How Tucker Zimmerman and Big Thief Made the Album of a Lifetime

San Francisco, 1965: The Summer of Love was still two years off, but its first whispers were on the breeze. Tucker Zimmerman was a promising undergraduate student of music composition and theory at San Francisco State, studies for which he would soon be offered a Fulbright scholarship. One day, a fellow student-composer named Phil Lesh invited Zimmerman to join him in a visit to a guitarist friend of his, who at that time was still playing mostly bluegrass and jug band music. When the pair arrived, their host handed Lesh a bass guitar and informed him that he would be playing it in a brand-new rock’n’roll band. Zimmerman just kind of stood there. 

“Jerry ignored me completely,” the octogenarian singer-songwriter remembers now, six decades on from an encounter that could have reshaped his life. “He had a good sense of people. He knew right away I wasn’t a Grateful Dead musician. He saw that I had another path to go.”

The other path led Zimmerman, after a series of twists worthy of a hefty bildungsroman, to Dance of Love, his eleventh album. Its songs are crowded with seemingly contradictory feelings and ideas: childlike jokes following pearls of old-timer’s wisdom, cosmic revelations arising from close observation of everyday mundanity, joy and grief standing so close you can hardly tell them apart. Listening to the rambunctious “Leave It on The Porch Outside” or the elegiac “The Season,” you get the sense that if Death itself came knocking at Zimmerman’s cottage in rural Belgium, he’d open the door wide, brew up some coffee or tea, and exchange shaggy-dog stories with this shadowy visitor until he’d turned it from a stranger into a friend. 

Zimmerman has been writing songs and making records in relative obscurity since not long after that near-miss with Jerry Garcia. But Dance of Love is surely a first introduction for many listeners, thanks in large part to Big Thief, whose members produced it and served as his backing musicians, along with multi-instrumentalists Mat Davidson and Zach Burba. Though the songs are all Zimmerman’s, the familial spontaneity of their recordings belong unmistakably to the band. Adrianne Lenker sings on nearly every song, in duet and aching harmony with Zimmerman. Certain moments sound like outtakes from Dragon New Warm Mountain, I Believe in You: the gently churning arrangement of “Idiot’s Maze,” or the wiggly blues solo on “Nobody Knows,” which Buck Meek played, in anything-goes Big Thief fashion, on a miniature fretless guitar that was lying around the studio. Lenker’s somewhat limited abilities as a trumpet player did not stop her from taking an exuberant, atonal trumpet solo on “The Ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong Song.” 

The playfulness and curiosity suit the material: Zimmerman’s default mode as a songwriter—one that seems to be an utterly genuine expression of his personality—is wide-eyed wonder at being alive. He has, for a man in his 80s, a remarkable enthusiasm for the new, including in music. At one point, I ask him about a section of his personal website full of music he recommends, which includes both the legendary avant-garde composer Charles Ives and a few albums by Ed Sheeran. He answers easily: he listed both of them because he considers both to be geniuses.

If you’ve ever wondered about the source of a certain scruffy good cheer in Big Thief’s more recent music—like why Lenker was suddenly singing about potatoes and space aliens over hoedown fiddle and bouncy jaw-harp on “Spud Infinity”—well, it may have had something to do with them becoming Tucker Zimmerman fans. Lenker was on a vision quest of sorts when she first encountered his songs: “Driving around by myself, completely freewheeling, between tours, just kind of looking for meaning,” she says. 

While stopped in New Mexico, she met a woman whose tattoos she admired, and who happened to be a tattooer herself. She invited Lenker to her house to get inked, and the session stretched into an epic four-day hang. At some point, the tattooer’s partner played some Tucker Zimmerman records. “I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard it, and that he didn’t have a huge following, or that he wasn’t as well known as John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, or Bob Dylan, because I just think he’s just as good as any of those guys,” Lenker says. “I listened to pretty much just Tucker for, like, a year. I got kind of obsessed with it.” 

After Lenker showed his music to her bandmates and they shared her enthusiasm, she had her manager dig up his email address and messaged him to ask if he would open a few Big Thief shows in Europe. He ignored it, as he does with most music-related requests that hit his inbox. Then his son got wind that Big Thief was the band asking and advised him to pay attention to this one. At their very first show together, in 2022 at a London theatre, Zimmerman asked the band to join him onstage, without rehearsal, to perform a boogie-woogie-ing rendition of his song “Cat Man Doo Dan.” “It’s just a single-chord song, A7 the whole way through,” he says. “I knew it would be really easy for them.” The vibes were good, the onstage collaborations continued, a U.S. tour followed the European one. It was the first time that Zimmerman, who’s been living in Europe since the late ’60s, had ever toured his home country. Everyone involved says they were sure more or less immediately that they would all make an album together.

Zimmerman was born in 1941: slightly too old to be a hippie and too young to have been a beatnik, as he sees it, though both cohorts influenced his outlooks on life and art. (He took his fair share of acid in his day, but it’s difficult to imagine him ever wearing tie-dye.) His first calling as a musician was toward classical composition. Like many other composers at the time, he was working in the long shadow of serialism, an avant-garde movement dating to the early 20th century that replaced old-fashioned tonality with fearsome dissonance and a new elaborate system of rules to govern it. As the era’s currents of free expression continued to exert their influence on the young Zimmerman, the rigidity of serialism began to seem increasingly confining. He began picking up his roommate’s guitar, though he hardly knew how to play it. Soon, he was setting the reams of poetry he’d lately been amassing to song. “In serialism, you have to follow a pattern. So the next note, no matter how I arranged it and configured it—that wasn’t the note I heard,” he says now. “I couldn’t accept that next note, so I went somewhere else.” 

The Fulbright scholarship took him to Italy, and helped him to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. He finished his studies, then went to London and landed a recording contract as a psychedelic-intellectual troubadour, singing surreal romantic poetry and strumming a 12-string guitar he’d finally learned how to handle. Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman, his 1969 debut album, was produced by Tony Visconti, who would soon make his name as an important collaborator to David Bowie. (In 2003, Bowie called Ten Songs one of his favorite records of all time.) After two years in London, Zimmerman moved to Belgium, where he still lives with his wife of a half-century or so, Marie-Claire Zimmerman, who appears with him on the Dance of Love album cover and gives a delightful vocal appearance on one song. 

Generally, they lead what Zimmerman describes as a hermetic life. But Big Thief has been getting them out of the house a little more lately. Marie-Claire accompanied them on the U.S. tour, and Tucker was particularly excited about taking her on her first visit to Dairy Queen. Naturally, he gave an impromptu performance of his song “Showdown at the Dairy Queen” for the other customers while they were there. The Zimmermans, Lenker says, “were like two little kids.” 

Buck Meek has been struck, in spending time with Zimmerman, with the sharpness of his observation and memory, and the way that songwriting and daily experience seem inseparable for him, a sentiment that Lenker echoed. “He’ll remember the names of every single stagehand at a show, and every single thing everybody says, even under your breath,” Meek says. “You’ll say something to someone else, and he’ll overhear it, and then he’ll reference it, like, a month later in conversation. And often he’s wrapping these things into songs. He would wake up in the morning and bring in a song that was riffing off of some conversation he’d had that previous day.”

I asked both Zimmerman and Lenker what they have learned from the other, if anything, and their answers were strikingly similar. Zimmerman: “She is very, very open, and she just talks about anything, from her heart. This is what’s on her mind at that moment. And I’ve always been rhythmically strict, and she taught me to maybe ease up a little bit.” Lenker: “He’s one of the most present people I’ve ever encountered, and it just inspires me about how to live, and about songwriting. I'm like, ‘How did you settle on all these words?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t think too much about it, it’s just what comes out.’ It’s made me feel like maybe I can let myself do that more.’”

Both songwriters are believers in the mysterious power of seemingly random happenstance, an enchanted view of life that colors both of their work. The story of Dance of Love may be enough to make you a believer, too. What if Zimmerman had never opened the email from Lenker? What if she had been feeling too shy or tired to compliment the other woman’s tattoos that day in New Mexico? What if he had been satisfied with the next note in whatever serialist composition he was working on as a young man in the ’60s and never picked up his roommate’s guitar? What if Jerry Garcia had ignored Phil Lesh and handed him the bass instead? 

In this timeline, at least, fate’s steam engine made all the right turns at all the crucial junctures and arrived on schedule at Double Infinity, Big Thief’s all-analog studio in rural New England, where they and Zimmerman laid Dance of Love to tape in July of last year. Why did all those disparate switches of circumstance click into place the way they did? “There’s no reason/I’ve given up on that one long ago,” as Lenker sings sweetly, delivering Zimmerman’s words, on “The Season,” the album’s centerpiece ballad. It’s a song about nearing the end of life and accepting the procession of accidents and chance encounters that got you there. I find its third verse, presumably addressed to Marie-Claire, tremendously moving:

And memories
They come and go like water in a well
And when they run dry
Then I'll have nothing worthwhile left to tell
And I know you're feeling the same
So bring around a tip jar and we'll collect the rain
And we'll mix the old drops with the new
'Cause it's the season
When all the dreams of your dreams come true

As Zimmerman himself puts it on “Nobody Knows,” the strangely upbeat account of death’s mysteries that closes the album: “Nobody knows what’s gonna happen next.” Maybe you get together with an era-defining band several decades your junior, make one of the best albums of your career, and introduce a whole new generation to your songs. Or maybe you miss the invitation and that train passes you by. 

“I believe, when you’ve got something going, go all the way through, go to the end, see what happens,” Zimmerman tells me at one point. I’d asked him about his intuitive approach to songwriting, but he might as well have been talking about his approach to life itself. As Lenker and Meek both pointed out, he hardly seems to see a distinction between the two. The point is to keep going, not in spite of, but precisely because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody does.