Tucker Zimmerman: A Life, A Song and A Dance
David Bowie called the 83-year-old, Belgium-based singer-songwriter’s debut album one of his all-time favorites. Now, with Big Thief as his producers and backing band, he’s made his 11th record, signed with 4AD, and is getting his long-deserved flowers.
Photo by Dirk LeunisIn 2003, David Bowie said that Tucker Zimmerman was “way too qualified for folk [music],” before declaring that the picker’s debut album, Ten Songs By Tucker Zimmerman, was one of his all-time favorites. The two musicians, born in different countries but in each other’s orbit in 1960s London, were not friends by any means. “Looking back, I wonder if he had any friends,” Zimmerman wonders from his home in Belgium. “He held off. He was a very reserved person.” In their time knowing each other, Bowie helped Zimmerman get a couple of gigs around the city. “He knew I needed money, and I had to play under assumed names—because I couldn’t get a work permit,” Zimmerman adds. The British didn’t want him there “living off their bounty.”
Sometimes, Zimmerman and Bowie would sit on their producer Tony Visconti’s rug and trade songs back and forth, and Ziggy was present for almost all of the Ten Songs recording sessions at Trident Studios but discreetly so—curiously studying not just what Zimmerman was doing at the microphone, but what Visconti was doing as an engineer. “He was in the control room the whole time,” Zimmerman recalls. “I’d be down below, and I’d climb the stairs to listen to a playback and David would be gone. I watched him while I was recording, up through the window. He’d be peeking around the edge of the window, but when I went up the stairs, he was gone. Tony says, ‘Oh, no, he’s out in the hall. He doesn’t want to bother you.”
Zimmerman was born in 1941 in San Francisco, California and his grandfather on his father’s side, whom he never met, was a violin maker. “A violin came down to me at the age of four,” he says. “I got violin lessons when I was a kid, and I sort of moved up through the years with different instruments—piano, trombone.” Zimmerman began playing piano at age eight, though he claims that he “never became a good piano player” because he hated practicing. “I was more interested in copying stuff I heard on the radio, like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Fats Domino, the ‘piano man’ from New Orleans,” he says. “In New Orleans, the piano music was great—probably still is! But my teacher never wanted me to go there.” Eventually, Zimmerman had to play piano as a composer when he went to City College and San Francisco State University. He continued his lessons from childhood, firmly entrenched in music’s role in his life because he “wasn’t going to do anything else,” but admits to me a lingering truth: “I still don’t like piano. I resent it, in a way, because I knew I’d never be a great pianist.”
While the United States was embroiled in a burgeoning Vietnam War, Zimmerman was sent to Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship to study composition and theory under Gofreddo Petrassi, one of the most important Italian composers of the 20th century, who’d served as the musical director of the La Fenice opera house and taught master composition courses at Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Being in Europe as war unraveled wasn’t a hotbed for nurturing Zimmerman’s creative liberties, because he considers himself to be a “compulsive writer” who will “write no matter where.” Instead, being across the pond freed him, both physically and mentally, from the pressures of America. “I didn’t want to go to Vietnam,” Zimmerman says. “I got drafted, and they wanted me in the Army. I got the draft notice and everything, and I just didn’t show up. I got away, escaped, and I didn’t go back.”
Zimmerman reveals that he wasn’t a very good student while on his scholarship. “I was more interested in writing songs rather than composing for an orchestra,” he says. “I was more interested in just looking around and being there. I really loved being in Rome, it was a great place to live—and I think it still might be.” Zimmerman got along with the Italian people and their culture quite well in those days, believing that he fit right in with them. He’d only visit Petrassi on Wednesday mornings, always arriving at his office with “very little to show him.” “He sort of gave up on me,” Zimmerman bemoans, before perking up. “I used the scholarship as a free ride, but I made use of it. I didn’t waste it. I wrote a lot of songs, and my head got around to the right place—as to what I wanted to do with my life.”
While in Rome, Zimmerman had very little reference for what was happening in America, musically. LPs were available, and he’d hear rumblings of news coming out of England, but he could never compare himself to anybody. In his second year of scholarship, he began gigging at clubs around the capital, and nobody else around him was writing sonatas but dreaming of becoming a folk and rock singer-songwriter. Zimmerman met Visconti in London once his schooling in Rome had run out, after he and his now-wife, Marie-Claire, went to “the only place I could go to make music, make my songs and record my songs”: London. If he returned to the States, he would’ve been arrested for draft-dodging. At the time, Visconti was still a relatively green producer—having worked with Marc Bolan’s not-yet-abbreviated band Tyrannosaurus Rex on a few records but not yet made a splash with Bowie or the Moody Blues—and Zimmerman had written some tunes for other artists, namely the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (“Droppin’ Out”). “He helped me a lot,” Zimmerman says of the producer, “more than just getting me on record and getting me into a studio, taping. He supported me financially in many, many ways. I owe so much to Tony. Not only was he sneaking me jobs under the table in the studio, as a studio musician, but we became good friends.”
Zimmerman is based in Belgium now—Liege, to be exact—because Marie-Claire hails from there and the couple was kicked out of England around Christmas of 1969, which he just calls “1970.” “I couldn’t prove that I was making money,” he says. “I was, but it was under the table. The nearest point was across the channel into Belgium, from Dover to Ostend. We had to escape pretty quickly, because they wanted us out.” They had a week to get their stuff together and leave, and Visconti loaded their possessions into his car and drove them down to the ferry. “I didn’t know where else to go, and Marie-Claire suggested we go to her parents’ house.” Fleeing by force turned into something unexpected, though, as Visconti wrote ahead to Radio Luxembourg, sent them a copy of Ten Songs and told them to “pay attention.” A disc jockey named David “Kid” Jensen liked the record and invited Zimmerman to come down and spend an evening playing through it.
“During the session, I got three phone calls from clubs in Belgium asking if I would come and play. I said, ‘Yeah, of course,’” Zimmerman says. “That evolved into 12 gigs, and that evolved into 24 more gigs. I was playing all over Belgium and all over Germany within a year. I knew it would be foolish of me to even think about going back [to the United States]. I was making good money, and I knew trying to get a start in America would have been very, very difficult.” Zimmerman was in a unique position in Belgium, since he was a “lonely American” playing to so many young people who were, in his eyes, “looking to America for some sort of cultural guidance.” The previous summer, Woodstock had happened, and that cultural apogee had begun flooding into Europe and summoned Zimmerman to gigs in Switzerland, France and Holland. “They really wanted to have some American to hang onto, and I was one of the very few that came and played for them,” he insists. “I had really good audiences. They were mostly students, especially in Germany. I was accepted really very warmly.”
Last year, Big Potato Records released a re-issue of Zimmerman’s 1974 album, Over Here in Europe—a project that finds the self-proclaimed “songpoet” toddling in various experimental champaigns, namely that of the Ondes Martenot, a theremin hybrid that players like Jonny Greenwood have come to embrace 30, 40 years later. “When I went to Paris, I knew I wanted an Ondes, because I’d loved the sound of that instrument since I was a student,” he says. The LP sees Zimmerman’s rollicking, wind-beaten folk disposition converging with electronica ambitions. He’s never been one to shy away from reinvention, following whims and conquering them rather than leaning on tried-and-tested formulas.
Over Here in Europe, still bound by Zimmerman’s penchant for plucky, sing-song instrumentation (“Good Old Days” has a droning undercurrent shadowed by a Vaudevillian accordion), was a primitive step, as synthesizers were a rarity and MIDI was still nearly 10 years away from standardization. And none of it ever seemed unusual to him. “When somebody asks for a recording, I just take what I have around me at the moment and use it,” he says. “That’s the principle of the rule I have for recording: Just don’t go too far out of the way to make it do anything special. Take what you got and go with it.” Since making Word Games in 1983, Zimmerman claims that he’s filled a box with “over 500 song sheets.”
In May 2022, Zimmerman returned to the West Coast and opened a few shows for Big Thief in California, Oregon and Washington. There was a warm crossover there, as the band’s longtime audience took to Zimmerman’s work beautifully. “Here’s this man that I know, pay attention,” Adrianne Lenker said to the crowds every night, or something of that nature. “And they paid attention,” he says. Before the Los Angeles show at the Wiltern Theatre, in particular, Zach Burba (of Iji) told Zimmerman that he would be “playing for 1,500 songwriters.” “I went out on stage and I said, “Hello, songwriters! Here we are. Listen closely,’” he laughs.
Now, in 2024, Zimmerman has made his 11th record: Dance of Love, recorded with Big Thief as his producers and backing band. After sending Lenker, Buck Meek, James Krivchenia, Mat Davidson (Twain) and Burba demos of more than 25 songs, Zimmerman had no real expectations about what was going to happen with the rest of the record. The band took care of the logistics, deciding which song sketches to add paint to and what order they should go in on the tracklist, while Zimmerman played his guitar, sang and felt relieved he didn’t have to play piano. “I think, for the first time, I really trusted everybody around me,” he says. “I let them make the decisions. There’s definitely a spiritual bond between us; I enjoyed the vibrations of the moment. Nobody was in charge, nobody was telling anybody what to do. We just did it, and it was very, very special. It was mystical, because all I had to do was sit back and not cause any trouble.”
Lenker has long been a champion of Zimmerman’s work, calling him “one of the greatest songwriters of all time.” “I have a great affection for her as a person, as a writer,” he says. “I’ve learned from her, and she tells me she’s learned from me.” But, he has not yet had a chance to listen to her resplendent new record Bright Future, on account of his turntable still being unopened. “She came through on a solo tour, and we spent some time together in Brussels and here at the house,” he says, pensively, before his straight face quickly dissolves into a full-bodied chuckle. “She came down and gave me a copy of it. I’ve got this machine—it plays discs, cassettes, everything—behind me over here, and it’s still in the box. I’m really slow with this stuff. I hesitate to branch into any kind of alternate technology—I’d have to learn new things, you know? But I heard her performance in Brussels, it was wonderful. She played with a violinist and a pianist and it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before.”
Dance of Love is like a memoir interwoven with mythology and ubiquitous gratitude—all done live with no overdubs. Whether it’s a 12-bar blues melody or a piano-based melody that conjures the styles Zimmerman was trying to copy nearly 70 years ago, the record arrives full of anecdotes reconstructed into timeless tales. On a song like “Lorelei”—a duet with Lenker—he takes the tragedy of the titular Germanic legend and makes her perspective a tranquil, revisionist still of triumph. “Sing my siren songs,” Lenker declares, before Zimmerman finishes her thought: “But only as a guiding light to better times and safer shores.” On “The Idiot’s Maze,” Zimmerman conjures a type of language not unlike the matador magicians and rainbow metamorphoses populating his earlier work, and a type of language you can hear all over Big Thief’s “Spud Infinity” and Lenker’s “Once a Bunch”: “I’ll medicate you with a dose of clam chowder, stun you with a paradoxical pun,” he sings. “Get you in line with the crossroad dream, meditate you with a Dalai Lama hum.”
Marie-Claire, who Zimmerman lovingly calls “Bear” and can sometimes be seen rummaging through their belongings in the background of my call with him, sings on Dance of Love, notably during the call-and-response of “Leave It on the Porch Outside.” And, while singing with your spouse has got to be one of the greatest rewards in life, it was quite normal for her and Zimmerman. “We sing a lot together around the house,” he says. “In the ‘70s, when I was doing many of those gigs across Belgium and Germany, she was driving me—because I don’t drive—so I asked her to come on stage and we would just reproduce a couple of songs—what we’d done at the house, singing together, harmonies. “She sang quite a bit with me in public during the ‘70s, and she’s even on a couple of the albums from during that time.” Through their shared music, we are asked to step into their lifetime and share intimacy with them.
And, when Zimmerman and Lenker sing of a grandmother whose “patchwork quilts were filled with dreams” during “Old Folks of Farmersville,” Davidson’s lap steel cries like an aching stranger and all of the laughter, imperfections and poetry turn still in the air that surrounds them—because Dance of Love is nurtured, whimsical and sanguine, a fabled balm from beginning to end. “Drain me away to the far-flung sea and measure me with mystery, weigh me with wonder,” Zimmerman croons affectionately, in the embrace of a cantata he so deeply yearned to make in Rome 60 years ago. “It felt larger than me,” he says. “I didn’t feel like it was so much my record, and I still don’t. It’s everybody’s record, and I can’t put myself apart from it in any way. I know I wrote the songs and I sang most of them, but that’s not only me there. For the first time in my life, I fit in so wonderfully and so easily. It was a very easy album to make.”
Tucker Zimmerman is as gentle as they come, speaking with a kindness that sticks to every syllable. “I would really, really be so happy if a lot of people could listen to this album,” he confides to me, “because I feel good about it. Really good.” “I have a good feeling about it, Tucker, I really do,” I respond. “That’s good to hear, because I don’t pay attention,” he replies. “I would like it to go out into the world and make its way, but I don’t even listen to music anymore. I have no idea what’s going on in the world. [Laughs] I’m in my little cubby hole right now, and I have been for many, many years. I like being alone, I like working alone.”
Because his music was a little off-the-nose and zany 55 years ago, some folks—even Bowie—used to say that Zimmerman wanted to be like another Zimmerman, Bob Dylan. His body of work supports the opposite, as he walked on as a cult troubadour particularly drawn to scuffling drum beats, steel guitars gleaned from busking resonance and a magic wreathed in well-worn obscurity. “The world is wide and it whimpers,” Zimmerman once sang, words aglow with distance while his birthplace’s peace curled into a violence just as damned as it was when he left it. In London, he pondered angels that danced in “intricate darkness,” beckoned and broken by “the echo of the dawn.” Zimmerman, an American siren asked to translate folk music to audiences abroad, forever looked onward at what techniques and tools surrounded him then and refused to waste them, leading to an eclectic catalog young songwriters like Lenker still pull from even now.
Thus, Dance of Love isn’t Ten Songs, nor could it ever have been, even if both records’ tracklists are numerically linked. Here, we meet the 83-year-old exactly where he’s met everyone else who’s ever entered his life thus far: with a spark to tend to and a song to sing. “I always found this album of stern, angry compositions enthralling, and often wondered what ever happened to him,” Bowie told Vanity Fair about Ten Songs 21 years ago. It’s too bad we can’t ring up Ziggy and give him the skinny on Zimmerman, because I do wonder what he might think of his old London colleague and these new digs. Perhaps he’d listen to the songs in the quiet of his home, alone, and take notes. Maybe he’d stick around in the control room with an opinion to lend. In another life, I suppose.
At the beginning of Dance of Love, Zimmerman directs all of us with hope and wisdom: “If a stranger does you a good turn, love it and live it and never forget it until your dying day.” 43 minutes later, and each gesture of goodwill toward him is held onto. I ask Tucker if making this record taught him anything about the vocation of music he’s so deeply studied, pursued and serenaded all his life. “I probably will discover more things later than I know now,” he replies. “All I have now is a great desire to do it again, to make another album. I could probably come up with an answer for you in 10 years.” It’s nearly 7 PM in Belgium, and the light poking into Zimmerman’s cubby hole is beginning to wane. “I think we’re saying goodbye, aren’t we?” he says, after peering at the light over his shoulder. He has a couple of shows in Europe coming up, so I wish him well on his travels. “I might need a little luck, because it’s going to be a long one and I get tired pretty quickly,” he responds, taking a beat. “But, you know, I think we’ll make it. We’ll make it okay.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.