Buck Meek melds Hill Country and Topanga Canyon sounds on ‘The Mirror’

Buck Meek produced his fourth record, The Mirror, in a big cabin in Topanga Canyon, located in the mountains west of Los Angeles.

Meek, also part of the band Big Thief, is based in L.A. But the Wimberley native says that there will always be some central Texas in his songwriting.

He spoke to the Texas Standard about making “The Mirror,” and balancing his other creative project. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: I want to start by talking about the very first song on this record called “Gasoline,” which is very catchy, but has a different feel to it. What kind of feeling were you trying to evoke?

Buck Meek: I guess I was trying to evoke kind of the interplay between intuition and consciousness when you’re falling in love — you know, like when you’re just really feeling somebody and you’re kind of following your gut but you’re also overthinking things. And it feels wild and chaotic and exciting all at the same time.

Feels like a little bit of a like a train almost about to go off the rails but then, hopefully, things line up.

Did you record this record in Texas?

No, we recorded this in Los Angeles, actually in Topanga Canyon.

I’ve been living out in the LA area for a while now, and I was renting this cabin up in the mountains, this log cabin. We recorded this all in a big room. Drums were set up in the big room with the fireplace.

And then there was a front porch that I sang vocals on outside, actually. There was a big window to the living room from the front porch, and so I was outside the whole time, which was nice in the wind, and the band was cooking inside, and then the live band was triggering a bunch of modular synthesizers in the control room.

And so there was this kind of parallel world of a live rock and roll band, live vocals on the porch triggering a bunch of kind of modular synth and ambient textures.

Really, it’s just kind of a picture of our community out there, like a lot of my best friends in L.A.  and people that I’ve met over the course of touring around. So it’s really just like this, you know, big party of all of our best friends hanging out.

Buck Meek’s “The Mirror” is the artist’s latest solo release.

Has that influenced your sound, moving out away from the Texas Hill Country where you grew up?

I think so, for sure.

I mean, I left, I grew up in Wimberley playing with Slim Richey and Django Porter and Brandon Gist — a bunch of like Texas guitar players. And I was going out to the Charlie’s Catfish Restaurant bluegrass jam every Friday with Donna Bailey and Mike Bond and Alan Munde and a lot of those like Hill Country legends.

So I grew up surrounded by that music. But then I went to music school right out of high school and ended up moving to New York and playing a bunch of rock and roll and stuff in basements and a bunch of grungy stuff and then moved out to California.

I think every place definitely has an influence on my sound.

Yeah. You mentioned a bunch of local artists there. Do you think there are artists you listened to growing up that you still feel like have an impact on your work now?

Definitely. I mean, I grew up going to the Kerville Folk Festival a lot as well. And when I first started writing songs as a teenager, I would go out there and share my songs around campfires for especially the Crows Nest Camp up at the top of the hill there on the Quiet Valley Ranch with Brian Cutean and Steve Fisher and Darlene Raven.

And to this day, for sure, like every time I write a song, I’m really writing for them — you know, like kind of for that witness, that audience out there.

Growing up in the Hill Country and playing music at all the bars around there and the Devil’s Backbone Tavern and the Wood Creek Tavern, and the Cypress Creek Tavern, and like so many of the spots around Austin, which, you know, I was playing jazz music because it was usually for dancing and for people having a good time.

And I think that’s something I really carry with me — just keeping in mind that the most important thing is almost like being of service to people: feeling something on Saturday night, having their hard-earned money spent well.

How do you make time to write and record solo work while also making music with your band Big Thief?

Well, I usually book a recording session maybe like six months in advance, just kind of as like a deadline. And then I try to book a session out like six months when I have some free time and then I’ll just sit down every day to write like a day job, 9 to 5-style and just lock myself up with my guitar and write all day, every day until that recording session.

Just kind of having my band waiting for me at the end of that is a system of accountability that kind of lights a fire under me.

But beyond that, I honestly kind of try not to write for phases. I try to just go out and live and play guitar and travel through music for sure — on the guitar, especially — and playing with other bands and trying to absorb life experience that in the long run feeds back into the songs, I guess.

Well, and it’s not just a band. I understand you’re also involved in a new band called Kisser, which toured with you in support of this record. When you’re writing music, do you have a feel of whether it’s a Buck Meek song or a Big Thief song or now for Kisser?

You know, again, like music is just… It’s kind of this amorphous thing, really.

Often it starts from a very abstract place. Even with collaborators, we often just start by goofing around and making up words or just jamming or whatever and then it kind of slowly turns into something and then we put a name on it and create a construct around it.

I guess you could say that for sure, Big Thief has primarily been Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting project. And I’m there to support her songs with James [Krivchenia] and we’ve been playing with Joshua Crumbly for the last couple of years now. But we’re there to lift her songs up.

And we have been co-writing a bit more — like on our last record, “Double Infinity,” we wrote a handful of songs together. But for the most part, it’s really driven by her vision, lyrically and melodically.

And then with my project, I guess it’s my songwriting project — kind of there to tell my story. And with Kisser, it’s my wife, Germaine Dunes. She’s the primary songwriter of Kisser and I’m there to support those songs on guitar.

Well, I didn’t realize that. Tell me about that, about working with your wife and being in a band. I mean, you guys must have been playing music together for a while. How did it make sense to make this a touring project?

We really didn’t play music together for a long time. Like she has a background in science. She worked at a bunch of different scientific organizations in Europe and got her like master’s in science and worked at CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] and ESA [European Space Agency] and stuff.

And when she moved to the states, she started. She’s been writing songs her whole life for herself, but just for fun. And when she moved to the states, she put a lot more focus into it and she was writing songs around the house that I couldn’t help but just fall in love with and like want to play guitar on… Just writing these incredible rock and roll songs.

And so she put a band together for a recording last June with some of our best friends in L.A. And then over the course of a week recording it, it just kind of became a band.

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