Thomas Dollbaum

Singer-songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, born in Tampa and based in New Orleans, presents Birds of Paradise, a goodbye letter to lost loved ones and former selves. These songs find Dollbaum searching for acceptance in the transient in-between places: Florida’s pine flatwoods, backroads leading to I-95, where birds fly across the water. The ghosts of his alt-country predecessors Townes Van Zandt and Jason Molina are present, and on Birds of Paradise, Dollbaum emerges from their shadows, waving to the past and sounding like himself.

Both of Dollbaum’s previous releases, Wellswood (Big Legal Mess, 2022) and the Drive All Night EP (Dear Life Records, 2025), had taken a long time to record due to circumstances out of his control, leaving him frustrated. After having been away from his home for eight years, the place he had left was no longer the place he remembered, and the unchanging of the natural world felt like a constant he wanted to write about. He wrote Birds of Paradise in three months, then called up the musicians he trusted and admired the most, Nick Corson, Josh Halper, and Jake Lenderman, and asked them to meet him at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi, with producer and engineer Clay Jones. They learned and tracked the album in four days.

“Big Boi” recounts the time high school-aged Thomas got roped into giving a couple outside the Waffle House a ride to pick up drugs at a pill mill. At a time in indie rock when many singer-songwriters like to proclaim they’re Southern, Dollbaum knows it is more complicated than that. “One day I'll take you down to a place that you can never get out/ Couple splinters in the wall, nothing to brag about,” he sings steady and direct after realizing the mess he’s in. It brings to mind the short story “Samaritans” by Larry Brown, where the narrator is tormented for having a helping heart.

“Pulverize,” the album’s hardest and darkest rocker, recalls another short story, “Time and Again,” by Breece D’J Pancake. Both song and story are told from the point of view of a man plowing down the road, picking up strangers, trying to forget things they can’t mention. Dollbaum was inspired by the time he tried to drive across Louisiana overnight but then, halfway, decided to turn around. In “Pulverize,” Dollbaum’s narrator is too afraid to look back. “You should have seen me/ out of Texas in the high moon/ Playing with God riding across the border cooped up/ in a hoopty to the promised land,” he sings. Lenderman harmonizes with Dollbaum on the chorus, “Pulverize this heart.” Dollbaum sings the next line alone, slinging his voice the highest it will be the whole album: “I don’t even need it.” By the end of the song, he is screaming: “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s FINE.”

“King’s Landing” moves from the point of view of little-kid Dollbaum growing up near a small private airport, with big dreams of flying him and his parents out of there. “I wish I could take us from this town,” he sings. But knowing this dream is “probably a waste of time,” he suggests going home and watching “Judge Joe Brown/ And reruns of Cops episodes in our home town.” “I hope we catch one where the bad guy gets away,” Dollbaum offers, “Maybe he’ll steal a small plane/ Fly off to the everglades/ Build us a home out of water and snakes.” When there is nothing else, survival and imagination are the same thing.

With the help of Lenderman, Halper, Corson, and Jones, Birds of Paradise marks a turning point for Dollbaum’s work. Alive and echoing like the poems and short stories that stay with you, coyotes howl, birds fly south, kids chase rabbits through the sugar cane, and cigarettes are four dollars a pack. Birds of Paradise turns to where we come from and the things inside ourselves we have forgotten.

Thomas Dollbaum will present Birds of Paradise live at Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds on 11 March 2027 at 7h30.