Cannonball!

"Cannonball!" shows Buck Meek stepping fully out of Big Thief's shadow, trading that band's spectral hush for loose, sun-warmed Americana on 2023's *Haunted Mountain*. The track ambles in on rolling, country-inflected guitar — bright, slightly twangy, with a rhythm section that swings rather than drives, drums brushed and easy. There's a back-porch looseness to the production, room tone and human imperfection left intact, the opposite of grid-locked perfection. Meek's voice is its own instrument: high, reedy, cracked at the edges, conversational to the point of seeming half-improvised, full of those little melodic swerves that feel discovered in real time. The lyrics traffic in his characteristic plainspoken surrealism — images that read like fragments of a half-remembered dream, affection rendered through oblique, tumbling phrases rather than direct declaration. The exclamation point in the title fits: there's a tossed-off, leaping joy here, a willingness to plunge in headfirst. It sits in a lineage of cosmic-country and Laurel Canyon songwriting, but filtered through a thoroughly contemporary indie sensibility, unhurried and a little weird. Best played with the windows down on a back road, or low in a kitchen on a slow morning — music for when you want company that doesn't demand anything, warm and slightly off-kilter, like a friend telling a story they're making up as they go.