Buck Meek - The Mirror Buck Meek

As Pitchfork praises, Meek “specialises in a philosophical strain of songwriting,” which is evident across The Mirror. There’s a tender power, countered by immutable vulnerability. With an uncanny curiosity, he reveals the uniqueness in the mundane. The Mirror searches for new meaning and the familiar is reframed through Meek’s singular voice.

On The Mirror, love, as an idea, is always close – but in its reflection comes an afterimage of the way things could be and how they’ve been before. Meek holds the absurdity of devotion, the choice to love – with equal parts ache and grin, as on the single, ‘Gasoline’. He sings, “Making words up while we made love / one month and she’s in my blood.”

Emerging from a decade of work together in Big Thief, the partnership of Meek and producer, James Krivchenia, on The Mirror, arrived from the idea to combine the band’s live, kinetic energy with an oblique electronic world. From production projects including Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You and his recent solo record, Performing Belief, Krivchenia’s work is enlivened through electronic elements, always seeking to deepen sound. The concept for The Mirror welcomed a collective atmosphere in which simultaneous experiment could occur – the musicians responded to each other in real time, while their instruments triggered modular synthesizers.

For The Mirror, Meek and Krivchenia welcomed in friends, family, and longtime collaborators including Adrianne Lenker, who contributed vocals, Adam Brisbin on guitar, and Ken Woodward on bass. New creative partners and longtime friends like composer and ambient musician Alex Somers joined in on synthesizer, toy microphone, an old piano, and Mary Lattimore brought in the sounds of her prismatic harp. A rotating cast of four drummers: Jesse Quebbeman-Turley, Jonathan Wilson, Kyle Crane, and Krivchenia provide a wide dynamic arc of grooves. Germaine Dunes, Staci Foster, Jolie Holland, and Lenker sing as a choir on many songs. Meek’s brother, Dylan Meek contributed piano, keys, and vocals. Adrian Olsen created a wide range of sounds and melodies with modular synths.

With his songwriting acting as a compass to the recording process, Meek invited interaction, instead of limiting the tracks to something controllable. The album was recorded in Meek and Dunes' Los Angeles log cabin studio, Ringo Bingo. Meek recorded vocals outdoors on the front porch, looking through the living room window where the band played inside.

As an artist, Meek continues to reveal his singular aptitude as translator of human feeling and its endless portals. Through The Mirror, he aptly embraces the unknown with an abiding desire to find the right questions to ask, rather than their answers. “I don’t know the meaning of your dreams,” Meek writes on ‘Déjà vu’, “Though tell me everything.”