Lost Lake Presents Dreamer Boy – SUMMER IN AMERICA TOUR 2024 on Friday, June 21st.
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.
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.
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.”
– 16+, under 16 admitted with ticketed guardian
