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.