Bob Dylan (née Zimmerman) recently wrote a piece for theNew York Timesabout being 80(Dylan is 85). He said the best thing about living to an advanced age is “the freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control”. The Nobel Prize-winning provocateur should know. In our youth we think we know all that matters and can change the world. When we are old, we realize that was never the case. That’s not news. Back in 1964, when Dylan was only 23 years old, he reflectively wrote and sang with the same insight: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” Sadly, the more we learn, the less we know. Age doesn’t bring wisdom. It just brings one closer to death.
Tucker Zimmerman was 84 years old in 2025 when he recorded his final album, Dream Me a Dream, with his wife Marie-Claire, award-winning folk artist Jackie Oates and producer Nick Holton. Zimmerman’s voice betrays his age. It’s frayed at the edges, and the center cannot hold the notes very long. He’s reciting the lyrics more than singing them, mostly to the accompaniment of synths and electronic effects along with an acoustic guitar, violin, banjo, or keyboards that make appearances now and then. The result is not music in the conventional sense. It’s more like poetry.
This posthumous release offers deep pleasures as it combines dreams, fables, stories of love, and humor in wondrous combinations to show the meaning and the meaningless of life. “Dream me a dream of a dream of a dream,” he wryly sings on the title tune to a sea shanty-like backdrop. This ridiculous and strange illogic is the point. This Zimmerman knows that life is just a dream of a dream of a dream, and it doesn’t matter where we are going. There is no direction home because we are already there.
The album’s lyrics posit the connections among all things and all times in a way understood by Einstein and the Buddha, Neil Young, and Greek mythology. References to the cosmos abound on the album, highlighting the absurdity of everything being part of the whole. Marie-Claire co-wrote several songs. She sings lead on the imaginative “Riding Around in My Dream, which offers the silliest and most profound map to enlightenment. “Just go down the hill and pass through the communist regime until you come to the Academy Awards. If you’ve done right, you will end up in the slow movement of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto. So, keep going straight up the hill, and you’ll come to the last episode of the Jerry Seinfeld show. You can’t miss it.” This condensation of people, places, and things is truly the stuff dreams are made of!
The album contains one cover, Adrianne Lenker‘s (Big Thief) “Stay (I Want You to Stay)”. Zimmerman expresses his desire straightforwardly. While there is much craziness on this record, the confusion he feels (and Maire-Claire’s rejoinders express) is clearly the result of being in love and then left behind. This rendition works as a metaphor for someone leaving the world behind.
Zimmerman and Marie-Claire died tragically in a house fire in Belgium before this record was released. The joy inherent in songs such as “Sun in Scorpio”, “Rose of Sharon”, and “Rooftops of San Francisco” reveals a life spirit that suggests death may be the end, but it’s not. It’s just a “Crosswalk”, as another track puts it, on our journey.
Music may not change the world, but it does transform its makers and listeners. That’s what Dylan was pointing out about the freedom one feels when one realizes one does not have control. Life is but a dream, and the dream has a life of its own. We wake up only when we sleep. Tucker Zimmerman’s final opus offers a lullaby of love.