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. Taylor has spent the last few years stacking up his successes, touring the world with Still Woozy, Omar Apollo, Clairo, and more, on the back of a sentimental and sweetly psychedelic debut (Love, Nostalgia) and his heartfelt sophomore album, All the Ways We Are Together. But now, he wanted to get back in touch with his roots. So 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. At its heart, the record is about finding yourself. 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.”