When singer-songwriter Buck Meek signed up for a workshop led by longtime friend and fellow music artist Luke Temple, he found himself faced with a daunting assignment: Build a song on a cliché as if you believed it.
Meek didn’t know it at the time, but the exercise of chiseling truth from tired phrases — think “I’d die for you” and “I can’t live without you” — would give way to a creative breakthrough. The process laid groundwork for “Didn’t Know You Then,” the sweetheart centerpiece of the Texas-raised artist’s latest LP Haunted Mountain, released last fall via 4AD. Anchoring his third solo effort outside indie folk-rock juggernaut Big Thief, the straight-ahead love song makes a compelling case for pulling big feelings from simple ideas.
“It felt really good to sing, even though I didn’t believe in the lyrics at all. Something about the act of being really open-hearted in a song felt cathartic,” says Meek, whose partner responded well to the early version of the dewey-eyed love song. “So I rewrote the lyrics to something I actually believe in, but tried to keep the spirit. That was one of the first songs for the record that gave me some courage to dig a little deeper.”
That courage guided Meek, 36, down more unexpected corridors as the writing process continued to unfurl. Embracing an unblinking earnestness that would form the spine of Haunted Mountain, the result is a heart-on-the-sleeve slice of sincerity from one of the decade’s most consequential guitarists and songwriters. Fingerprints of his Grammy-nominated, full-time outfit can be found in Meek’s springy folk-rock guitar tone and earthbound sense of cosmic wonder. But here the insulating comfort of the Big Thief collective is stripped away, leaving him alone and unadorned in the frame.
“The more I write songs, the more I realize vulnerability is such a powerful resource,” he says. “As a younger songwriter, I was trying to project this identity of poeticism or complexity, trying to build puzzles. It’s so much fun to write songs like that — and I still do — but the older I get, the more it’s about surrendering to simplicity and speaking plainly. I feel like melody sanctifies even the simplest words.”
Perhaps the sharpest example of that vulnerability comes on the Side B standout “Lullabies,” where Meek — with the help of singer-songwriter and fellow Texan Jollie Holland, who shares co-writing credits on nearly half a dozen tracks — spins a familiar child’s bedtime tune into a bonafide tearjerker: “Ava crowed, her labor went on for days / eyes glowed, she sang lullabies to slow the pain / ‘Sunshine, my sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray.’”
“I was like, ‘This is exactly what I’m not supposed to do. This is just gonna be really cheesy,’” he says of the decision to fold the lyrics of a well-worn lullaby into the vivid world of his musical storytelling. “But it just felt so earnest to imagine a mother singing that to her newborn after a really difficult labor. It’s what the song needed.”
Mother nature’s son
When it comes into leaning into his newfound earnestness, Meek says few topics are as tricky to tackle as romantic love. Formerly the baseline concern of most Top 40 hitmakers, the once-ubiquitous subject — which has become somewhat gauche in contemporary creative circles — stretches out luxuriously and without apology on his latest album.
“The first 50 years or so of recorded popular music were just so rich with romantic love, but with the advent of psychoanalysis and concept of co-dependence, it has become a bit of a taboo in the arts — for better or worse,” says Meek, whose divorce from Big Thief frontperson Adrianne Lenker set the stage for the album’s 2021 predecessor, Two Saviors.
But broaching the minefield of writing about the rosier side of romantic love was only part of the project for Meek on Haunted Mountain. As the album’s jaunty title track suggests, these songs also hold space for reverie surrounding the natural world and its many splendors and specters: “All of my life, I’ve been a rounder / traveling across this green land / but now that I live here on this haunted mountain / I know I’m never coming down again.”
“I feel like emotions animate the inanimate, and that’s also true for nature. They can be these talismans representing the emotional experience, but there’s perspective as well, because they’re separate from the body,” says Meek, who has called the Santa Monica Mountains surrounding California’s Topanga Canyon home since his 2018 split with Lenker. “So there’s a little bit of space there, which can maybe leave some room for interpretation and create a habitable environment for the listener.”
And when it comes to the Big Taboo of love, Meek isn’t just concerned with its romantic variety. While the record does in large part map a budding relationship on the heels of a public break-up, he says Haunted Mountain takes an aerial view of the theme and turns it over to see what else might be revealed in the light.
“It’s also about reconciling with the work that love requires in all forms,” he says. “That includes romantic love, and also the love of family and friends, and I guess myself as well.”
ON THE BILL: Buck Meek with Dylan Meek. 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 27, Globe Hall, 483 Logan St., Denver. Sold out.