Dream Me a Dream serves as a coda to Dance of Love, the 2024 album that introduced cult singer/songwriter Tucker Zimmerman to a wider audience thanks to an assist from Big Thief, who served as his supporting band. The music brought Zimmerman, who dropped off the grid in Belgium after releasing the Tony Visconti-produced, David Bowie-endorsed Ten Songs in 1970, back from obscurity, so he seized the opportunity to deliver a sequel.
Not long after completing Dream Me a Dream, Zimmerman and Marie-Claire Lambert, his wife of 55 years and frequent creative partner, perished in a house fire. The terrible accident happened this past January, leaving the album as an unintentional farewell from an artist who only recently re-emerged on a wider stage. Big Potato Records—an imprint co-founded by Nick Holton, a neo-psychedelic artist who performs as HOO and serves as the co-producer here—decided to proceed with the scheduled release, because “that’s what Tucker was expecting.” Although it doesn’t precisely cast a pall over the music, the tragedy can’t help but color the perception of Dream Me a Dream, lending a poignance to its lightest moments and accentuating its bittersweet undercurrents.
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That wistful undertow stems from Zimmerman’s casual acceptance of his advancing age. His hushed, ragged whisper feels suitably weathered, fitting a collection of songs that never are in a hurry. Even when the tempo picks up slightly, as it does on the steady, sequenced pulse of “Rose of Sharon,” a song that also bears the clearest melody—there’s not a sense of urgency. An unsentimental portrait of 1960s hippies, “Rose of Sharon” is balanced by the affectionate chronicle of his bohemian days on “Lovers of Beggar St.,” two examples of how Zimmerman spends a good portion of the album reconnecting with his younger years. He twice turns old poems into new songs, discovering a gentle lilt within the words of the title track and turning “Rooftops of San Francisco” into a meditation. He spends both the cheerful ramble “Don’t Feel Like Doing Nothing Today” and the closing “Cross Walk” reminiscing about old friends, idols, and fellow travelers with bemused affection. These backward glances don’t play as nostalgia. Rather, they’re the grace notes of an old man taking stock of his life, noticing how memories intertwine with the present as he keeps his love for Lambert as his north star. She recites the song-poem of “Riding Around in My Dreams” and is the object of affection on Zimmerman’s version of Adrianne Lenker’s “Stay (Wanted You to Stay).”
The presence of a song from Lenker can’t help but highlight the gulf between Dance of Love and Dream Me a Dream. Big Thief brought a quiet, insistent warmth to Dance of Love, giving the album a unifying sense of communion that’s unusual in Zimmerman’s body of work. Dream Me a Dream is a reversion to the mean, a happily untidy record where he’s content to get lost in reverie or just plain lost. Holton encourages these wanderings, dressing the plainspoken folk of “Sun in Scorpio” with washes of synths, teasing out ambient textures in the instrumental “Orion Comes Down to Walk the Land,” and building “Rooftops of San Francisco” from stark introspection into electronic noir. The synths don’t feel futuristic so much as a new age remnant, a reminder that Zimmerman spent much of his career pursuing a muse that kept him on the fringes of popular music. With its loose ends and digressions, Dream Me a Dream stays true to those idiosyncratic instincts while retaining enough of the welcoming glow of Dance of Love to make this an affecting farewell from an endearing eccentric.
