How Buck Meek lets his music fly

Further on in our conversation, he describes to me his hometown of Wimberley, Texas – the barrenness of the ground, the delicate quality of the trees that only grow on the river banks, the peaceful springs where water moccasins lurk.

Meek’s second record Two Saviors was itself a product of place. First born in 2018, it was written mostly in solitude in the mountains following Meek’s relocation to California after eight years living in New York City. Guided by Andrew Sarlo, who produced all four of Big Thief’s LPs, Meek took his band and his songs to New Orleans, where they recorded the whole record over a single week, in the hottest part of the summer.

“New Orleans is a city sunken into a swamp, very humid and very hot,” says Meek. “We stayed in this old Victorian house right by the Mississippi River. Sarlo would have us play the songs once through in the morning and then we would take a long siesta for six or seven hours. Then we would play the songs another time through in the evening. We did that every day, for seven days in a row - essentially playing a set through fourteen times.”

The intention was to try to create the feeling of a first take, stripping away the slickness and control of studio recording. “In my experience of recording,” Meek explains, “I often find that first take to be the most living and beautiful representation of music. It’s that moment of adrenaline and expression when the players are connecting to the very core of the song. We wanted to boil away any self-consciousness and just capture the feeling of playing together in a room. The feeling of people reacting to each other in the moment; the instincts and the adrenaline; all the discrepancies in the moment that make music a living breathing thing.”

Like a home-town garage band practising in their living room, Meek taught the songs to the other band members “pretty much on the spot” before they hit record. The recording was made with an 8-track tape machine, with eight dynamic microphones, and the band played very close to one another, only intensifying the rawness and the need to be in tune with one another. They also experimented with set-up, playing in all the rooms of the house over the course of the week to find the space which felt most resonant, most inspiring.

“If anything, it was really just a simple approach,” says Meek, “a return to the most basic approach to recording. We didn’t do any overdubs or redo any vocal takes. We were just playing together – I wanted to really capture that danger. It was very old-fashioned in a sense: I hugely admire recorded music from the 1920s, 30s and 40s – Billie Holliday, Django Reinhardt, Bill Monroe’s bands - when you had only one shot to record your song. It feels so immediate and genuine, with a rawness that I think really represents the human spirit.”

I’m curious to discover if any conclusions can be drawn from this experiment, whether trends emerged on listening back to each of the fourteen sets recorded over the week. Meek found he preferred the morning takes, when the band had just woken up, drank a cup of coffee and immediately started playing. This was where the spontaneous, unselfconscious sound they had hoped for emerged – they just let their bodies play.

Meek is no stranger to this approach. Big Thief are known for recording live and often in a single take, as well as for retreating to remote locations to make music: for U.F.O.F, a converted farmhouse in Washington state; for Two Hands, a ranch in the scorching Texan desert. Their records seem inseparable from the place that they were crafted. But whether the location is selected with an intent, or the environment inspires an unforeseen result – that remains a mystery. Therein lies the beauty and paradox of Big Thief – they create music that sounds seamlessly precise and wildly spontaneous, all at once.

"You can plan every detail, but at some point, you have to surrender control, and just let it fly."

“We’ve always played the wildcard of the unexpected,” says Meek. “I’m most fascinated by the creative process of preparing yourself by collecting those integral elements, and then when you feel like you have all the ingredients for some alchemy, then just let your spirit move through it. Leaving room for magic or disaster. You can plan every detail, but at some point, you have to surrender control, and just let it fly.”

Big Thief are a force of nature in many respects, not least because of the remarkable connection that exists between the four of them. Frontperson Adrianne Lenker, to whom Meek was married until 2018, has described the intense, almost family-like bond that the band share. Like Meek, the other band members nurture solo projects, from Lenker’s yearning acoustic ballads to drummer James Krivchenia’s darkly ambient electronic music. In describing making music, Meek talks about alchemy, and it strikes me that this is what Big Thief has mastered – the bringing together of individual elements to create an extraordinary whole.

“At this point, writing songs with Big Thief is a very communal experience,” says Meek. “A very honest and collaborative thing, where we’re solving this puzzle together. It’s a super constructive process and can be very precise. The precision also comes from working with engineer Dom Monks on U.F.O.F. and Two Hands. He’s incredibly perceptive – he would spend hours subtly moving the mics to find exactly the right set-up – and had such a vision for the sonic landscape.”

“With my solo music,” he continues, “it’s more in the mind of getting in a room, and seeing what happens. I think in some ways that is a reaction to Big Thief – I need that balance in my creative life. Big Thief can be so intricate and intentional, and sometimes I need the chance to let everything fly wildly.”

Striking that balance has been a winding path. Meek recalls the early days of Big Thief: they had all quit their jobs, moved out of apartments and toured constantly. But slowly, as the band came into form and became more predictable, Meek began to find space to focus more on his solo music. “It’s a really harmonious relationship between the two bands; they provide a balance to each other. When I’ve focused on one for a while, I’m always so excited to return to the other. And I think I really need both – the vulnerability and responsibility of making solo music, as well as being part of the hive mind of a band.”

Two Saviors is honest and full of heart, and wise without feeling ostentatious. Meek’s music feels nourishing, as though it could easily lull you into a magical, dream-filled sleep. Lurking in the vivid and sentimental lyrics are unsettling images: a pool spiked with turpentine; a pair of eyes of differing colour; a bag of potato chips hidden in a drawer – but Meek’s warm vocals serve as a guide through the strange and mystical world he conjures. The record is also littered with musical surprises: moments of heaviness, sudden rhythmic shifts, and the feeling it might fall to pieces at any moment – but never does.

I’m pleased to find that as a person, Meek is just as I had anticipated: sincere, kind-hearted, entirely unpretentious. He doesn’t speak without thinking, but takes long pauses before embarking on a response; his thoughts are fully-formed, streaming out of him like poetry.

For example, when I ask about the main themes of Two Saviors, there is a long silence of quiet consideration. Finally, he offers: “Writing this album was a healing process for me. It served as a guide for returning to myself after a period of my identity dispersing into a relationship running its course, a certain chapter of my life running its course. I pulled myself out of that and put myself in an entirely new environment and wrote these songs as my own guide to my independence. It was a meditation on resilience and potential. Life is full of such loss, but we always have the capacity for resilience. That’s the cure, the relief; it can transform the loss into a seed for some new life.”

For the most part, Meek’s songs are reflections of his own life and his own experiences, but mingling those with fantasy is where he finds true beauty. “Writing is me processing and reprocessing my experiences, alchemising them with my imagination,” he explains. “I don’t really journal – I’m more driven by the phenomenon of not journaling. I love the idea of my experiences combining obliquely, out of order and upside down, and the accidents that can come from that. To a certain degree that is how we experience life: of course we witness it linearly in time, but the veil is very thin between our dreams and our waking lives, and emotions and characters in our lives bleed into each other. I love to honour that in song.”

Meek also recalls finding perspective and comfort in nature throughout the writing process, discovering human elements in the most subtle details of the world around him. The record’s opening track finds Meek lying in the grass with a friend, looking for shapes in the clouds, a game which neither of them could put a name to. Later, he stumbled on ‘paradelolia’, a rare word denoting the incorrect perception of objects in stimuli – like an animal in a cloud or a face in a cup of coffee. “I got a kick out of that concept,” says Meek. “It’s this human instinct to project meaning onto a stimulus, making connections in your mind. I use it as a tool in songwriting too – just playing music and mumbling sounds, and then almost interpreting them into words. I can often feel a shape of a word from a melody, and sometimes a word fits to the shape of a melody and I’m guided by that.”

In subject matter and in execution, Two Saviors comes from a place of sincerity; it represents not only a brave artistic achievement, but a remarkable progression from his first LP, too. “If my first record was an exercise, making Two Saviors felt more necessary and genuine,” Meek acknowledges. “There is definitely a thread that runs between the two records, and they were both made with the same players. But I think you can hear the release that came from playing together in that intense way, you can feel the difference there in our psychology. We learned to trust each other, to surrender to the group mind, and to the music.”