Consumer Guide Album

Tucker Zimmerman & Friends: Tucker Zimmerman & Friends Play Dance of Love [4AD, 2024]
A Belgium-based 83-year-old who grew up in northern California and has recorded sporadically since co-writing a song with Paul Butterfield in 1967, Zimmerman is a minor legend who has ample music on Spotify. But not much of it takes off like this album, where the friends helping him out are Big Thief, with the inspired Adrianne Lenker enriching every song except "Leave It on the Porch Outside," where Tucker's wife Marie-Claire Zimmerman gets the cameo she certainly deserves. At once dreamlike and bone simple, half these selections had me marking up my booklet: "I'll medicate you with a dose of clam chowder/Stun you with a parodoxical pun," "Pick me a rose from the left hand of Moses/Kick out the jokers and the jams," "Someday I will move away/To the city on the hill/Leave behind the waterfall/Leave behind the water wheel," "They don't say it/But it's true/We're frozen glue/Ice cubes have a better chance," "Don't go crazy/Go slow release/Go with the flow/Go in peace." So often eightysomethings impress us with their vitality. Still plenty vital, this guy identifies just as much with his mortality. As an eightysomething myself, I know the feeling. A