Colour Vinyl
Surreal folk banjo, violin, swirling organ paired with delicate analogue synths, Moog & electronic beauty. Tucker Zimmerman’s last studio album Dream Me A Dream is full of soul, vulnerability and breathtaking atmospheres. It was completed in 2025 and features his wife Marie-Claire, award winning folk artist Jackie Oates and producer Nick Holton.In October last year Tucker wrote some words about what the album was and how it all began- “...The Little Prince by way of the pen of Antoine de Saint Exupéry said ‘Draw me a sheep’ and I said to the the Little Prince ‘Dream me a dream’ overheard by Nick HOO (Big Potato Nick) who said ‘Record me a song’ so I recorded a song and then one or two more and just like that whip crack away and snap dragon fingers we had an album and just like that pump up the jambalaya and kick the chandelier Nick’s got the tracks mixed and mastered and pressed into 12” discs that say hallelujah and great balls of fire on the cover and that’s all I’m going to say about the outer wheels of this wagon as it rolls into your life the inner clockworks too intricate and deep to make language suffer so if you want more go to the Little Prince ask him to draw you a Dream of Now and Memory…” T. Zimmerman 14/10/25 Tucker embraced and re-discovered the electronica adventures of his younger self (Over Here In Europe & Words Games). Some of these songs date back to the sixties but most were written while recording during two sessions in 2024/25. His performances of them, in his garden studio in rural Liege are exquisite. Tucker leapt into mixing up sparse banjo/violin/swirling organ arrangements on some tracks with orchestral Moog, analogue synths and processed piano backings on others. Musically, it is a wonderful departure in every sense. Tucker was in his eighties and this LP sounds like nothing else he recorded. 'Sun In Scorpio' is a deliberately delicate slow opener, creating beautiful spaces for gently plucked synths and melodic bursts. In contrast, the title track 'Dream Me a Dream’ - based on his poem from his first book When In Flows The Sea - is lovely intimate folk with plucked banjo, roomy backing and violin. Both these sound palettes are given room to open out on subsequent tracks via processed piano, Moog and wonderful orchestral analogue synth. The surreal spoken word sound-scape of Rooftops is based on a poem Tucker wrote aged 19. His voice sounds so powerful as he repeats the line “rooftops of San Francisco” over hypnotic Harmonia-like patterns until you are swept up in his visionary youthful dreams.
