Buck Meek - Haunted Mountain

Release Date	25/08/2023
Format	LP Indies Green Vinyl/ LP/ CD
Label	4AD
Catalogue Number	4AD0601LPE/ 4AD0601LP/ 4AD0601CD

 

Texas-bred singer songwriter and Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek announces his new album, ‘Haunted Mountain’.
Following his beloved 2021 album, ‘Two Saviors’, ‘Haunted Mountain’ marks Meek’s third solo album. ‘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 loves songs are the hardest 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.”

Lead single ‘Haunted Mountain’ is anchored by sweet lyrics penned by Meek and Holland, who is also from Texas and shares co-writing credits on five of ‘Haunted Mountain’’s 11 songs. The first two verses and chorus of ‘Haunted Mountain’ were written by Holland as a love song to Mount Shasta in northern California, with the final verse written by Meek, together seeking reciprocity with nature. “It’s about being humbled by the thing you’re drawing power from only at which point an actual, fair relationship begins,” he says. Propelled by the pristine chemistry of his band, ‘Haunted Mountain’ is presented alongside a Riley Engemoen-directed video that captures the group’s in-studio magic.

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.”

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.”

Tracklist

Mood Ring
Haunted Mountain
Paradise
Cyclades
Secret Side
Didn’t Know You Then
Undae Dunes
Where You’re Coming From
Lullabies
Lagrimas
The Rainbow