Dan Zimmerman

Dan Zimmerman is an indie folk singer/songwriter affiliated with Daniel Smith of the band Danielson and the label Sounds Familyre. Born in 1948, Zimmerman is the son of a Methodist preacher and was deeply influenced by his time in the church. He began playing the guitar in 1957 and later attended the Syracuse School of Art. Many of his primary influences date to the mid- to late '50s and early '60s, from the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Disillusioned by a number of late-'60s occurrences — the divorce of his parents, the Vietnam War, the drug outbreak — he dropped out of school at the end of the 1960s and traveled across the country to Portland, OR, in a van, hitchhiking the final leg of the journey. In the early '70s he married his college sweetheart and moved to Washington state to start a yoga community out in the woods. During the mid-'70s he got a job working for the government forestry service alongside Mount St. Helens. At the end of the '70s he moved back to Portland and focused on his life as a family man. In 1984 he co-founded the band Subterranean Café, which released three albums over the course of five years. In 1995 he moved to New Jersey and eventually became acquainted with Daniel Smith of the indie band Danielson (aka Danielson Famile). After decades of songwriting and performing, Zimmerman at last made his recording debut in 2001 with the album Great Small, which Smith released on his Danielson-associated label, Sounds Familyre. A follow-up album, Northwest Years (2003), was self-released a couple years later. Zimmerman's third album, Cosmic Patriot (2009), was another collaboration with Smith, who produced the full-length effort and released it on Sounds Familyre.