As I started to write this review, I found that Tucker Zimmerman died in January this year. This was news to me, sad news, made worse by the fact he died in a house fire at his home in Belgium, alongside his wife of more than five decades, Marie-Claire. I’d no idea and, as a fan taken by unhappy surprise, it likely affects my writing and perspective on this, his final album.
At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 as an all-time favourite). Zimmerman’s career never flew but he released some superb singer-songwriter fare, culminating in a late-career run when he was rediscovered and supported by the band Big Thief (whose singer, Adrienne Lenker, joins him here for the lovely “Stay (I Wanted You to Stay”).
On Dream Me a Dream, his musical support system is synth wizard Nick Holton and folkie singer-fiddler Jackie Oates, as well, as was often the case, Marie-Claire, who tells a French-accented surrealist yarn on one track, “Riding Around in my Dreams”.
It’s an album by an unapologetic old hippy, and sounds that way, not in an indulgent Gong-proggy way, but in the sense of a beatnik-flecked original ruminating in his later years. The album’s opening lines are, “She had a Gemini Moon, sun in Scorpio”… enough said.
He strums super-lightly and sings sweet-natured songs such as “Don’t Feel Like Doing Nothing Today”, about lazing around (“Pick up a book, Bukowski’s at the tracks”), or the playfully silly list song “Cross Walk” (“In comes the The New Riders of the Purple Sage/Out walks the Green Berets”). He muses on the past, notably on “The Lovers of Beggar Street” (“They called us Bohemians, clipped our wings/We were a noisy crowd but cool in the heat”), and sings much of love and dreams.
The whole thing is made poignant by his voice, always a quavery instrument, now more so with age, his songs' wistfulness amplified by Oates’ melancholic violin. Nick Holton also produces and gives the whole thing a spacy mellowness, sometimes couched in ambient stoner synths that add a gently psychedelic sheen.
It feels like drifting away, like someone at the end of the trail. It has the mellow, welcoming warmth of spending time around one who has lived well. These aren’t forceful songs but are of the home’n’hearth, built on Zimmerman’s genial, well-practiced way with a tune. It is a quiet but apt farewell to a delightful one-off.
Below: Listen to the sing "Dream Me a Dream" by Tucker Zimmerman
