Chris Meck tries out songwriting for his Guilty Birds

There was little fanfare when Chris Meck and the Guilty Birds released their debut recording, a self-titled four-song EP, in March. Meck, who has been writing for the band for nearly two years, didn’t see much point in celebrating.

“We didn’t really have a release show at all,” he says. “The goal was to get it done before we went to South by Southwest, just so that we would have it, because you kind of have to have something to put in people’s hands down there. It’s just an EP — once upon a time, they used to call them demos. And it took longer than I would have liked, but I had to have songs I didn’t hate on there.”

Meck isn’t indulging in false modesty. Songwriting, he says, is a relatively new practice for him, despite a long tenure in the local music scene. (He has played guitar with Kristie Stremel and Tony Ladesich, as well as in Gaslights, Atlantic Fadeout and Tiny Horse; he’s now with the Architects.) He began writing in earnest two years ago, at 41. It was a promise to his late wife, Midwest Music Foundation co-founder Abigail Henderson, who died in August 2013 following a five-year struggle with breast cancer.

“We had a lot of conversations as her time was dwindling about what I was going to do,” Meck says, “and I said I thought maybe it was time for me to step out of being a sideman and take on a different role and see if I could even do it, see if it was something I could grow into, fronting a band. And she felt like that’s what I needed to do, too.”

Henderson’s request came with another stipuation: After she was gone, he would perform on the opening Friday of every Apocalypse Meow fundraiser: MMF’s biggest annual event, which Henderson spearheaded in the fall of 2008. It was a date that Henderson and Meck’s band, Tiny Horse, had kept every year except 2011, when Henderson’s deteriorated health prevented her from playing.

“It’s been one of those things where I literally had a gig before I had any material,” Meck says. “A lot of those first gigs came before we were really ready for them because people heard my story or they knew me from other projects and felt they could trust me.”

The first Chris Meck and the Guilty Birds gig came at the sixth annual Apocalypse Meow, just a few months after Henderson died. Meck was petrified.

“It’s funny because I’m never nervous to just play guitar,” Meck says. “It’s a whole different thing when they’re your songs and you’re the singer. You’re shouldering a whole different world than when you’re just a guitar player. I started playing with the Architects in October [2014], and I’ve done a couple of the biggest crowds I’ve ever played to, but I wasn’t nervous for that at all. Right now, I’m more nervous to play for 50 people at the Brick with my band than for 3,000 with the Architects because I have a lot more responsibility with my band.”

Meck shouldn’t worry. Despite multiple lineup changes, he and his Guilty Birds —keyboardist and singer Camry Ivory, bassist and singer Calandra Ysquierdo and drummer Michelle Bacon — deliver an assured, accomplished sound. His EP may be short, but it’s a flavorful slice of what his band does — blues-colored rock and roll — and it’s very good. “Dark Sea” can be read as a requiem for Henderson — My love has gone across the dark sea/Try as I might, I cannot follow — but it’s not as mournful as it is moody, the lyrics buffered by an energetic interplay between organ and guitar.

“At first, I think there were a lot of expectations about what people were going to hear,” Meck says. “I think people thought they were going to hear a lot about Abby dying – and there are bits and pieces of it here, in a lyric or something…. I started writing the first songs of the batch when Abby was still here, and we’d just started hospice care. I had a lot of heavy emotional stuff going on, but I was trying to figure out a way to channel that without being a super-sad bastard about it.”

We’ve been talking at a booth inside the Brick, which is mostly empty at this post-lunch, pre-happy-hour time of day. Meck speaks with an even, plain tone; there’s little grief in his expression but there’s little humor, either. He exudes square-shouldered resolve.

“My main reason for doing this, other than the promise I made to Abby, is that every time a band ends — and they all do, unless you’re the Rolling Stones, apparently — you have to start over if you’re just the guitar player,” he tells me. “I’ve done that so many times that I felt like I needed to at least try and see if I could run a band under my own name because that’s something I’ll never have to start again.”

He goes on: “What keeps me coming back to it is just feeling like each time I have a new song, I feel like I can see that it’s better than the first few that I wrote, and I feel like it’s getting better and it’s improving. And as I’m noticing improvement, it makes me want to go back and do it again.”