Buck Meek Is Always Up for a Challenge

Buck Meek didn’t initially set out to write an album of love songs. In fact, the singer/songwriter and guitarist for Big Thief didn’t have any particular concept in mind when he began writing what would eventually become his third solo album, Haunted Mountain.“

"I rarely can predetermine what an album or a collection of songs is about,” he tells InsideHook. “They usually start from a pretty subconscious place, I think.” This time, however, it started with a specific assignment that yielded some unexpected results.

“The song ‘Didn’t Know You Then’ was originally kind of catalyzed by this songwriting class I took with an artist named Luke Temple, who’s one of my heroes,” Meek explains. “And one of the first exercises in his songwriting class was to write a love song with cliches. Like he talked about the history of romantic love and how it’s pretty recent concept, really just like in the last 400 years or something, and how we’re in kind of this like adolescent phase of romantic love where there’s a bit of a taboo around it, at least in popular culture with the advent of psychoanalysis and the concept of codependency — for good reason, you know. But nonetheless, we’re all still somehow moved by a love song.”

We caught up with the musician recently to chat about the inspiration behind the record, why he's so drawn to mountains and what it was like to go viral on TikTok.