Dreamer Boy

It’s humid and you’re going to baseball practice. You’re “listening to Big Star, lying in your car.” You’re “cutting into the country-fried / Got a lawnchair, open into the fall air.” You’re a kid under the Texas sky: “Friends come through the side door / Mail is in a pile.”

That’s what Dreamer Boy’s new slowplay / Capitol Records album, Lonestar, feels like. For his third full-length, the indie star and singer-songwriter Zach Taylor took his time—two years of searching—and it shows. Moving from Nashville to Los Angeles, Taylor found his new direction during trips out West, back East, and out again, watching the miles of the country pass by. Driving through his childhood home of Texas and visiting his grandfather’s farm three times in a year instilled a sense of connectivity to the South he’d realized he lost touch with. 

“I felt myself needing to hold that as a fixture in my heart as I was going out West again,” he says. “I felt the need to attach to my spirit the tone and feeling of those places”—Texas, Alabama, Tennessee—as he started his new chapter in Hollywood. As he began to build his new life in L.A., he became increasingly soul-bound to the rootsy Americana of his youth. “That identification started to well up within me as I began sifting through emotional material that might become this next album,” he continues. “You find those things about yourself that really make you you, especially when you’re putting back together the pieces of yourself after heartbreak.”

Lonestar itself is a journey: It begins with Taylor tackling change and heartbreak on the yearning opener “Summer in America,” which wrestles with uncertainty, using American landscapes as the inspiration and backdrop for a lost soul finding his way home from a party. Ultimately, he finds his way and the record ends in contentment on the exquisite “Harmony,” with new friendships and new beginnings. 

On his arrival in L.A., Taylor assembled a group of collaborators, along with a smattering of important features including Miya Folick, Goldie Boutilier, and fellow Texans Hovvdy, who would make up the new band he recorded Lonestar with. “I’ve always wanted to be in a band,” he says. Working with these new partners was “exactly parallel” to the internal journey he had just experienced. Inspired by those Southern landscapes, and a “need to represent that part of myself and hold that as a fixture of who I am,” Taylor and his bandmates created Lonestar in a manner that felt “true to a space and a moment.”

Taylor and his band The Lone Stars recorded in full takes in an effort to make the music as organically and collaboratively as possible. Lonestar’s creation was a joyful experience. It was “the most fun I’ve had making music, ever,” Taylor attests. “There were nights at the studio where it’d be like 12 people in this tiny room and we’re recording background vocals and friends are just hanging out and you can hear people talking in the background of the recording. I think music sometimes is only as powerful as the energy you inject into it.”

Cowboy pop was always a part of the Dreamer Boy DNA, but Lonestar sees Taylor firmly stepping out of the bedroom and on to the highways of the American South. It’s an evolution of some of the themes and sounds that have been at play since his auspicious 2018 start.  Around then, he toured with Still Woozy, The Marías, Clairo, and Omar Apollo, following his debut, Love, Nostalgia (whose “Falling For the Wrong One” now has 19M Spotify streams), characteristic of the synthy-psychedelic, sweetly homemade sound of that scene. 

Not only has Taylor taken “a leap into new waters,” as he puts it, but his musical growth extends into his creation of a character in the tread of figures he admires, David Bowie and Tyler, the Creator (“Artists who will embody something bigger than themselves for sake of making the music feel bigger,” he says): a rodeo clown who’s made his way from Texas to Hollywood. The rodeo clown persona allows Taylor to be both theatrical and earnest, to swing between zany and heartfelt, to embody the wide spectrum of emotions expressed on Lonestar in one fell swoop. Which is, of course, very country music—to marry over-the-top performance with sentiment, to tap into place and identity within a character, to use identity to transcend the limitations of identity. “It allows me as a performer to go places I wouldn’t be able to go if it was just Zach or Dreamer Boy,” Taylor explains.

The songs on Lonestar that encapsulate this character the most are “Heartbreaker,” an energetic love song smeared with both the grit and glam of ‘70s rock, which showcases Dreamer Boy and the band to the highest effect, while Taylor sings, “Back holding my head, coming down / Beggin’ Lucky Lue if she’d stick around.” On the jammy“Suckerpunch,” Taylor is his most vocally expressive: “I’m just like the shoe untied that you wear around / I paint the tears on my face and the mud on my lace like a rodeo clown.” And there’s the Hovvdy-featuring “Boy,” fittingly in the middle of the record, which Taylor says most sums up his warm associations with growing up in Texas.

Playing the clown character attaches an unmistakable visual to the new Dreamer Boy era, allowing for associations that go beyond the music. Plus, Taylor adds, it’s fun. He was a sports kid who played baseball and tennis growing up, but he always knew he had a performer inside of himself. This scratches the itch, with the added pleasure of tying his childhood obsession with America’s pastime to memories of seeing clowns at the Texas State Fair circus with his grandparents. 

Dreamer Boy’s Lonestar is a gossamer balance of duality. Pure associations with Southern culture and the textures of Americana are woven with the creation of persona. It’s an intricate narrative act—to chart a literal personal journey over an actual landscape onto an emotional transformation, and to have it distilled into music that is poignant and entertaining. 

At its heart, the record is about finding yourself. “You start off running away,” Taylor says. “You’re literally like, ‘Get me out of my parents’ house, get me out into the world.’ But then you start to run back to some of those things.” It’s about building yourself as a person in the turbulence of a breakup, which involves looking back, feeling a little lost, a little heartbroken, a little nostalgic. But, ultimately, there’s clarity—you figure out what makes you really yourself, even if it might change. 

“You’re left with the music,” Taylor says, “but you’re also left with the life of making it.”