Buck Meek - Haunted Mountain

Haunted Mountain is the third solo studio album by Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek, released in August 2023 via 4AD Records.

Buck Meek is an American musician from Wimberley, Texas, best known as the guitarist and backing vocalist of Big Thief.

Following his beloved 2021 album, Two Saviors, Haunted Mountain marks Meek’s third solo album and first for his new label-home.  Haunted Mountain is about love and… something other.  Something bigger than love, something that doesn’t challenge love exactly but stands in contrast to it.  A soulfulness, or a soul-seeking fullness. Meek says that love songs are the hardest to write.  “Not break-up songs, but an actual love song written in earnest? That is taboo now,” he says. “Sometimes it can feel like all the great love songs have already been written.”

560 miles from Meek’s hometown of Wimberly, TX, the Franklin Mountains — or more reverently named, Sierras de los Mansos — rise over the tops of the endless acres of pecan trees that surround Sonic Ranch in the border town of Tornillo, where Haunted Mountain was recorded.

The songs were written in mountains: by sold springs in the Serra da Estrela of Portugal, on the submerged volcano of Milos in the Cyclades, Valle Onsernone in the Swiss Alps (where Haunted Mountain’s cover photo was taken), and the Santa Monica range where Buck now calls home — all where his new love was born.

On Haunted Mountain, love often assumes a natural form — crystal ball dew-drops, green rivers and grasses, tears bottled. Sometimes it becomes artificial — mood rings, earrings, a pair of jeans, motorcycles and spacecraft. Sometimes cosmic — “I fell into a black hole with the hot flux of hazel” (from 'Paradise').  Love is a consciousness here, interacting with the lovers, greeting them, watching them sometimes, becoming them sometimes.  It extends beyond romance, examining the inexhaustible bond between mother and sun, and asks — is love a form of magic?  “When you are in love, it inhabits your environment, animates the inanimate, charging everything around you with a sense of meaning,” he says, “and not just new love; also love of many years.”

Since Buck’s self-titled full-length album, his band has remained consistent — Adam Brisbin (guitar), Austin Vaughn (drums), and Mat Davidson (pedal steel, bass on Buck Meek and Two Saviors).  In the year or so leading up to recording Haunted Mountain, they were joined by Ken Woodward (bass) as well as Meek’s brother, Dylan Meek, who joined them for the session on piano and synths.  Produced by the band’s own Davidson, Haunted Mountain was recorded and mixed in two weeks by Adrian Olsen, who also performed the sound manipulation via modular synthesizer that can be heard throughout the album.

One intention was to make a hi-fi album that contrasted with the intentionally lo-fi approach of Two Saviors, while preserving the intimacy.  Recorded live to two-inch tape, the group played together in one big room, with no headphones.  In Davidson’s words, “The music here is an expression of a group. I asked for the job because I felt strongly that we shouldn’t bring in someone from outside the band.  Otherwise, the only personal desire I had was that we be able to explore space, that we let the music open up and slow down in contrast to previous records - not in terms of tempo but rather overall movement, information between the beats.”  Davidson’s approach was to treat the live room as a sacred space – phones were left on a ledge outside and conversation about the music was reserved for the control room; the live room was only used for playing music.

Meek believes that all of the great love songs have not been written yet.  In between the lines of Haunted Mountain, we hear that love, in every form, is the creation of home, from within — forever leaving one to find another.

This album is a limited edition on green coloured vinyl housed in a single pocket sleeve with a printed inner sleeve, pressed in the UK via 4AD.