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X-WR-CALNAME:RSVP — Buck Meek
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SUMMARY:Buck Meek
DTSTART:20261206T040000Z
DTEND:20261206T070000Z
DTSTAMP:20261113T015122Z
UID:rsvp-2307@rsvp.local
DESCRIPTION:On Saturday\, December 5th\, 2026\, the Community Center for t
 he Performing Arts proudly welcomes Buck Meek to the WOW Hall.\n\nA gleane
 r of the forgotten\, Buck Meek tips over the familiar and turns the unknow
 n 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 imm
 utable vulnerability. With an uncanny curiosity\, Meek conjures twin world
 s to reveal the uniqueness in the mundane. Inviting in reflection as colla
 borator 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 answ
 er.\n“The more I get to know you\, the less I know of love / Is it scien
 ce? Is it art? / Can I learn to give away my heart?”\nMeek grew up in Wi
 mberley\, Texas. The grandson of a Shakespearean scholar grandmother and F
 aulkner scholar grandfather\; the son of a child psychologist mother and g
 lass sculptor father\; and teenage protege to an old guard of mystic Texas
  songwriters and musicians\, outlaw poets\, acid hillbilly jazzers\, and g
 utbucket guitarists. Meek’s first gig was at thirteen\, playing rhythm f
 or the Memphis bluesman Brandon Gist\, kicking Gist’s old amp when it wo
 uld short out on stage. The artist went on to cut his teeth playing Manouc
 he\, Romanian waltzes\, ragtime\, western swing\, rock and roll\, and his 
 own songs in bars\, icehouses\, square dances\, pie socials\, cowgirl kabu
 ki theaters\, fire dances\, and acrobat squats in high desert mission chur
 ches. He moved to Boston to study jazz\, and quickly found community in ot
 her young “jazz musicians” who really just wanted to write songs and p
 lay rock and roll at house shows. Later\, he moved to New York where he me
 t Adrianne Lenker. The two lived in a van while singing their songs across
  the country before forming Big Thief.\nPeeking into the corners of The Mi
 rror’s Wunderkammer\, angels fly above the bed\, and demons learn to rea
 d. The lens shape-shifts –– out of curiosity and out of yearn. For Mee
 k\, language is something shared\, passed in cupped hands\, outstretched\,
  and spilled again –– back into the river\, and to the source. In “D
 emon\,” Meek reflects this inheritance\, “The more I learn the less I 
 know / Stole that last line from my friend / Tucker Zimer-zim-zim-zimmerma
 n / The line between us all is thin.” The record moves as an artifact of
  friendship\, both in process and lyric. The Mirror dances loose-limbed in
 to an unknown where shared listening is the language.\nEmerging from a dec
 ade of work together in Big Thief\, the partnership of Meek and producer J
 ames Krivchenia on The Mirror arrived from the idea to combine the band’
 s live\, kinetic energy with an oblique electronic world. The pair share a
  school of thought that holds foundational trust in a song\, to let perfor
 mance be the guide. Krivchenia brought technique and philosophy from his o
 wn experimental music practice. From production projects like Big Thief’
 s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You\, and Westerman’s An Inbuilt
  Fault\, to his recent solo record\, Performing Belief––Krivchenia’s
  work enlivens through electronic elements\, always seeking to deepen soun
 d. The concept for The Mirror welcomed a collective atmosphere in which si
 multaneous experiment could occur –– the musicians responded to each o
 ther in real time\, while their instruments triggered modular synthesizers
  and electronic magic boxes. The warmth and textures of the live band are 
 emphasized by the electronic edge\, revealing subtle parallel realities in
 side the recording. In merging the two worlds\, Krivchenia and Meek found 
 a shared telepathy through the process\, an unspoken creative sync.\nThe p
 air looked towards the experiment\, welcoming in friends\, family\, and lo
 ngtime collaborators from ranging musical eras of life as vital co-creator
 s. Adrianne Lenker\, who contributed vocals\, is Meek’s creative collabo
 rator of fifteen years while Adam Brisbin on guitar and Ken Woodward on ba
 ss have been strongholds in Meek’s solo project for a decade. New creati
 ve partners and longtime friends like composer and ambient musician Alex S
 omers joined in on synthesizer\, toy microphone\, and piano\, and Mary Lat
 timore brought in the sounds of her prismatic harp. A rotating cast of fou
 r drummers: Jesse Quebbeman-Turley\, Jonathan Wilson\, Kyle Crane\, and Ja
 mes Krivchenia provide a wide dynamic arc of grooves. Germaine Dunes\, Sta
 ci Foster\, Jolie Holland\, and Lenker sing as a choir on many songs. Meek
 ’s brother\, Dylan Meek contributed piano\, keys\, and vocals. Adrian Ol
 sen created a wide range of sounds and melodies with modular synths.\nMeek
 ’s songwriting became compass to the recording process\, instead of limi
 ting the tracks to something controllable\, he invited interaction\, pulse
 . The album was recorded in Meek and Germaine Dunes’ log cabin studio\, 
 Ringo Bingo. While Meek recorded vocals outdoors on the front porch\, look
 ing through the living room window where the band played inside\, Krivchen
 ia and engineer Adrian Olsen were building a mirror dimension of slurm tha
 t breathed alongside the songs. With the live band emerged a kinetic immed
 iacy that when layered with Krivchenia’s buoyant and textural electronic
  atmospheres\, a new habitable world was formed.\nViva voce\, hallowed or 
 an afterthought\, Meek captures essential human feeling with humor and swe
 et reverence. The Mirror searches for new meaning and the familiar is refr
 amed through Meek’s singular voice. Love\, as an idea\, is always close
 ––but in its reflection comes an afterimage of the way things could be
  and how they’ve been before. “In Heart In the Mirror\,” the reflect
 ion takes on a literal form––“Backwards love is easier to read / Whe
 n it’s tattooed on my heart in the mirror.” The Mirror steps through p
 hases of love\, from freshly formed to union\, and the songs seek an infin
 ite curiosity rather than resolution. The feedback loop takes hold in “C
 an I Mend it\,” as self-reflection is magnified in partnership: “Can I
  mend it? Can I make it whole? / Now that you’ve seen into the dark side
  of my soul.” The answers may come eventually\, but the record treats lo
 ve less as confession than as study—a map of not-knowing and a reverence
  for those shadows of intimacy. In “Gasoline\,” Meek signals linguisti
 c play again\, this time irreverently in shared company\, “Making words 
 up while we made love / one month and she’s in my blood / Ooheeah lalo\,
  faroosee mneykro.” The record holds the absurdity of devotion\, the cho
 ice to love—with equal parts ache and grin.\nLexical mirrors are handhel
 d\, tactile\, and kept close throughout The Mirror––each one holding u
 p a new truth. Language continues to spill over itself in “Demon’s” 
 aural doubling\, “I try to write a broken wing.” Meaning flickers. At 
 once\, the line appears like a healing call through the homophone of write
  and right\, while containing within it the idea of the descriptive\, the 
 evocation of injury. Can’t it be both? On “Pretty Flowers\,” Meek wr
 ites: “Show me how to come into my power without being mean / the garden
  weeds are making it look easy.” Meek looks for duality\, finding it in 
 the overgrowth.\nThese images echo thematically through the record as a li
 ghthouse beacon\, positioning the self as both subject and collaborator in
  a transformation where the reflection is infinite. On “Gasoline\,” la
 nguage arrives unformed with tender ease\, layering past with new love. 
 “We lay in silence through the morning / Until language slowly started f
 orming / She hummed a lullaby / I recognized from when I was a newborn.”
  Memory gets a slippery incarnation\, making doubles and threading time-sp
 aces. On “Soul Feeling\,” memory becomes a site for loss and the emerg
 ence of new meaning. “Memories are disappearing / But he’s still got h
 is soul feeling.” The song becomes a vessel to expand and contract time\
 , moving through story and experience.\n“My demon is my darkness and my 
 darkness is my angel / I taught him how to read\, now I’m teaching him t
 o write.”\nThe Mirror keeps on holding multiplicity and the line stays t
 hin: “My demon is my darkness and my darkness is my angel / I taught him
  how to read\, now I’m teaching him to write.” On “Demon\,” mirror
  and demon become twin symbols for the self-encounter. Fear\, darkness\, a
 nd reflection are collaborators rather than enemies––versions of the s
 elf with hands waiting to be held. How can you protect the spontaneity of 
 reflection before it hardens into self-analysis? Before it calcifies as cr
 iticism? Before it argues for perfection? The questions keep arriving\, pl
 aying with expectation\, when on the other side there could be anything.\n
 The creek films with leaves\, jimson trumpets\, wild roses\, tarmac\, worm
 s and blue jeans\, love and hot air. Nearby\, in one million years\, a lig
 htbeam\, a warm rock and a cool breeze. When memory returns it arrives in 
 a new body\, it asks an old question. As an artist\, Meek continues to rev
 eal his singular aptitude as translator of human feeling and its endless p
 ortals. Through The Mirror\, Meek aptly embraces this unknown with an abid
 ing desire to find the right questions to ask\, rather than their answers.
  “I don’t know the meaning of your dreams\,” Meek writes on Deja Vu\
 , “Though tell me everything.”\n“I don’t know the meaning of your 
 dreams / Though tell me everything”
LOCATION:WOW Hall\, 291 West 8th Avenue\, Eugene\, OR\, 97401\, United Sta
 tes
URL:https://rsvpw.me/events/2307-buck-meek-2026-12-05
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