THOMAS DOLLBAUM - Birds Of Paradise

It's almost inevitable to bring up MJ Lenderman when discussing "Birds Of Paradise", the second album by Thomas Dollbaum. Not only because the North Carolina artist plays on the record and delivers one of the most memorable guitar solos of the year on "Dozen Roses", but because Dollbaum belongs to that same wave of American songwriters who are steering independent country-rock back toward a literary, deeply human dimension. Still, it would be reductive to stop there. Dollbaum has a distinct authorial voice and belongs to a wider lineage, that of writers who learned from Bill Callahan and Jason Molina that a story is often best told by chasing an image. His characters never really explain who they are; we come to know them by watching them cross empty parking lots, sun-baked suburbs, roads that seem to lead nowhere.

The songs on "Birds Of Paradise" are populated by figures in transit, men and women chasing dreams too big or too distant to ever be reached. Dollbaum observes these characters with an empathetic but never sentimental eye, letting the landscapes, back roads and seemingly insignificant details tell the story of their hopes and defeats. On "King's Landing", the dream of getting a pilot's license becomes a metaphor for an impossible escape from a small town that holds onto its residents like a gravitational pull. On "Coyote", the protagonist watches the world from a rooftop, torn between the urge to take flight and the awareness that he can't. On "Dozen Roses", time turns memories into relics and lost friends into benevolent ghosts. These are characters who keep dreaming, even knowing those dreams will probably never come true. Dollbaum's voice, warm and welcoming, acts as a quiet guide through these small-scale epics of small-town America, where the urge to leave constantly coexists with the awareness of staying put.

Not every track on the record carries the same evocative power, but when the songwriting and the arrangements click, the results are striking. "Dozen Roses" strikes a perfect balance between melancholy and rock momentum, lit up by Lenderman's aforementioned solo. "Coyote" builds remarkable narrative tension over a slow, crepuscular groove, while "Big Boi" shows off Dollbaum's more immediate musical side: a simple but highly effective chord progression, guitars suspended between jangle-pop and alt-country, and a rhythm section that carries the song with a light touch while still holding onto its melodic tension.

"Scrub Jay" contains within itself all the themes running through the album. Its lyrics give the record its title, "Birds Of Paradise", and in its visionary imagery, suspended between nature and memory, the Florida songwriter distills the record's whole poetics: the attempt to hold on to what time inexorably takes away. The closing "Blue Meets Blue" acts as a kind of emotional counter-shot. Where the former looks at what time takes away, the latter, buoyed by a heartland-flavored crescendo, suggests that something, through memory, can still remain.

Dollbaum doesn't reinvent the vocabulary of contemporary Americana, nor does he seem interested in doing so. His strength lies instead in his ability to find new emotional shades within an established tradition, giving voice to dreamers, losers and stubborn romantics with rare sensitivity. Like a backlit photograph, he portrays an America at the margins of the contemporary narrative, remote in its settings but deeply human in its wounds.

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08/06/2026