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“The Mirror,” released in February on 4AD, is Meek’s fourth solo album.
“It's a lot heavier in ways," he told WAMC. "We have a pretty, pretty heavy rock band behind it, but there's also a lot of delicacy and synthesis.”
The record plays like a desert road trip, contrasting the Texan’s plaintive, intimate reflections with a vast and continually unfolding landscape that coasts by through a dusty window.
“My friend James Krivchenia produced the record," said Meek. "He's the drummer of Big Thief, but he's also a wild electronic musician in his own right, and he was kind of creating these parallel realities with a bunch of modular synths and weird electronic instruments that was all being triggered by the live band in the room. So we had this rock band in the room, and it was triggering this psychedelic synthesis world completely beyond our knowledge. We weren't hearing that, but it was happening simultaneously, and so we kind of combined the two worlds in the mix.”
Meek – who calls LA home these days – was born and raised in Wimberley, a small town about 40 miles southeast of Austin. He says the work of that city’s hometown filmmaking hero Richard Linklater – particularly his classic 1990 film “Slacker” – has been a lasting influence on his music.
“There's all these seemingly disparate elements, these unrelated characters with these unrelated stories, but then as the movie goes on, you start to fill in the blanks of what the soul of a city is, or the soul of a time, and just these ephemeral moments that you can't really put your finger on, or look right in the eye," Meek said. "Life is just way too complex to sum up literally, and I feel like Linklater is good at kind of providing enough context obliquely to let the observer fill in the blanks and get a feel for what it actually felt like. And I guess I try to do that with songs.”
The Berklee College of Music attendee has had a big decade. Since Big Thief formed in Brooklyn in 2015, the acclaimed act has garnered Grammy nominations, developed a passionate fanbase, and given Meek opportunities like his appearance in the 2021 Bob Dylan concert film “Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan.” While the guitarist says he must remain silent about the experience – citing an NDA he signed for a “big scary cowboy” in Dylan’s retinue – he took away a valuable insight into the Nobel laureate’s process.
“He moves so quick," said Meek. "He's like a shark out there. He's just iterating so fast, and he notices every detail in the room.”
As member of Big Thief, Meek will return to the Northeast on Aug. 8 for a concert at MASS MoCA in North Adams.
The last song on “The Mirror” is Meek’s attempt at a séance, of sorts, written immediately after his grandmother’s death.
“I was really close to my grandmother, and grew up just a block away from her," he said. "And she was a professor of literature, she was a Shakespearean scholar, and my bedtime stories were Yates and stuff. I had a lifelong dialog with her about literature and songs. I would run songs by her. And she was also professor of film, and every weekend I’d go to her house and she would show me old films, Ingrid Bergman films and all the good old black and whites and everything, and a lot of weird art films, French stuff. Losing her was tough because I feel like she was my deepest source for that.”
“Outta Body” is Meek both grieving her and bringing her back for one more conversation.
“That's one of my favorite things about writing songs, is there's no rules, and you can create this fantasy world," he told WAMC. "I created this fantasy where my grandmother, I could communicate with her after she had passed, and she was kind of reaching out to me through dreams, and through watching an Ingrid Bergman film, and Ingrid Bergman winking at me- And really, it's my grandmother's spirit kind of piercing through the screen. And so, yeah, just for the moment I was writing that song, it was comforting to feel that she was still communicating.”
