A gleaner of the forgotten, Buck Meek tips over the familiar and turns the unknown into a companion. On The Mirror, the artist’s fourth solo record and second album released by 4AD, there’s a tender power, countered by immutable vulnerability. With an uncanny curiosity, Meek conjures twin worlds to reveal the uniqueness in the mundane. Inviting in reflection as collaborator and demon as friend, The Mirror doesn’t seek to know but to ask, looking to the shape of a question rather than the illusion of its answer.

Meek grew up in Wimberley, Texas, teenage protege to an old guard of mystic Texas songwriters and musicians. He later moved to New York where he met Adrianne Lenker. The two lived in a van while singing their songs across the country before forming Big Thief. 

The partnership of Meek and producer, James Krivchenia, emerged from a decade of work together in Big Thief. Conceptually, The Mirror emerged from the idea to combine Meek’s  band’s live, kinetic energy with an oblique electronic world. The pair invited a collective atmosphere in which simultaneous experiment could occurr––the musicians responded to each other in real time, while their instruments triggered modular synthesizers and electronic magic boxes. The Mirror welcomed in friends, family, longtime collaborators from ranging musical eras of life as vital co-creators. New creative partners and longtime friends like composer and ambient musician Alex Somers joined in on synthesizer, toy microphone, and piano, and Mary Lattimore brought in the sounds of her prismatic harp.

Lexical mirrors are handheld, tactile, and kept close throughout the record––each one holding up a new truth. The Mirror aptly embraces the unknown with an abiding curiosity and Meek continues to reveal his skill as translator of human feeling and its endless portals. The Mirror looks for duality, finding it in the weeds and overgrowth. 

“My demon is my darkness and my darkness is my angel / 

I taught him how to read, now I’m teaching him to write.”