For his latest solo album, Buck Meek, lead guitarist of Big Thief, went back to Texas – to the border town of Tornillo 560 miles from his hometown of Wimberley – to record Haunted Mountain. The band - Buck (guitar, vocals), Adam Brisbin (guitar), Austin Vaughn (drums), Ken Woodward (bass), Mat Davidson (pedal steel, vocals), and Dylan Meek (keys) - recorded the eleven songs that make up Haunted Mountain over the course of two weeks at Sonic Ranch studio. The album was produced by Davidson and engineered and mixed by Adrian Olsen. The album follows Meek’s 2018 self-titled debut and 2021’s Two Saviors, with records as a part of Big Thief in-between - U.F.O.F. and Two Hands (2019), and Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (2022).
Haunted Mountain is about love and… something other. Something bigger than love, a soulfulness, or a soul seeking fullness. In the songs, (with five co-written alongside longtime friend and musical hero Jolie Holland (‘Haunted Mountain’, ‘Paradise’, ‘Where You’re Coming From’, ‘Lagrimas’, & ‘Lullabies’) and one (‘The Rainbow’) set to the words of Judee Sill’s final journal entry, written 3 weeks before she passed) love often assumes a natural form, sometimes it becomes artificial, sometimes cosmic. It is a consciousness here, interacting with the lovers, watching them sometimes, becoming them sometimes. Romance is not the only form of love Haunted Mountain explores; The epic ‘Lullabies’ examines the inexhaustible connection between mother and son; a platonic bond appears in ‘Where you’re coming from’; and grief leads to communion with the dead in ‘Lagrimas’.
The songs were written in mountains; by cold springs in the Serra da Estrela of Portugal, on the submerged volcano of Milos in the Cyclades, Valle Onsernone in the Swiss Alps (where the cover photo was taken), and the Santa Monica range where Buck now calls home - all where his new love was born. “Love inhabits your environment, animates the inanimate, charging everything around you with a sense of meaning,” Meek says. Haunted Mountain asks - is love a form of magic?
American multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, producer, and singer-songwriter Jolie Holland has been on the road since the early 2000s, releasing nine of her own albums and collaborating on countless others. Her work has been described as a syncretization of American roots, with rock and experimental elements. She’s been in the studio with Booker T, Lucinda Williams, and TV On The Radio; and shared stages with Mavis Staples, St. Vincent, Elbow, and Big Thief. Her collaborators have included Hal Willner, Kronos Quartet, and Boots Riley. Lou Reed once told her, “I could have listened to you all night.”
Album Synopsis
Jolie Holland’s Haunted Mountain is a beckoning, confronting place. At once ancient and of the moment, it hums with literary and political interconnections. The songs illuminate states of dispossession and alienation, lust and pollination: a state of reciprocity with our living planet. The record is a creation beyond genre, a refined jewel that refracts as anti-patriarchal dance music and sultry anti-fascist love songs to bats and bees. The album's rendered environments--ranging from sparse acoustic constellations to dense electronic atmospheres--are punctuated with nuanced percussion from cicadas, drums and even knuckles on piano. These sound-worlds were produced and animated by a trio of multi-instrumentalists: Jolie Holland, Adam Brisbin and Justin Veloso. Helping to conjure Haunted Mountain, the great magician Buck Meek of Big Thief authors the third verse of the title track, and duets with Holland on Highway 72. in a show of love and solidarity, both Meek and Holland include versions of their song Haunted Mountain on their 2023 releases, and both name their records after the song. After all, it is fun to say.