Shapeshifting singer-songwriter Dreamer Boy (born Zach Taylor) returns with “Heartbreaker” out today via slowplay/Capitol Records. The high-octane love song is smeared with both the grit and glam of ‘70s rock, showcasing Dreamer Boy and his new band The Lone Stars to great effect. Penned after road trips back to the American South where he spent much of his childhood, the song also conjures up small town vibes, with Dreamer Boy singing, “I’d see her all the time at 5 and diner / She would blow me kisses cross the kitchen counter / I said oohhh / I wanna be your boy.” Listen HERE. View the gritty visualizer HERE.
“‘Heartbreaker’ carries this hyperbolized energy of my lived experience. The song has this fun, zany energy of heartbreak, the feeling that you’ve sort of met your match,” explains Dreamer Boy. “The narrator is pining after this equally tempting and damaging person who sort of reels them in. As soon as they get too close, it just kind of blows up and leads to more heartbreak. The hook is one of those messages that you can’t really receive in the moment, but you look back and realize a warning sign was there.”
Dreamer Boy wrote “Heartbreaker” with his bandmates – Aidan Spiro, Henry Solomon, Christian Taylor, Brook Jones, Aaron Wing. Spiro, Taylor, and Solomon produced.
“I’ve always wanted to be in a band,” Dreamer Boy says. Working with these new partners was “exactly parallel” to the internal journey he had just experienced. After moving from Nashville to Los Angeles, Dreamer Boy found himself pulled back to his childhood home of Texas, paying multiple visits to his grandfather’s farm. His travels sparked a sense of connectivity to the South he’d realized he lost touch with.
Taking “a leap into new waters,” as he puts it, Dreamer Boy’s 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, who appears on the single art for “Heartbreaker” allows Dreamer Boy to be both theatrical and earnest, to swing between zany and heartfelt, to embody the wide spectrum of emotions expressed in his new music. “It allows me as a performer to go places I wouldn’t be able to go if it was just Zach or Dreamer Boy,” he explains.
“Heartbreaker” marks Dreamer Boy’s first release since the 2022 singles “Over Everything,” “JUMPSHOT!” and “Hues.” He’s spent the last few years touring the world with Clairo, Omar Apollo, The Marías , Still Woozy, and more, on the back of his sentimental, sweetly psychedelic debut album, Love, Nostalgia, and his heartfelt 2021 album All the Ways We Are Together.
DORK said, “All The Ways We Are Together embraces love in its most natural, authentic form, and it is completely uplifting for it.” Premiering the single “Crybaby” as an Apple Music 1 World First, Zane Lowe said, “I just don’t see a future where many, many of us don’t absolutely fall in love with Dreamer Boy…the music is so flawless.”
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