The songwriter, guitar hero and Big Thief mainstay takes Samuel Cox through the songs that made him.
“Ooheeah lalo, faroosee mneykro,” sings Buck Meek on “Gasoline,” the opening song on his fourth solo album The Mirror.
As wonderful as those words are, as an interview subject, Meek is brilliantly lucid. Make no mistake though, these nonsense words articulately capture the fact that sometimes the language we fumble for to express our love towards someone can feel plainly inadequate.
The only thing for it, Meek seems to say, is to contort our mouths into unfamiliar shapes, plumb the depths of our subconsciouses, and see what the hell comes out. “Making words up while we make love,” he sings, before letting the gibberish flow.
It is this same impulse – to express the inexpressible – that drives people to make music. In childhood, music comes before language; we learn our ABCs through singing, for example. When we get older, as more prosaic memories fade, music is still lodged firmly in our grey matter: “Still remembers every word / of dirty songs on Bourbon / Every line of Auld Lang Syne / though acquaintance be forgotten,” Meek sings on “Soul Feeling.”
“Maybe we’ve evolved to some degree to retain information through music,” Meek suggests from his home in Los Angeles, California, wearing a down jacket to keep the tail end of an LA winter at arm’s length. “There’s an incentive for us to imprint through music, to keep knowledge alive. Of course we enjoy it, but maybe there’s a biological incentive to enjoy it because we need it.”
Childhood and music intertwine like the caduceus on The Mirror. On “Gasoline,” his lover hums him a lullaby he recognises from when he was a newborn. On “Ring of Fire,” he asks her if she will be the mother of his child, promising in return a lifetime of singing. On “Soul Feeling,” a baby stares at him and he responds with funny faces and lullabies.
It’s no wonder that in Meek’s worldview childhood and music are inextricably linked; as he reminisces through his Nine Songs selections that represent the yardsticks planted along his journey to adulthood, it becomes clear that he grew up cocooned in the broad tapestry of American music: jazz, blues, swing, ragtime, bluegrass, and rock’n’roll.
For Meek, it is the latter genre that serves as a synecdoche for the freewheeling lifestyle and uncompromising philosophy he and his bandmates in Big Thief seek to embody. “Rock’n’roll is in my blood,” he sings on “Ring of Fire,” mirroring Adrianne Lenker’s life-affirming mantra – “Gonna turn it all into rock’n’roll” – on “Grandma,” from the 2025 Big Thief album Double Infinity.
Rock’n’roll as a guiding philosophy, Meek explains, “Is something we’re always reaching for, and it’s definitely not defined by genre, or an instrument, or any kind of process…” He pauses, concrete definitions swimming out of reach, trying to reify this abstract driving force; perhaps made-up words would work better.
The general principle seems to be this: if rock’n’roll is Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” on the deck of the USS Hancock for The Milton Berle Show, it’s also Muddy Waters singing into Alan Lomax’s tape recorder in his cabin in Coahoma County, Mississippi; it’s Johnny Cash in the mess hall at Folsom Prison, Brian Wilson in his sandbox, Tom Verlaine at Max’s Kansas City. In other words, it is American music at its most unmediated, uncompromising, and mystical.
Meek’s music, like the music of so many great rock’n’rollers, is unmistakably American. His earlier work is populated by benevolent car mechanics, drag-racing teenagers, and intrepid, motorcycling girls; all Annies, Joes and Sues.
While, by and large, these characters are absent on The Mirror, Meek still paints jagged, colourful American landscapes on his canvas, although occasionally tensions emerge between its idyllic surface and the darker subconscious gnawing away below the veneer; demons crawl in the weeds, the flora of the landscape conceals poisonous plants, tempers occasionally fray.
Meanwhile, the smell of gasoline blown across the landscape by those Meek characters of old still lingers in the nostrils. Although now based in LA, Meek grew up in Texas and life for Big Thief began on the East Coast, in Boston and New York City.
The vastness of the American continent is readily apparent in Meek’s music – its withering heat and its piercing cold, its kindness and its cruelty – and could only have been crafted by someone who well knows those miles of roads that zig-zag across it.
The deification of a rock’n’roll ideal and the story Meek tells through his Nine Songs choices - of a childhood spent perfecting jazz and blues licks in ice bars across the Texan Hill Country - is peculiarly, even thrillingly, old fashioned.
That Big Thief have remained something of a mystic presence in contemporary music feels refreshingly anomalous to an era in which being enigmatic is no longer seen as commercially feasible.
Sure, they post on Instagram, but usually from a cabin somewhere beneath snow-capped mountains, or else on the road. Meek being a guitar player with an inimitable, carefully honed style - somewhere between Richard Thompson’s and Neil Young’s but, ultimately, entirely his own - also makes him seem like something of a man out of time.
Yet, neither Meek nor his band remotely trade on nostalgia; theirs is music planted firmly in the twenty-first century, and looking forward beadily. This modern touch is never heavy handed, but always implicit.
The Mirror – like each album put out by the Big Thief family, from Double Infinity to James Krivchenia’s Planet Mu curio Performing Belief – sounds like a poised leap into the unknown, cognisant of the past but never turning back to pillage it.
The music you listen to when you’re young seizes you, it worms its way inside your brain and blood and bones and refuses to leave. Ultimately, though, it’s what you do next that matters: how you make it your own, how you shape it into indefinable, always-new, never-sentimental rock’n’roll.
“Peanut Butter Sandwich” by Raffi
BUCK MEEK: Raffi is a children’s musician who I was obsessed with as a kid, as a two-year-old. I had a VHS film of him playing a concert in the round for a bunch of kids. He was wearing his moccasins with his old guitar, singing these songs about peanut butter sandwiches and about brushing your teeth.
I would sit there with my mom’s old Yamaha FG on my lap and strum it, open stringed, along to the VHS. Every day, all day long. I really wanted to be a songwriter because of that – the way he was communicating with these kids, he was lighting them up. His songs are very simple in a way, but regardless of being a great children’s songwriter, he’s an excellent songwriter as a whole.
Even his reference to David Amram in that song… David Amram is a really hip downtown cat from back in the day, and a really deep songwriter and musician; he collaborated with a lot of the jazz greats. Raffi was really hip and tapped in and took it as his purpose in life to inspire kids.
BEST FIT: In the song, Raffi sings “A peanut butter sandwich made with jam / one for me and one for David Amran.” I couldn’t help but think about one of your songs that also mentions sharing half a sandwich. Was that a conscious or an unconscious reference?
[Laughs.] That was unconscious, but that’s true. There were a lot of songs, especially as I was first starting to write, that had their parallels with children’s music, for sure.
I was also reminded of a line in “Gasoline”, “She hummed a lullaby / I recognised from when I was a new born.” I find it really interesting that you make this connection between your own very early memories and meeting someone new and falling in love. It feels to me that sometimes falling in love compels us to dig up and reflect on our formative memories.
Definitely. In that line there is this Oedipal cycle of being in love and being reminded of something from a time before you even had language – being sung a song by your mother and finding comfort in that. I’m sure those early moments of music and song, even from within the womb, have such an impact on us.
Somebody told me about a talk they heard recently by an ambient artist, I forget who, where they were replicating what it sounds like inside a womb, and it’s actually super loud in there. Ninety to a hundred decibels is the level you’re experiencing as an unborn child, which is super loud, it’s like a rock concert. I think 95dB is the cap for most venues.
This artist was replicating the way sound travels in that space and through liquid, in this crazy, reverberant super-loud amplified space where you’re literally just swimming in every voice and every melody that you’re hearing. That must have such an impact on you.
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding
When I was a very young boy, maybe four or five or so, I would go to my grandparents’ house every Friday.
They lived up the street in Houston, Texas. My grandma would cook dinner for me and put this song on every time. She would be cooking with her apron on and at some point, she would grab me and dance with me – it was our ritual, and she was the first woman I ever danced with, I think. That was the song that we danced to.
It was this huge moment for me, connecting music with dance, which, for most of history, around the world, has been kind of inseparable – music was for dancing, or for religion, you know? Somewhere along the way that’s been lost to some degree but nonetheless I think music and dance are best when they’re made together.
I think this song has a real sense of place, it’s very vivid. I read that Otis Redding wrote this song on a little houseboat on the coast of California. You’re living in California now – do you find it evocative of that area?
Wow, I had no idea that it was written in California. That blows my mind. Somehow I always envisioned that song being written in Louisiana or Florida or something – a humid, Southern bay environment.
So that’s a whole different meaning to the song that I never thought about. That’s going to change my relationship with the song now!
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones
This was the first song I learnt to play on guitar. My dad was always playing The Stones growing up. He’s a glass sculptor and we had this big art studio attached to our house – he was making glass sculptures and always jamming to this old vinyl collection, The Stones and Zeppelin and everything.
I think I was six or seven when I learnt this song on guitar, that riff, and I played it all day long. I’d play for eight hours. That’s all I wanted to do, play that riff. It definitely set me off on the course of wanting to be a guitar player and to play rock’n’roll.
I feel like for any kid, when they first learn guitar, it’s all about finding that one riff that they can play over and over again. For me it was Nirvana’s “Come As You Are.”
I had that one too for a minute, when I was a little older. I love that about learning the guitar as a kid – you find that riff and you just live inside of it like it’s a drone, like it’s a mantra. It’s all you know how to do, and you do it all day long and you’re totally happy. You feel so good just playing that riff a thousand times.
I was reading about this song and Keith Richards said he wrote it in his sleep. There’s the story about Paul McCartney writing “Yesterday” in his sleep and waking up and playing it on his piano, but apparently Keith recorded a whole demo for the song while he was basically asleep and woke up the next morning like, “Wait – what’s this?” Has inspiration ever struck when you’ve been asleep?
Damn, that’s next level [Laughs.] I’ve written so many songs in my sleep, but I’ve never been very good at documenting them when I first wake up. But there’s a lot in there for sure. I’ve actually been wanting to practice that more. I’ve been thinking about trying to write a whole album in there, because when I was a kid I actually practiced waking dreams for a minute.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a film by Richard Linklater called Waking Life, about lucid dreaming, but the whole film is these interviews with people who lucid dreamt. I was obsessed with that when I was a teenager and got really into practicing trying to lucid dream.
There are all these tricks you can do to try to trigger lucid dreams, like every time you walk into a room you turn the light switch on and off, because if you do that enough you’ll start doing it in your dreams – just because of the repetitive motion of it – and I guess electricity doesn’t translate to the dream world, because often the light won’t turn on or off and that will trigger your awareness that you’re in a dream, which is the first step for getting into lucid dreaming.
That’s the first step, realising ‘Oh I’m in a dream right now, now I’m going to take control and fly’ or whatever you want to do. I achieved it once, I was in my bedroom in the dream and I wanted to be with everyone I’d ever met, so I put everyone in my room with me for this epic party. I was in this tiny little room with a thousand people!
I’ve been wanting to get back to lucid dreaming so I can actively write songs in there. I’ve heard you can even improve your muscle memory – you can practice guitar in your dreams, and it’ll actually improve your dexterity in waking life. Or an athlete could practice sports in the lucid dream space and it would actively improve their response time and their muscle memory and everything, supposedly.
You could put your own supergroup together – your own lucid dreaming supergroup!
Yeah, no doubt!
“Linoleum” by NOFX
“Linoleum”! The Stones were my gateway to rock’n’roll and then when I was thirteen, I found NOFX. Where I grew up – in Wimberley, Texas – it’s a super small town with a football-focused school with all the jocks, where all the teachers were coaches and stuff.
But I found my little crew of punks, Colin Ainsworth, Jack Schutze, and Matt Cooke. We started a little punk band in the garage – we didn’t even have a name, it was just us playing guitar really, really loud.
Colin had a Marshall half-stack and I saved up for a couple of years and got myself the cheapest Marshall half-stack they had. We lived on opposite ends of this really long block and we would open up our windows and play tunes – NOFX tunes, Blink-182 songs – and then call each other on the phone and have each other guess what we were playing.
We’d play so loud that you could hear it from half a mile away. I’d call the others and be like “What song was that?” That was my gateway into more rock and roll, I guess.
Do you listen to NOFX and Blink-182 and that kind of stuff now?
I don’t actively, but every once in a while, when I really need to get pumped up I’ll put NOFX on, for sure. “The Decline” is definitely my go to for that. If I just need to reconnect with that teenage spirit.
“Blues Power” by Albert King
When I was fifteen, I had my first job washing dishes at this Mexican restaurant in Wimberley, Texas, and the bartender was this cat, Brandon Gist, who was a guitar player from Memphis, Tennessee.
I had my guitar at work one day and he was like, “You play guitar, kid?” He had this shack behind his house near the bar, and a giant old Silverface Fender Twin Reverb, and we would play the blues.
He taught me how to play the blues rhythm and he’d solo for hours while I played rhythm. It was this trial by fire thing where he taught me to play, and I was just his rhythm boy so he could solo.
He got me my first gigs around town at the ice houses – we’d play the blues for all the bar flies around Wimberley. Whenever his amp would short out, he would have me kick his amp to try and wake it up. He’d be like, “Kick my amp, Buck!” He’d turn around in the middle of a guitar solo and yell at me to kick his amp and I’d have to kick it really hard, and it would come back to life.
I started wanting to solo – because after playing rhythm for about a year, Karate Kid-style, waxing on, waxing off, I begged him to start teaching me how to solo – so he’d give me some songs and say, “Try and copy some of these Albert King licks and try and play them by ear.” He got me the blues scale and said, “Go home and learn these,” basically. It made a big impact on me.
I love that it’s this ten-minute-long live cut and you can hear him riffing with the crowd, it feels very alive and breathing and in the moment.
Albert King is probably my favourite of all those blues cats – his tone is insane, on that Flying V, and his vibrato is so fierce and cuts the air. Shout out to Brandon Gist. He’s still playing in Austin, he’s playing on Sixth Street.
He’s got someone else kicking his amp now!
Exactly [Laughs.]
Given that you’ve picked a live cut, I want to ask, Big Thief shows are so exciting because the songs are this living, evolving thing. It’s like the Bob Dylan method of working, protean, always being written and re-written. There’s a song from your last record, “Cyclades,” where you put out a different take with completely different lyrics, called “Cuero Dudes.” Do you see all of the songs you write as fluid?
I think I’m not attached to them staying the same. From time to time, a song will want to change, based on my life experience – maybe I’ve lived a little bit more since I wrote a song and I realised something about an aspect of it that I need to change.
But at the same time, I also love keeping them intact as an artifact of a moment in my life, as a journal entry. I see songs as a way of journaling my life. If it really comes up that I want to change something, I’ll change it. Usually, though, I just write a new song, but from time to time it’s fun to break that rule.
“Django’s Tiger” by Django Reinhardt
So, a couple of years later, after I met Brandon, I found this really cool school in Wimberley that was a charter arts high school, in an old furniture warehouse run by the Maltese politician and activist Yana Bland. The school was called The Katherine Anne Porter School, named after the poet.
It was this really ramshackle collection of all these young artists from the community; all the teachers were in their twenties and not necessarily even licensed but really passionate and really smart.
It was a refuge for all the kids who couldn’t hack it in public school in Texas, from the whole county – the kids who dropped out; the goths; the rock’n’roller kids; the people who didn’t fit into the football landscape. They all ended up at this one little school.
It’s such a cool place and it really changed my life, because I was feeling pretty misunderstood at the public high school in Wimberley. Long story short, we had this guitar teacher called Django Porter and he was, like his namesake, a master of that manouche jazz, that Django Reinhardt-style guitar.
His dad was a guitar player and named him Django, after Django Reinhardt, and then he somehow became this incredible virtuoso in that style. So he brought me in, kind of under his wing, in a similar way to Brandon, where he taught me how to play the la pompe rhythm, just chugging away at the chords of those old Django Reinhardt songs and ragtime songs, four on the floor, so he could solo.
It was a similar relationship to Brandon, where I was just his rhythm kid and I didn’t take a solo for a couple of years in that style. He would take me all over the Hill Country, to Austin, and all over the countryside, to different little weird dancehalls.
There was this whole jazz community out there from the [Texan guitarist and “King of Western Swing”] Bob Wills school – a lot of old Western swing players that he knew – and this old guitar player named Slim Richey who was from that camp as well. He really inundated me into the Western swing, manouche jazz world of Texas. It really changed my life.
Django was our god, basically. I was obsessed with Django for quite a while in high school after that and then slowly started learning to play the solos, improvised. Again, both of these guys were these master guitar players who took me in as a kid and treated me like an equal, socially, but also taught me a lot.
I’m a big Django fan as well, so it was exciting to see this on the list.
I love “Django’s Tiger.” I love all the songs, but this is the one that I think is a really beautiful example of his improvisation, his compositional improvisation. No one improvises like Django Reinhardt on the guitar.
He composes these perfect long-form compositions on the spot, with so much virtuosity and feeling, and with just two fingers.
“The Hobo Song” by Old & In The Way
Most of these songs are from my childhood, because so much of my relationship with music is rooted in my first impressions with music as a kid. As my relationship with language was developing, and all the aspects of my life were forming as a kid, music was such a big part of that.
Simultaneously to playing the blues with Brandon Gist and playing manouche jazz with Django Porter, my best friend Matt Cooke and I were obsessed with this record by Old & In The Way, which is a bluegrass record, but with Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead on banjo and Peter Rowan, this psychedelic country songwriter, on vocals.
They’re all incredible bluegrass musicians, but it’s also unique in that it’s psychedelic, acid rock’n’roll musicians playing bluegrass really well, committed to the genre. The songs are a little more outside the lines, like this song – it’s about a hobo who is this troubadour and he’s travelling and sleeping in hallways and drinking perfume and stuff.
Matt and I would drive around the Hill Country in Texas listening to this record on repeat and swimming in the rivers, and that brought us out to the Kerrville Folk Festival, a festival in West Texas, where songwriters have been gathering around campfires and singing tunes and playing bluegrass since 1972.
I started going out there every summer and it made a huge impact on me to start really writing songs.
Were you at the time, or have you since become, a full-blown Deadhead?
I love the Dead. I still haven’t gone into my deep Deadhead phase, but I’m sure it’s going to happen. I love the Dead, for sure, but I haven’t gone deep into the live collections and stuff.
It comes for all of us, eventually, I’m sure.
Yeah, it’s coming. I can’t wait – I’m very excited for that time.
“The Smokey Turtle” by Eyeball Skeleton
I fell in love with jazz through playing with Django and all these cats in the Hill Country and that led me to want to study jazz.
So I went to music school to study jazz and realised very quickly that the intellectual environment – the jazz-industrial complex – that’s been built around it in music education, was very different to where I was coming from, which was basically playing jazz for a bunch of crazy drunk people having a hell of a time on Saturday and dancing and making out.
That’s really where jazz comes from, from New Orleans, from the brothels and all that stuff. I came up playing jazz for parties and dances and it was so fun and ecstatic and non-precious, and then I got to music school, and it was suddenly this really competitive, judgement-based environment where you’re literally getting rated on how fast you can play and how quickly you can read.
It was just this contest, and I didn’t like that. My roommate at the time was a kid from Baltimore called Greg Hatem, who came from the underground rock’n’roll and experimental music scene in Baltimore, and he showed me this band Eyeball Skeleton.
They were a father and two of his young sons – they were six and eight or something like that – and they named the band Eyeball Skeleton. They each got a word, one chose “eyeball,” the other chose “skeleton.” Their dad plays the drums, and they write these hilarious songs.
This one’s about a breakdancing turtle who does a bunch of cool moves, a “shell-spin” and a “pyramid-tip,” it creates all this smoke and everybody “chokey chokeys.” It’s the spirit of young kids with total abandon writing songs from the hip and playing punk rock with their dad.
Greg had this wild collection of all these bands like that from Baltimore, we would take the bus down there and go to these underground rock’n’roll shows in all these old warehouses.
It totally blew my mind seeing the source of all this underground rock’n’roll, because I didn’t have that growing up in the Hill Country in Texas – I had really good blues music, and really good western and swing and jazz and stuff, and then I had my little weird punk band in the garage, but there wasn’t a scene for it.
He inundated me with it, and I fell in love with rock’n’roll and I left jazz behind for a while in college. In jazz school I started writing rock’n’roll, basically, and playing rock’n’roll guitar all the time and skipping classes.
Were you a precocious young songwriter like Eyeball Skeleton?
Not really. I wrote my first song when I was fifteen or sixteen, as far as I remember. I probably did fool around before that, but I wrote my first real song when I was sixteen and I was hopelessly in love with my best friend in high school.
It was a love song, which I’ve totally forgotten – I wish I had a recording of it. That’s when I really started writing songs, but until then I was just one hundred percent a guitar player. I started playing guitar at six years old and I was just obsessed with the guitar, and that’s all I wanted to do until high school.
“Two Girls” by Townes Van Zandt
That Eyeball Skeleton phase in college, that’s when I started getting serious about writing songs.
When I first started writing I was kind of shooting in the dark. Then I found Townes Van Zandt and he was tying all these worlds together for me; he was a Texas songwriter, I had left Texas and I felt like an outsider there in a way, but Townes represented everything that I love about Texas, while also being this total mystic, a real poet, and so outside of regular country music at the same time.
He was such an experimental, cutting-edge writer in his own way, while also playing within the melodic language of Texas songwriting. But really, he’s like Shakespeare or something, or a Sufi poet. I became so obsessed with him – right after college, when I was living in New York City and starting to really get serious about writing songs – kind of as a spirit guide for what’s possible in songwriting.
He was really empowering for me. A song like “Two Girls”, for instance, has all this mysticism but it’s also so oblique. Every verse is like its own independent short story. They all feel unrelated in a way, and the chorus has all this oblique space to it, I still don’t know what it means, it could mean so many different things.
“I’ve got two girls / One’s in heaven and one’s below / One I love with all my heart / One I do not know.” You could interpret that in a handful of different ways. Maybe he had a partner who’d passed away in childbirth, or maybe he was in love with two women – you could go in a lot of directions with it, but it definitely makes me feel a lot.
And then the verses are totally oblique to that. They’re almost like different songs, but the fact they’re all in the same song ties them together like a blood bond. There’s all this specificity, whilst also so much open space. As I was starting to really write songs, hearing one like “Two Girls,” which was just so multifaceted…it was like a masterclass, I guess, and it really changed my relationship to songwriting.
Do you hear the sound of Texas in those oblique lyrics and in his music?
Yes, I guess that’s one thing I really love about him is that I hear the real sound of what Texas means to me, in a multifaceted way. On the most basic level, yes, he’s playing an acoustic guitar, it sounds like he’s by a campfire and he’s singing within the lexicon of country – gravelly, outlaw Texas songwriting melodies and stuff like that.
But way more importantly, I think he represents the dichotomy of this almost unliveable environment. On the one hand it’s the harshness of Texas: this rock-hard soil, the sharp cactus, the poisonous plants and the poisonous animals, the snakes and the pink centipedes that will spike you with every single leg, and the scorpions and the rattlesnakes and the water moccasins.
Even in this song, he talks about water moccasins making these strange designs on the ice. But simultaneously, there’s this deep softness that you find in Texas – there’s almost a softness to the people. Because it’s such a harsh place there’s a humility there, in the people and even in the nature.
There’s a resilience in the face of all that, this deep patience and resilience and understanding of how thin the line is between life and death, and how fragile it is. The need to withstand that actually requires a lot of patience and subtlety.
That also lends itself to mysticism, somehow – being hyper-aware of this line between life and death inevitably leads to some kind of spiritual connection. This mystic spirituality that you find in Texas a lot isn’t really spoken about in the media.
Of course, it gets painted based on its politics, which are really backwards, a hundred percent, but on the ground – especially in the Hill Country, in Wimberley; in parallel to Austin, which is this liberal stronghold – there’s a lot of depth and mysticism out there, too, and I think he represents all of those things.
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