Dance of Love, the eleventh album from Tucker Zimmerman, wouldn’t exist with out the advocacy of Massive Thief. The neo-folk group coaxed the reclusive singer-songwriter out of his seclusion in Belgium, the nation he’s referred to as house for over 40 years, to hitch them in a cabin in New England to jot down and document Dance of Love, the album that can introduce the 83-year-old musician to the most important viewers he has ever recognized.
Arriving 55 years after his debut, Dance of Love can be successfully Zimmerman’s first album to obtain an preliminary launch in his native America. Raised on beatnik poetry within the Fifties, he spent the Sixties wandering on the fringes of the people and blues revivals, touchdown a co-writing credit score with blues harpist Paul Butterfield on his 1967 LP The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw with a music referred to as “Droppin’ Out.” Zimmerman took his personal recommendation, departing America for Europe, and studied music in Rome on a Fulbright scholarship earlier than heading to London to sing people music. A stroke of luck introduced him into contact with Tony Visconti, a fledgling document producer contemporary off his first collaborations with Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. The pair made his debut, Ten Songs, an earnest and sober assortment that hinted at Visconti’s majestic orchestrations however not the homespun type Zimmerman later cultivated.
Ten Songs did discover one outstanding champion in David Bowie, a buddy and lifelong collaborator of Visconti’s. Bowie touted the album in a record of “25 albums that would change your status” for a 2003 difficulty of Self-importance Honest. There’s so little writing on Zimmerman that Bowie’s 107-word blurb is commonly cited as descriptions of the singer/songwriter’s music, significantly the assessments that “the man’s method too certified for people” and “I all the time discovered this album of stern, indignant compositions enthralling.” It’s doable to listen to what Bowie heard on Ten Songs: earnest and internally adventurous, its craving poetic bent is saved from austerity by Visconti’s imaginative manufacturing. With its trippy echoes, honest strums, and occasional fuzz freakouts, it’s a interval artifact, the type of document that feels perched on the precipice of discovery.
Zimmerman didn’t observe any of the doable avenues exterior of Ten Songs. Confronted with an unsure future—dodging the draft, he was intent on not returning to America—he selected to retreat together with his spouse Marie Claire to her homeland of Belgium, the place they established a artistic enclave full of artwork. Though he continued to compose music, Zimmerman walked away from recording within the early Eighties, not lengthy after he launched Sq. Dance, the 1980 LP Massive Thief’s Adrianne Lenker occurred to listen to when getting a tattoo not so way back. Entranced by its intimacy, Lenker performed Sq. Dance for her bandmate Buck Meek, who additionally turned a fan. The pair tried to enlist Zimmerman as a gap act for Massive Thief’s European tour of 2022, a plan that developed into Zimmerman and Marie Claire agreeing to hitch Massive Thief for 2 weeks in a New England cabin the place they recorded Dance of Love.
