In many ways, Melissa Lingo, the songwriter who performs under the name meka, is something of a throwback. Her life story and her music both seem like the product of headier and perhaps more innocent times. Born in California, meka grew up in a community of astronomical researchers and has since spent most of her life travelling the world. She has lived in Brazil, India, Cambodia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and her latest album, The Rabbit, was recorded in Sweden. On the face of it, it’s a lifestyle redolent of the late 1960s, when increased freedom of movement helped facilitate a culture of itinerant creativity, and meka’s music is duly indebted to some of the best songwriters of that era, especially the likes of Linda Perhacs, Joni Mitchell, and most of all Vashti Bunyan, whose own work was heavily inspired by spontaneous travel and drop-out culture.
But the social and political terrain is different now, and people move around for a wider variety of reasons. Accordingly, meka’s songs are subtler and more emotionally complex than those of many of her forebears. She also suffers from chronic illness, which must add another level of difficulty to constant travelling and which also informs the content of her songs. But rather than focussing on the negative aspects of illness, she has a knack of sublimating pain – and sometimes grief – into moments of beauty. And The Rabbit is full of melodic and lyrical beauty. It is there in the very first song, Something Strange, where a deceptively simple acoustic strum gives way, after the first chorus, to a rolling, fluid full band arrangement. The lyrics are full of symbolic portent: the shed skin of a snake, a white sheet blowing in the wind, a mysterious grey fox. But meka sings with an inquisitive energy, and we are led towards the beauty in these enigmatic objects.
Her writing is imagistic but loose, reflecting her world, which is one of constant movement. Temperance, with its sweet, sweeping string arrangement, carries with it the visual qualities of a road movie, and we can almost see meka processing in real time the grief of losing a friend as she drives across the California desert. She is brilliant at evoking a particular feeling – often melancholy or nostalgia or pain or love – through minimal but distinctive imagery, like the sun shining through spider webs in Heavy Hands or the uncertain memory of a colour in Manzanita.
Many of these songs unfold slowly and discursively like the gauzy, shimmering Memory Machine, which nods to the soulful side of country, or The Tower, whose intriguing, gnomic lyrics and powerful vocals make it sound like a desert-folk Stevie Nicks before a distorted middle section draws attention to the song’s more pressing message. The album isn’t short of these dark moments, but often they are occluded by a surface gentleness, as on the pretty, piano-led Vices and Virtues with its themes of domesticity and disruption. Baby Blues succeeds, in little over two minutes, in marrying up themes of grief and friendship with environmental concerns. It’s as simple as a lullaby but multi-layered and highly accomplished. Imagine a world where Nick Drake introduced political consciousness to his songs without sacrificing their exquisite weightlessness.
She uses a similar technique in Tomato Song, setting up an idyllic domestic scene and undermining it with themes of existentialism and loss and instability. Similarly, the Joni Mitchell-esque title track plays on the juxtaposition of joy and sadness, using images of flowers and graves. But meka’s concerns run deeper than that: the cyclical nature of things, the inexorability of natural processes in the face of fleeting human emotions. A twinkling piano reminds us that wonder and joy can be experienced anywhere, even alongside grief and sadness. In the closing song, What Once Was, we finally see meka make a kind of peace with her role as a rambler and a chronicler of human emotions and geographical landscapes.
It is no accident that more than one song on The Rabbit is named after the tarot’s major arcana. In a way, the whole album can be experienced as a kind of tarot reading, a mystical, alluring set of pathways into the human mind, a comment on fate, a dream with a cast of obscure characters. It is an album with a free and easy feel that nonetheless marks out its creator as a musician in complete artistic control. It’s no great stretch to put meka right up there with her heroes in the pantheon of folk songwriters.
The Rabbit (May 21st, 2025) Dumont Dumont
Order/Save: https://idol-io.ffm.to/therabbit
meka was also one of KLOF Mag’s recent Off the Shelf Guests:
You can also hear her in our latest Mixtape:
