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.
And yet, the most exciting part of Dollbaum’s music is how restlessly he travels within that landscape. On last year’s Drive All Night EP, the University of New Orleans poetry MFA graduate wrote with the precision and purpose of a studied storyteller: “I got kicked out of school now for fighting again,” he sang. “It was your ex with the gold chain rosary.” Nothing on Birds of Paradise rings with such specificity, although the lack of detail often gives his characters more emotional space to wander. In “King’s Landing,” the narrator dreams of earning his pilot’s license but gets all the escape he needs from just having his ambition taken seriously. And everything we need to know about the characters is the opening “Visitation” arrives through a subtle distinction between their points of view: “I know you never believed/And me, not in a long while.”
If Dollbaum has grown more interested in narratives that happen entirely between the lines, the music itself is now where he throws his direct hits. In addition to Lenderman, his band includes guitarist Josh Halper and bassist Nick Corson, who, compared to the refined accompaniment on Drive All Night and 2022’s Wellswood, reintroduce his sound in the form of a bracing rock band, building toward fiery meditations like “Dozen Roses” and emotionally charged singalongs like “Coyote.” In the grief-stricken closer “Blue Meets Blue,” Dollbaum gives into the band’s cheerful accompaniment with off-mic yelps that instantly mark the track the crowd-favorite encore in the live set.
Recorded over the span of a week in Oxford, Mississippi, with Clay Jones—a producer whose credits include 21st century work with Modest Mouse and mandolin on a Counting Crows album—Birds of Paradise has a driving, electric sound that’s as essential to the experience as the songwriting itself. Dollbaum has talked about writing these songs in conversation with one another—the “magical thinking” in “Visitation” leading directly to the physical longing in “Dozen Roses”—and often the music seems to bring these memories to the surface in one fluid breath. It’s a lively, kinetic texture that lends the record as much common ground with the anthemic, early work of My Morning Jacket or Band of Horses as the more writerly artists Dollbaum tends to be compared to.
This is also why, more than any specific lyric or hook, you might find yourself returning to fleeting performances and melodic choices: the way Dollbaum’s and Lenderman’s harmonies crack through the existential questions of “Waterbirds,” or how the chiming guitar riff in “Rabbits” both emphasizes and complicates its concluding promise, “I’m happy to be alive.” And for all the plot direction and characters sprinkled around “Big Boi,” a song that started life as a piece of fiction, my favorite couplet speaks to a more elemental story that Dollbaum seems to be telling: “I can feel your heartbeat through the front of my car/Falling off this earth is easy when you don’t know where you are.” If Dollbaum’s music once painted a vivid portrait of all the low places he’s been, then on Birds of Paradise, he sounds all the more confident in showing us where he wants to go next.
