In one of his most enduring songs, Johnny Cash likened love to a burning ring of fire. Originally penned by his soon-to-be-second wife, June Carter, “Ring of Fire” gave romance a tangible feeling, a concreteness that could easily be pointed to, a sensory depth and explicative character. Combined with Cash’s signature baritone, that ineffable feeling is rendered even more tactile. There’s a reason it has become routinely recognized among the greatest love songs and as a classic in the country canon.
Love songs are a familiar character in songwriting, but Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek frames his own love songs through his subject’s unfamiliarity. On Meek’s “Ring of Fire,” not to be confused with the aforementioned Cash staple, he echoes the Man in Black’s tale of transformation but highlights fire’s imperceptible contours, the haze that lurks at its edges and the smoke that billows from an undefined source. Fire is an alchemical reaction, and Meek’s love is similarly intense and heated. There are “the thousand hearts you took with that look in your eyes,” a gesture that can’t be properly explained save for the effect that it has. “All that love I’ve found in the sound and the songs, I’m saving for my girl back home,” he sings in his reedy folk timbre. It’s a standout moment from his fourth solo album, The Mirror, a record that reckons with the mysterious properties of love and how those properties manifest themselves in myriad ways.
Take the opening track and lead single, “Gasoline,” whose opening line captures a shared vernacular only two lovers could share: “Making up words while we made love / one month and she’s in my blood,” he sings over acoustic guitar that flutters like a rapid heartbeat, his words quickly giving way to a string of gibberish insensible to any fly on the wall, “Ooheeah lalo, faroosee mneykro.” In the Wild Pink-channeling “Pretty Flowers,” Meek marvels at what he cannot name. “The more I get to know you / The less I know of love / Is it science? Is it art? / Can I learn to give away my heart,” he wonders in the first verse. The quasi-title track, “Heart in the Mirror,” wrestles with the ways in which love defies logic and how it often follows a reasoning of its own accord: “Backwards love is easier to read / When it’s tattooed on my heart in the mirror.”
Although it’s a solo album, Buck Meek doesn’t embark on this journey alone. Collaborators such as his brother and keyboardist Dylan; bassist Ken Woodward; harpist Mary Lattimore; and Big Thief bandmates Adrianne Lenker and James Krivchenia, the latter of whom also produced The Mirror, are just some of the musicians who join him at various stops along the way. Krivchenia, in particular, helps to subtly expand Meek’s indie-folk template. The drummer’s own electronic solo work now informs Meek’s, whose songs are littered with flourishes of modular synth and elliptical textures performed by Adiran Olsen. There are the modern-day-Alex G squelches in the intro of “Can I Mend It?”; the sputtering synths toward the end of “Deja Vu”; and the splashes of arpeggio on the feeble little horse-esque closer “Outta Body.”
The Mirror may not be as all-encompassing or adventurous, but it partly recalls how Big Thief gestured toward the electronic world on 2022’s double LP, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, notably on mid-album cuts like “Heavy Bend” and “Blurred View.” The key focus this time, however, is Meek’s songwriting, but there are fine-drawn textural layers that sustain it throughout. The scattered synths lend his songs an esoteric edge, emphasizing the latent abstractions that animate romantic affection. The Mirror doesn’t concern itself with solving love’s mysteries so much as guiding us to their existence, showcasing them in all their arcane splendor, angling its resplendent reflections toward us. Buck Meek’s new songs are a fitting conduit. [4AD]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
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