What we lose when an artist we love dies unexpectedly is impossible to quantify. It’s more than just the sum of their potential work; it’s the loss of the knowledge that they are around, that they are somewhere on the planet creating something or just existing. Some people improve the world just by being in it, by inhabiting their own promise in an entirely authentic way even as they eschew the commercial world that owes its existence to their art.
In the past year or so we have lost (at least) three of those beloved outsiders: Michael Hurley, Ed Askew and Tucker Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s death last year at the age of 84 was the most shocking: a house fire at his home in Belgium which also claimed the life of his wife and creative partner, the artist Marie-Claire Lambert. The previous year he had released Dance of Love, a career highlight on which Big Thief served as his backing band. It was full of humour and positivity, camaraderie and a sense of new beginnings. It sounded like Zimmerman still had a whole lot of music to give.
Dream Me a Dream was Zimmerman’s final recording, and was due to be announced just days after his death. It is evidently a work from the same large heart that gave us Dance of Love, and it reminds us that while Zimmerman’s MO was a kind of dusty, lo-fi outsider folk, his range was much bigger than those labels imply. This is an album that opens out at every turn: here, a Garth Hudson-esque organ vamp; there, a nebulous waft of synth. Opener Sun In Scorpio unfolds over five minutes, the initial, minimal acoustic guitar carried in unexpected directions by synth blooms that spread like bursts of ink in water. On top of all this is Zimmerman’s patient, husky singing. On the surface it’s as simple as an old blues song, but there is an admirable amount of control on show here: the singing somehow ties up the loose ends, the strands of electro-acoustic ambience and gentle folk.
By contrast, Wolf Run skips along on staccato organ chords and finds time for a nimble piano and some chamber-folk strings. Here and elsewhere, Jackie Oates provides much of the musical and vocal backing, her presence providing a sense of balance and texture. Multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Nick Holton is another big presence, playing anything with keys as well as bass and percussion. On Rose of Sharon, he conjures up textures and beats that sound like Tangerine Dream in miniature, while Zimmerman digs into his past to tell a cautionary tale about the dangerous side of late-60s hippie cults. The stately swirl of the instrumental Orion Comes Down to walk the Land owes as much to contemporary classical music as to folk, while Stay (I Want You To Stay), which was written by Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, quietly conjures a spell of longing. The closest Zimmerman comes to fellow folk pranksters like Hurley or Peter Stampfel is on closing track Crosswalk, a shuffling roll-call of heroes and villains.
Don’t Feel Like Doing Nothing Today, with its shimmering organ, is a hymn to the importance of a well-earned break: it sounds like a flippant theme for a song, but in reality it’s a wise piece of life advice, all the more so coming from an artist who was busy creating for well over half a century. The song namechecks a whole bunch of musicians, including Tom Waits, and there is something of the back-porch Waits in Zimmerman’s tone and delivery. Lovers of Beggar Street, in particular, contains something of Waits’ sideways glances at nostalgia, his idiosyncratic scene-setting, his beat poetry, sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking. Even more bittersweet, given the circumstances, is Riding Around in My Dream, which showcases Marie-Claire’s tender but surreal spoken word. This provides a kind of mirror to the title track, a gorgeously oneiric wordscape full of bizarre and beautiful details, and also a link to Rooftops of San Francisco, another spoken piece adapted from one of Zimmerman’s old poems that pulls its power from unexpectedly dramatic piano chords and squelchy space-age synths.
The thing that shines most brightly through Dream Me a Dream is Zimmerman’s generosity of spirit, and in particular his love for Marie-Claire, which cuts through every song, an endearing feature but also one tinged with sadness. It makes the album a fitting tribute to this most unconventional and quietly gifted of songwriters.
Dream Me A Dream (June 19th, 2026) Big Potato Records
Bandcamp: https://bigpotatorecords.bandcamp.com/album/dream-me-a-dream