Thomas Dollbaum’s ‘Birds of Paradise’ with MJ Lenderman is a bracing, heartland Americana breakthrough recorded in four days. Full review
Thomas Dollbaum is a songwriter who values atmosphere above all else. His voice is loamy and deep, the dissipating smoke in a room right after you’ve blown out a candle, and it will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the road-trip elegies of Damien Jurado or the art-folk incantations of Richard Buckner.
On his second album, Birds of Paradise, the Florida-born, Louisiana-based songwriter is accompanied by MJ Lenderman on drums, occasional guitar, and backing vocals, which helps Dollbaum’s rootsy, heartland rock feel part of a larger conversation in modern indie music, and his lyrics about “rambling through the pines” and “driving through the early morning” help it fit squarely into our most immediate associations with Americana as a genre and aesthetic.
The backstory behind Birds of Paradise matters because it shapes how the album lands. Dollbaum, 32, moved to New Orleans to complete an MFA in poetry and has since worked as a carpenter there. He recorded the album at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi over just four days in November 2023, with producer and engineer Clay Jones, alongside Lenderman, multi-instrumentalist Josh Halper, and the Convenience’s Nick Corson.
Then he waited. A falling out with his previous label over creative differences held the record back for years before Dear Life Records, the Asheville-adjacent label that also houses Fust, Florry, and Lenderman’s own Boat Songs, agreed to release it. The delay is audible in a particular way: the album sounds lived-in, certain of itself, unbothered by the moment it arrives into.
Goodbye Letters and Natural Constants
Birds of Paradise was written in three months following Dollbaum’s return to Tampa after eight years away, where he found a city that no longer matched the one he had left. That dislocation is the emotional engine of the record. The songs hunt for footholds in transient spaces: Florida’s pine flatwoods, backroads intersecting with I-95, the kind of geography that holds its shape when people do not. He described the album to Paste Magazine as “a goodbye letter to lost loved ones and former selves,” and the songs honour that framing without sentimentality.
The ten tracks move with the unhurried confidence of a record that knows where it is going. Opener “Visitation” establishes the album’s spectral register before “Dozen Roses” arrives as its most immediate statement, a churning heartland rock song that pulls from Tampa childhood memory and features a guitar solo from Lenderman that justifies his reputation as the indie guitar hero of his generation.
Elsewhere, “Coyote” and “Scrub Jay” demonstrate Dollbaum’s debt to Jason Isbell and John Prine, songwriters for whom the weight of place is inseparable from the weight of character. The ghosts of Townes Van Zandt and Jason Molina are present throughout, but Dollbaum does not disappear into them. He waves to them and moves on.
“Dozen Roses is an introduction of sorts to the themes of the record,” Dollbaum has said. “Magical thinking is a way to process the world and the memories I have.” That framing applies to the album as a whole. These are not songs of resolution. They are songs of ongoing negotiation with a past that refuses to stay fixed.
The Lenderman Question and Why It Misses the Point
Dollbaum met Lenderman through writer Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, who introduced them at a show in Asheville. They became fast friends, and Lenderman invited Dollbaum to play his Boat Songs release show, connecting him to the broader Dear Life community. The collaboration on Birds of Paradise predates Lenderman’s own breakthrough with Manning Fireworks, which means the instinct to frame Dollbaum as a Lenderman-adjacent arrival gets the chronology wrong.
They were peers building something together before the cultural machinery caught up. The more useful lineage sits elsewhere. Dollbaum’s vocal delivery, described by one early listener as somewhere between Alan Wilson of Canned Heat and Pete Townshend at his most interior, carries a quality of hard-won restraint that the Lenderman comparison flattens.
Birds of Paradise is a record about what the natural world holds constant when memory and place stop matching. It earns every association it invites. That it took three years to arrive makes it land with the particular gravity of something that was always going to exist on its own terms.
Birds of Paradise is out now via Dear Life Records.
