He may have opted to walk away from recording in the early ’80s, but Tucker Zimmerman’s career was ticking along well enough for decades, certainly in terms of personal satisfaction, before Big Thief’s generous advocacy. However, the success of their collaborative Dance Of Love album in 2024 opened a new, late-life chapter for the Californian folk outlier, then 83. That same year, he released a batch of songs cut between 1973-76 (as I Wonder If I’ll Ever Come True)and in 2025, an album of material recorded in the early Noughties with fellow forgotten legend Dave Evans. Now, another LP which both augments and updates Zimmerman’s hefty catalogue, though the romance of its title is bittersweet – both the artist and his wife Marie-Claire Zimmerman died in a house fire in January of this year.
It’s a tragic ending to a rich life that spans US draft dodging and relocation to the Belgian countryside to make myriad limited-issue recordings. Rather than an elegy, however, Dream Me A Dream reads like an intriguingly fresh, celebratory expansion of Zimmerman’s authorial voice. Produced by Big Potato label boss Nicholas Holton, who also plays across the set, it features 11 songs, many of which are from 2025 and one (“Wolf Run”) as recent as this year. “Sun In Scorpio” is decades old but had failed to find a suitable home until now, while the poems “Rooftops Of San Francisco” and “Rose Of Sharon” date from the ’60s, the latter now made over as a song. Also included is a cover of Adrianne Lenker’s “Stay (Wanted You To Stay)”. All were recorded in garden studios – Zimmerman’s in Stockay-Saint-Georges, near Liège, in Belgium, and Holton’s in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
What’s most striking about the set on first listen is the fact that Zimmerman’s lesser known, mid-’70s style – moody folk pop augmented with keyboards, synths and an Ondes Martenot – shines as strongly as his delicate, slightly cosmic, acoustic folk, dashed with blues and country soul. The Knopfler-ish synth rock of 1983’s Word Games, though, has not been revisited. As Holton explained to Uncut: “Tucker had requested a record like [Holton’s band HOO’s] Centipede Wisdom or We Shall Never Speak – I guess we wanted to try and take it in the electronic, even space-rock direction. We worked through [the songs] creating a loose, folky feel like [’70s psych-folk trio] Ithaca; we had a breakthrough with ‘Dream Me A Dream’.”
The album’s mien is vintage, then, but not oppressively so, the use of Moog and Roland Juno simpático with Zimmerman’s timeless song-poems and classic, 12-string timbre. Though history inevitably figures – whether in a snapshot of the 19-year-old singer in San Francisco, a roll call of treasured friends or musings on the dark side of the ’60s hippie dream – it’s personal and intimate, expressed in a compellingly hallucinatory style, as might be expected of a poet, rather than self-indulgently nostalgic. “Dream me a dream of a road map with highways in strawberry jam,” Zimmerman sings on the title track, in hushed harmony with guest Jackie Oates as violin and organ gently swoon behind. Then, “Dream me a dream of beatitude/You and I connected to every living being/Covered in a numinous, luminous cloud”.
The aforementioned “Sun In Scorpio” opens and is a slo-mo highlight, Zimmerman’s tender lyricism borne on soft Moog arpeggios and a cloud of woozy synth. It’s a precursor to the short but sweet instrumental “Orion Comes Down To Walk The Land”, after which there’s a shift for “Don’t Feel Like Doing Nothing Today”. A droll expression of lassitude, it comes on like Tom Waits (who’s namechecked) fronting Palace Brothers. One of three co-writes with Holton, “Riding Around In My Dreams” is a slyly fanciful recitation by Marie-Claire Zimmerman (“I’m stopping to give directions to lost bikers: ‘Just go down the hill and pass through the communist regime/until you come to the Academy Awards’”) over see-sawing bucolic folk with violin, banjo and whistling synth. The album bows out with the steady-paced country folk of “Crosswalk”, a fine example of both Zimmerman’s lyrical wit – he ticks off Smith and Wesson against “Marx & Spencer” and Amos and Andy, among other double acts – and nuanced echoing of his ’60s folk peers.
Dream Me A Dream boasts easy charm in spades and there’s no denying the poignancy of Zimmerman’s death before its release, but it’s the calibre of these songs, by turns soulful, cosmic and quietly humorous, in harmonious, considered settings, that ensures their staying power.