Buck Meek, the Big Thief guitarist who brought the band to his cabin

Buck Meek

Born	July 10, 1987 Wimberley, Texas, United States
Occupation	Musician

In the video for “Gasoline”, Buck Meek sings from the porch of a log cabin while his band plays inside, visible through the living-room window. The cabin is Ringo Bingo, the studio he shares with his wife, the singer Germaine Dunes, and the man producing the record inside it was James Krivchenia, the drummer who sits behind Meek every night in Big Thief. For a guitarist whose solo career is usually described as a side door out of one of indie folk’s most closely watched bands, the picture says something plain: on The Mirror, Meek did not leave the house. He invited everyone in.

That choice sits at the centre of his career. Meek has spent more than a decade as the second voice in a band built around Adrianne Lenker’s songs, the guitarist whose lines curl around her melodies and whose high harmony thickens her choruses. His own records, gentler and more rambling, keep being read against that band. The question his career keeps asking is whether a sideman’s solo work has to be an escape, or whether it can be a different room in the same house.

The path started in Wimberley, a small town in the Texas Hill Country, where Alexander Buckley Meek was born on July 10, 1987. He picked up the guitar young, and as a teenager he was already playing bars and dance halls around Texas, working through blues and western swing long before anyone called his music indie. He went on to Berklee College of Music in Boston, then moved to New York, where he paid his rent by busking in the subway stations at 14th Street–Union Square and Bedford Avenue.

New York is also where his partnership with Lenker took shape. The two released a pair of duo EPs, a-sides and b-sides, in 2014, and the following year they formed Big Thief in Brooklyn with the bassist Max Oleartchik, whom they recognised from Berklee; Krivchenia, first the band’s sound engineer, soon took over the drums. Masterpiece arrived in 2016 and Capacity in 2017. Then came 2019, the year the band released two albums, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, and the first of them earned a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. The sprawling double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You followed in 2022 and brought a second nomination in the same category.

Meek and Lenker married after meeting in New York, and they divorced in 2018. The band did not split along the same line. Outsiders tend to dwell on that detail. The two of them kept writing, recording and touring together, and both of Big Thief’s Grammy-nominated albums were made after the marriage ended.

His solo catalogue began with a self-titled album, Buck Meek, released in 2018 on the independent label Keeled Scales. Two Saviors followed in January 2021, recorded during a New Orleans heatwave at the corner of Royal and Desire streets with the producer Andrew Sarlo, a regular Big Thief collaborator; Mat Davidson’s pedal steel and organ from Meek’s brother, Dylan, gave it a loose country drift. That same year Meek turned up among the musicians in Shadow Kingdom, Alma Har’el’s filmed Bob Dylan performance. Haunted Mountain, his first album for 4AD, came in 2023: the songwriter Jolie Holland co-wrote five of its eleven songs, including the title track, Davidson produced, and the record reached No. 82 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart.

The critical case against Meek’s solo work has been consistent, and it deserves a hearing. Reviewing Two Saviors in The Guardian, Phil Mongredien called the album too laid-back for its own good, its songs sliding out of focus behind a featherweight voice. Five years later, The List described The Mirror as arguably a Big Thief album in everything but name and called it an amuse-bouche. Both reviews land on something real: Meek rarely raises his voice, and his songs seldom build to the kind of release Lenker’s do. What they miss is that the smallness is the subject. On “Demon” he sings about trying to write to contain his life and to love his wife; on “Heart In The Mirror” he sets out to write a song that is not for others. These are records about domestic scale, and judging them by the size of the band’s catharsis is a category error. The fairer criticism is narrower: when the writing is vague, there is no volume to hide behind.

The band changed shape in the meantime. Oleartchik left Big Thief in 2024, with the group citing interpersonal reasons, and the remaining three recorded Double Infinity live over three weeks at the Power Station in New York, with the producer Dom Monks and a ring of guest musicians. Released on 4AD in September 2025, it was the first Big Thief album made as a trio.

The Mirror, his fourth solo album, came out on 4AD on February 27, 2026. Krivchenia, who has moved toward electronics on his own records, brought modular synthesizers to the cabin sessions and laid them under a live band of Ken Woodward, Adam Brisbin and Jesse Quebbeman-Turley. Lenker sings backing vocals alongside Holland, Staci Foster and Dunes, the harpist Mary Lattimore and the composer Alex Somers add colour, and Dylan Meek is again in the room. Speaking to the Berlin magazine tip Berlin in March, Meek said the wordless, made-up syllables that open the record carry no fixed meaning and described the album as one about communication, the kind he manages best when he trusts intuition over explanation.

Meek lives in Southern California with Dunes, whom he met in the Netherlands, and the two also play together in Kisser, a band in which Dunes takes the lead vocal and Meek steps back to guitar, an arrangement that inverts his role in Big Thief. Kisser also opened most of his spring tour, which started in South Pasadena on March 12 and then crossed the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe.

The year has been split between the two lives. Big Thief spent spring in Europe, including three nights at London’s O2 Academy Brixton, then crossed North America from August into October, with a night at Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver on October 6. Meek now heads back out on his own: a West Coast run opens at The Crocodile in Seattle on December 2 and works down the coast through Vancouver, San Francisco and San Diego before finishing at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown on December 11, with Kisser on several of the bills. It is the same pattern as the cabin sessions, carried onto the road: his own songs, his own band, and family on the stage beside him.