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It’s not often that someone makes their best album almost sixty years into their recording career…Dance of Love feels like it could turn out to be Tucker Zimmerman’s Basement Tapes. Everything about it is fresh and spontaneous, music made on its own terms but with a spirit of collaborative generosity.
Over half a century ago, two talented young songwriters with poetic aspirations spent some time playing songs with various members of the Butterfield Blues Band. It’s possible that those two songwriters never met, but they were born a couple of months apart and share the same surname. For one of them, that introduction to Mike Bloomfield’s electric guitar would result in an epiphany which would go on to change the course of popular music in the twentieth century. There would be Grammy awards, motorcycle crashes, bestselling books and a Nobel Prize. For Tucker Zimmerman, however, relative obscurity ensued.
It might have been different. Tucker Zimmerman’s debut album, Ten Songs, was produced by Tony Visconti and counted David Bowie amongst its fans, but the late sixties was a precarious time to drop a slab of rough-hewn, psych-edged folk. Saturation point was imminent, and dozens of very good or even great albums fell by the wayside thanks to lack of promotion, record label disinterest or sheer bad luck.
It might have been different, but you get the feeling that Zimmerman didn’t really want it to be different. Ten Songs was good, but listening to what he has done in later years makes it clear that he hadn’t yet developed a mature style of his own. That album was a period piece; what came after was pure Zimmerman, no compromise. He moved to Belgium – either to be with his wife or to dodge the draft, or both – and set about creating an artistic community of his own, releasing five albums between 1971 and 1983 before giving up on music altogether in favour of writing novels and poetry.
There have been tentative returns to the recording studio in recent years, cementing his status as an outsider artist who only works on his own terms. But then a serendipitous twist: Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker heard Tucker Zimmerman’s songs in a tattoo parlour. She tracked him down, and they ended up in a studio together: the eighty-three-year-old songwriter, his wife Marie-Claire, and perhaps the most critically acclaimed indie band of the twenty-first century.
The result is Dance of Love, an album that feels like it could turn out to be Tucker Zimmerman’s Basement Tapes. It has that rich combination of intimacy and musical verve that made Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You one of the best albums of recent years. The opener, Old Folks of Farmersville, feels like a paean to a lost way of life, but actually, it’s more likely that that way of life isn’t lost at all: it exists in Zimmerman’s artistic commune, and in the New England cabin where the album was recorded. Zimmerman’s voice has a rough tenderness, but he nevertheless sounds younger than his years, and Lenker’s role as co-vocalist is inspired, lending a feeling of communality to the whole enterprise. Mat Davidson (who records as Twain and is a member of the Low Anthem) provides a suitably emotive pedal steel.
Everything here feels close, personable, unhurried and easy-going. The Season unfolds through a nostalgic miasma, with Zimmerman’s voice sounding almost like a rural, folksy Tom Waits but without any hint of artifice. Burial at Sea is the sound of a beatnik pirate finally finding peace, with Lenker playing the role of siren. Leave It On the Porch Outside is a delightful campfire singalong with Marie-Claire taking lead vocal duties.
Buck Meek’s guitar – doing so much with so little, as usual – is a prominent feature of The Idiot’s Maze, a bluesy, shuffling folk-boogie, somewhere in the sweet spot between Beefheart, Beck and the Band. Here and elsewhere, the band are joined by experimental pop purveyor Zach Burba (iji), who contributes some endearing piano licks that sound like they were recorded through a mattress. Meek also provides loose and looping bass on They Don’t Say It (But It’s True), one of a few songs here which look at human relationships with a wry eye and a clever turn of phrase. A thread of humour runs through the album, helping to offset any sense of over-sentimentality. The Ram-a-lama-ding-dong Dong begins with a request for a kazoo and proceeds to scuffle around contentedly in Holy Modal Rounders-esque acid-folk-skiffle territory.
Many of these songs seem to flop lazily to life, then hit you with a quiet flash of insight. Lorelei barely sounds like it’s started before its hook appears from nowhere, and the whole thing becomes a tender duet. To make another lame Dylan comparison, it’s like Desire’s Oh Sister or One More Cup of Coffee if Emmylou Harris had actually wanted to be there. Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace) builds upon a simple refrain to create something that feels like a kind of secular spiritual, while Nobody Knows gets up a rock’n’roll head of steam with minimal effort and mostly acoustic instrumentation, with Lenker’s electric guitar providing some dirty licks. There’s an improvised feel to the vocals, but the lyrics still seem mighty prescient.
It’s not often that someone makes their best album almost sixty years into their recording career, but then again, Tucker Zimmerman is no ordinary recording artist. Where many would have used those years to attempt to emulate former glories or improve upon recent successes, Zimmerman fills his songs with the sense of starting anew. Everything about Dance of Love is fresh and spontaneous, music made on its own terms but with a spirit of collaborative generosity.
Dance of Love (11th October 2024) 4AD
Order via: https://tuckerzimmerman.ffm.to/danceoflove
