Thomas Dollbaum prioritizes atmosphere, delivering a loamy, deep voice that evokes road-trip elegies and art-folk incantations. His second album, Birds of Paradise, features MJ Lenderman on drums, occasional guitar, and backing vocals, reinforcing a rootsy heartland rock feel within modern indie music. Lyrics about rambling through pines and driving through early morning place the songs firmly in immediate Americana associations. Dollbaum’s characters often gain emotional space through less specific detail, while earlier work showed sharp, precise storytelling. On Birds of Paradise, narratives shift toward ambiguity and subtle perspective distinctions, and the music becomes the main vehicle for direct emotional impact.
"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."
"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 Ni"
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