Nine Songs: Buck Meek

As wonderful as those words are, as an interview subject, Meek is brilliantly lucid. Make no mistake though, these nonsense words articulately capture the fact that sometimes the language we fumble for to express our love towards someone can feel plainly inadequate.

The only thing for it, Meek seems to say, is to contort our mouths into unfamiliar shapes, plumb the depths of our subconsciouses, and see what the hell comes out. “Making words up while we make love,” he sings, before letting the gibberish flow.

It is this same impulse – to express the inexpressible – that drives people to make music. In childhood, music comes before language; we learn our ABCs through singing, for example. When we get older, as more prosaic memories fade, music is still lodged firmly in our grey matter: “Still remembers every word / of dirty songs on Bourbon / Every line of Auld Lang Syne / though acquaintance be forgotten,” Meek sings on “Soul Feeling.”

“Maybe we’ve evolved to some degree to retain information through music,” Meek suggests from his home in Los Angeles, California, wearing a down jacket to keep the tail end of an LA winter at arm’s length. “There’s an incentive for us to imprint through music, to keep knowledge alive. Of course we enjoy it, but maybe there’s a biological incentive to enjoy it because we need it.”

Childhood and music intertwine like the caduceus on The Mirror. On “Gasoline,” his lover hums him a lullaby he recognises from when he was a newborn. On “Ring of Fire,” he asks her if she will be the mother of his child, promising in return a lifetime of singing. On “Soul Feeling,” a baby stares at him and he responds with funny faces and lullabies.

It’s no wonder that in Meek’s worldview childhood and music are inextricably linked; as he reminisces through his Nine Songs selections that represent the yardsticks planted along his journey to adulthood, it becomes clear that he grew up cocooned in the broad tapestry of American music: jazz, blues, swing, ragtime, bluegrass, and rock’n’roll.

For Meek, it is the latter genre that serves as a synecdoche for the freewheeling lifestyle and uncompromising philosophy he and his bandmates in Big Thief seek to embody. “Rock’n’roll is in my blood,” he sings on “Ring of Fire,” mirroring Adrianne Lenker’s life-affirming mantra – “Gonna turn it all into rock’n’roll” – on “Grandma,” from the 2025 Big Thief album Double Infinity.

Rock’n’roll as a guiding philosophy, Meek explains, “Is something we’re always reaching for, and it’s definitely not defined by genre, or an instrument, or any kind of process…” He pauses, concrete definitions swimming out of reach, trying to reify this abstract driving force; perhaps made-up words would work better.

The general principle seems to be this: if rock’n’roll is Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” on the deck of the USS Hancock for The Milton Berle Show, it’s also Muddy Waters singing into Alan Lomax’s tape recorder in his cabin in Coahoma County, Mississippi; it’s Johnny Cash in the mess hall at Folsom Prison, Brian Wilson in his sandbox, Tom Verlaine at Max’s Kansas City. In other words, it is American music at its most unmediated, uncompromising, and mystical.

Meek’s music, like the music of so many great rock’n’rollers, is unmistakably American. His earlier work is populated by benevolent car mechanics, drag-racing teenagers, and intrepid, motorcycling girls; all Annies, Joes and Sues.

While, by and large, these characters are absent on The Mirror, Meek still paints jagged, colourful American landscapes on his canvas, although occasionally tensions emerge between its idyllic surface and the darker subconscious gnawing away below the veneer; demons crawl in the weeds, the flora of the landscape conceals poisonous plants, tempers occasionally fray.

Meanwhile, the smell of gasoline blown across the landscape by those Meek characters of old still lingers in the nostrils. Although now based in LA, Meek grew up in Texas and life for Big Thief began on the East Coast, in Boston and New York City.

The vastness of the American continent is readily apparent in Meek’s music – its withering heat and its piercing cold, its kindness and its cruelty – and could only have been crafted by someone who well knows those miles of roads that zig-zag across it.

The deification of a rock’n’roll ideal and the story Meek tells through his Nine Songs choices are of a childhood spent perfecting jazz and blues licks in ice bars across the Texan Hill Country is peculiarly, even thrillingly, old fashioned.

That Big Thief have remained something of a mystic presence in contemporary music feels refreshingly anomalous to an era in which being enigmatic is no longer seen as commercially feasible.

Sure, they post on Instagram, but usually from a cabin somewhere beneath snow-capped mountains, or else on the road. Meek being a guitar player with an inimitable, carefully honed style - somewhere between Richard Thompson’s and Neil Young’s but, ultimately, entirely his own - also makes him seem like something of a man out of time.

Yet, neither Meek nor his band remotely trade on nostalgia; theirs is music planted firmly in the twenty-first century, and looking forward beadily. This modern touch is never heavy handed, but always implicit.

The Mirror – like each album put out by the Big Thief family, from Double Infinity to James Krivchenia’s Planet Mu curio Performing Belief – sounds like a poised leap into the unknown, cognisant of the past but never turning back to pillage it.

The music you listen to when you’re young seizes you, it worms its way inside your brain and blood and bones and refuses to leave. Ultimately, though, it’s what you do next that matters: how you make it your own, how you shape it into indefinable, always-new, never-sentimental rock’n’roll.