The natural world figures in a lot across Thomas Dollbaum’s “Birds of Paradise.”
The New Orleans-based singer-songwriter grew up about 20 minutes north of Tampa, Florida, in a place where the rural starts to overtake the suburban. And as he was writing the songs that would end up on his forthright new album, Dollbaum says he was thinking about a certain time in his life and the intertwining memories of late high school and early college.
“I don’t know if it was completely intentional,” Dollbaum says. “I think my memories are tied a lot to landscape and place and the natural world there. I feel like that just kind of came through when I was writing.”
Dollbaum sets scenes in burned-out sugarcane fields, where high school football players chase rabbits, and among pine trees and lakes. Coyotes, cardinals, waterbirds and scrub jays also make appearances.
On the album, there also are cheap motels, questionable strangers asking for favors and dark highways lit by headlights looking for I-95. Those details paint in songs that will feel familiar to anyone, especially Southerners, who came of age in rundown places.
“Birds of Paradise” is out now via Dear Life Records, and Dollbaum and his band play an album release show at 9 p.m. Sunday, June 7, at Saturn Bar. Lawn and Maddy Kirgo open.
The release of “Birds of Paradise” has brought a lot of recent attention to Dollbaum, who moved to New Orleans in 2015 to earn his MFA in creative writing at the University of New Orleans. Dollbaum also works in construction and has his own contractor business.
The release of his first full-length, “Wellswood” in 2022, began to build a buzz for the poet and songwriter, and last year’s acoustic EP, “Drive All Night,” was widely well-received. Now, “Birds of Paradise” has received attention from The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and profiles by Paste and UPROXX.
After his experiences making “Wellswood” and “Drive All Night,” which took longer than he had expected, Dollbaum wanted to approach his new album with a sense of immediacy. He booked a recording session with producer and engineer Clay Jones at a studio in Water Valley, Mississippi, and wrote many of the songs on “Birds of Paradise” within a few months.
Jake Lenderman, Thomas Dollbaum, Josh Halper and Nick Corson
Dollbaum asked a trio of trusted friends to help him bring the songs to life: Ashville-based musician Jake “MJ” Lenderman, who has had a meteoric rise the last few years; Nick Corson, who plays in the New Orleans-based indie rock bands The Convenience and Video Age; and Josh Halper, who has worked with Tommy Prine and Lenderman. Interestingly, each of the musicians typically play guitar, but on “Birds of Paradise,” Corson takes on the bass, Lenderman is on drums and Halper adds a second guitar behind Dollbaum.
Together, they learned and tracked “Bird of Paradise” in four days.
“It just felt like we needed to knock it through, and there was just a lot of energy,” Dollbaum says. “It felt like really energetic and fun the whole time … The energy of it feels good.”
Dollbaum’s music sits between earnest alt-country and propulsive indie rock. And although he occasionally plays solo, Dollbaum says he prefers to play with a full band, typically calling on friends in the city’s indie rock community.
At a recent Rolling Stone-presented show at The Fillmore opening for pop band Bleachers, Dollbaum was joined by guitarist Alejandro Skalany and drummer Atticus Lopez of the band Pope, bassist Stevie Spring, who has his own avant-garde punk project Steef, and Nashville vocalist Kate Teague, who appeared on “Drive All Night.”
With a literary quality, the stories Dollbaum conveys on “Birds of Paradise” are largely fictionalized — although there may be a memory or a friend’s story at the song’s heart — but they sound universal. There’s frustration and heartbreak, grief and stubbornness, and optimism about finally moving on.
The song “Big Boi” finds a maybe too trusting Dollbaum agreeing to help a man and a woman first move their car out of the road, which escalates to rides to the auto parts store and a pill mill. On “Pulverize,” with Dollbaum pushing his voice to new places, the narrator drives through the night, picking up hitchhikers and refusing to look back to what he left behind.
For “King’s Landing,” Dollbaum draws on inspiration from the movie “Trans” — where the main character hijacks a plane to make his escape — and his own memories of a small airport near the titular apartment complex.
Florida “is kind of where my imagination lives, I think,” Dollbaum says. “That’s where I kind of think about things [happening].”
Find “Birds of Paradise” at thomasdollbaum.bandcamp.com. And find Dollbaum on Instagram: @thomasdollbaum.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
