Buck Meek

Buck Meek - Haunted Mountain

For his latest solo album, Buck Meek, lead guitarist of Big Thief, went back to Texas – to the

border town of Tornillo 560 miles from his hometown of Wimberley – to record Haunted

Mountain. The band - Buck (guitar, vocals), Adam Brisbin (guitar), Austin Vaughn (drums), Ken

Woodward (bass), Mat Davidson (pedal steel, vocals), and Dylan Meek (keys) - recorded the

eleven songs that make up Haunted Mountain over the course of two weeks at Sonic Ranch

studio. The album was produced by Davidson and engineered and mixed by Adrian Olsen. The

album follows Meek’s 2018 self-titled debut and 2021’s Two Saviors, with records as a part of

Big Thief in-between - U.F.O.F. and Two Hands (2019), and Dragon New Warm Mountain I

Believe In You (2022).

Haunted Mountain is about love and... something other. Something bigger than love, a

soulfulness, or a soul seeking fullness. In the songs, (with five co-written alongside longtime

friend and musical hero Jolie Holland (‘Haunted Mountain’, ‘Paradise’, ‘Where You’re Coming

From’, ‘Lagrimas’, & ‘Lullabies’) and one (‘The Rainbow’) set to the words of Judee Sill’s final

journal entry, written 3 weeks before she passed) love often assumes a natural form, sometimes

it becomes artificial, sometimes cosmic. It is a consciousness here, interacting with the lovers,

watching them sometimes, becoming them sometimes. Romance is not the only form of love

Haunted Mountain explores; The epic ‘Lullabies’ examines the inexhaustible connection

between mother and son; a platonic bond appears in ‘Where you’re coming from’; and grief

leads to communion with the dead in ‘Lagrimas’.

The songs were written in mountains; by cold springs in the Serra da Estrela of Portugal, on the

submerged volcano of Milos in the Cyclades, Valle Onsernone in the Swiss Alps (where the

cover photo was taken), and the Santa Monica range where Buck now calls home - all where

his new love was born. “Love inhabits your environment, animates the inanimate, charging

everything around you with a sense of meaning,” Meek says. Haunted Mountain asks - is love a

form of magic?