Buck Meek

Buck Meek today presents his propulsive new single/video, “Cyclades,” from his forthcoming album, Haunted Mountain, out August 25th on 4AD. The songs of Haunted Mountain were written in the mountains: by cold springs in the Serra de Estrela of Portugal, Valle Onsernone in the Swiss Alps (where its cover photo was taken), on the submerged volcano of Milos in the Cyclades, and the Santa Monica range where Buck now calls home — all where his new love was born. “When you are in love, it inhabits your environment, animates the inanimate, charging everything around you with a sense of meaning,” Meek says, “and not just new love; also love of many years.”

The love that colors “Cyclades” is familial, depicting a true story of Meek’s father narrowly avoiding a motorcycle collision with a herd of elk. “These are all true stories, or at least as I was told, or remember them being told,” explains Meek. “There’s a thin line between history and mythology. Our lives are made of an endless myriad of unfinished stories, of every encounter of billions of people at the center of thousands of years in each direction. The telling is secondary.”

In conjunction, Meek announces a 2024 tour, including stops in Los Angeles, Austin, San Francisco, Denver and more, and will include his first shows in Japan and Korea as a solo artist. Full dates are listed below and tickets are on sale Friday at 12pm EDT.

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. 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. The album is about love and… something other. Something bigger than love, something that doesn’t challenge love exactly, but stands in contrast to it. 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?

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. 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. 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.

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.” 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.