Thomas Dollbaum turns highway memories into Birds of Paradise

On Thomas Dollbaum’s Birds of Paradise, the drive isn’t just scenery—it’s how he thinks, listens, reads, and writes. From mix CDs on Florida highways to a four-day recording sprint in Water Valley, Mississippi, Dollbaum traces how traveling and poetry shape a

By the time Thomas Dollbaum talks about “Pulverize,” you can already hear the road in it.

He grew up in Florida, where trips weren’t occasional events so much as the default rhythm of daily life. Everybody he knew lived about a 20-to-30 minute drive away. so the highway became a kind of shared space—always moving. always thinking. For him. that’s where songs start: in the time you spend looking out the window while music plays close enough to feel like company.

Dollbaum—New Orleans-based. with an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans—has now translated those memories into Birds of Paradise. a new album tracked in Water Valley. Mississippi in 2023 with producer Clay Jones. The record is out now via the Philadelphia-based label Dear Life Records. and it arrives with the momentum of someone who doesn’t separate art from motion.

Before Birds of Paradise. Dollbaum released his debut album. Wellswood. in 2022. then followed with the Drive All Night EP in September 2025. The new songs. he says. spring from childhood geography and the emotional weather that rides along with it—propulsive. twangy. and “torch-like. ” though he keeps returning to one idea: memory doesn’t stay put. It travels.

When asked about the inspiration behind his new single. “Pulverize. ” Dollbaum points to something specific: the idea of driving across Louisiana overnight. The song may sound like a drive, but for him it’s also a way to live inside time. “I grew up in Florida. ” he says. adding that he spends a lot of his time in a car because so much is far away. Much of what he remembers, he insists, is tied to those trips. “A lot of time to think. ” he calls it. even as he laughs at how naturally the life and the music braid together.

That listening habit is a practical detail—music mostly happens in the car rather than at home—yet it shapes the music’s atmosphere. He puts on records at the house sometimes. but “a lot of times. I’m just listening in the car.” In his words. travel becomes a liminal space; the act of moving and the act of hearing start to feel like the same thing.

So when friends share music in that shared motion, it isn’t a stylized myth. It’s a real routine: before Spotify, they made mix CDs for road trips. In Florida, the highways weren’t just routes—they were where people lived.

If Birds of Paradise carries that energy, it also carries the attention of a poet. Dollbaum reads while he writes. trying to keep books of poetry around “to pick through.” He isn’t claiming direct literary source-to-song connections. but he is clear about the role reading plays: it gets the brain into thinking. His approach leans toward poetry because it’s quicker—especially now. when his attention span has “gotten really bad.” He likes the shape of a session that lets him move through “4 or 5 poems. ” then put them down and return.

He keeps specific books close: Still Life by his old professor Jay Hopler, and Philip Levine’s What Work Is. When he’s stuck, he says, reading familiar pieces helps open up pathways. Even if songs don’t arrive immediately, he believes coming back can shift the way the track turns.

In that sense, his songwriting method doesn’t look like a detached craft session. It sounds like a mind staying in motion—sometimes by writing, sometimes by reading, sometimes by driving.

The creative partnership on Birds of Paradise adds another kind of mobility. Dollbaum recorded the album with a band that included guitarist Josh Halperm. bassist Nick Corson. and MJ Lenderman on drums. guitar. and backing vocals. The involvement of Lenderman—an Asheville. North Carolina scene figure alongside Wednesday. Colin Miller. and Fust—helps explain why Dollbaum’s music is often associated with that ecosystem. even as he insists so much of the emotional fuel is rooted elsewhere.

He also describes a small chain of choices that turned into a bigger sound. Lenderman’s backing vocals weren’t planned as a wide-ranging overhaul; they emerged from listening back after the session. “We got done with the session. ” Dollbaum says. and Lenderman pointed to a possible harmony on “Coyote.” That’s how the backing vocals happened. Dollbaum adds that there was only one major overdub like that. with the rest of the record moving quickly from demos to performance.

That speed is part of the album’s pressure and poise. Dollbaum wrote the songs in three months, then the recording period lasted four days. He calls it “super fun,” crediting the group’s ears and a collaborative mood that didn’t require constant negotiation. He sent demos—mostly phone recordings—and the musicians largely knew what to play. Changes happened, but not the kind that redraws a song’s identity. For “Rabbits. ” for example. Jake suggested they do it “a little faster. ” but the old demos were “pretty much the same. ” with only tempo and endings shifting slightly.

Even the way he talks about sharing songs reveals what kind of solitude he values. Until a song is done, he doesn’t like showing people songs. He avoids requests for lyrics and keeps writing as “a very solo process,” unless he’s working collaboratively with someone else.

That solitude doesn’t mean the songs feel sealed off. Dollbaum says he tries to keep empathy in his writing and doesn’t want to become too cynical. He hears a “sentimental record” in that intention—an emotional baseline that shows up in lines like “Wish I could save us from the mundane. ” and in the way he describes his framework for the album.

He points to the opening track and the line “The older I get. the more I do magical thinking. ” and then links it to how a kid does magical thinking in the next song. Dollbaum says he wrote those two first and placed them in order because they frame the rest. He describes a working method where one or two tracks become anchors. even if the other songs approach the material differently. “Everything’s always connected somehow,” he says.

He won’t pretend every detail is a straight autobiographical map. He acknowledges that the setting is youth and that the songs come from that space he knows from growing up. but he also says it’s not always clear what’s “specifically true” to his life. Still, he doesn’t see it as a problem. For him, the real value is that familiar ground becomes imaginative space—something you can return to and reshape.

On “I’ve only been screaming in the back of my head. ” the tone shifts again. and Dollbaum connects that emotional intensity to how the album was made. The band recorded it live, which made pushing vocally easier. In the studio, recording and overdubbing can make it harder to reproduce the energy of a whole band at once. With this record. he says. that translation happened—and it made singing stronger feel more natural than it does on an acoustic EP. where being alone with headphones makes the experience more intimate.

The collaborations and coincidences around the record also underline how interconnected the scenes are. even when the music is built from personal geography. Dollbaum met MJ Lenderman around the time Boat Songs came out. Lenderman came to one of Dollbaum’s shows early. when Wellswood was out and before Boat Songs had been out. and they became friends. They kept in touch through touring, where friendships form on the road.

Dollbaum says his guitar player on the record. Josh Halper. was also on Dear Life Records. placing everyone in the same orbit. He had Lenderman play the Boat Songs release show, and he visited Asheville to hang out. He wanted to do a full-band record after the EP. and Halper suggested it would be “cool if Jake played drums on it. ” because Dollbaum had heard the Indigo de Souza record. “That’s how it happened,” he says, adding that he had “a fun week” with them.

There’s also a coincidence Dollbaum can’t quite smooth over. He says “Jake” sent him Manning Fireworks and that he hadn’t heard it yet. When he heard it. he responded with a blunt “Damn”—because of the resonance with Lenderman’s own “Bark at the Moon.” The connection exists because their recording sessions happened before Dollbaum had heard Lenderman’s record. and Lenderman sent it after.

Birds of Paradise, then, isn’t just an album with influences and scenes attached to it. It’s a record built like a route—highways in Florida. a studio week compressed into four days in Water Valley. a web of musicians moving through the Asheville orbit. and poetry kept within reach for when the mind needs a new angle.

In the end, Dollbaum’s central idea is simple. He doesn’t describe music and travel as separate forces. He calls them one and the same. And on Birds of Paradise, the road is where his empathy sounds loudest—between memory and solitude, between the living and what they carry forward.

Thomas Dollbaum Birds of Paradise Dear Life Records MJ Lenderman Water Valley Mississippi Ashe​ville scene poetry and songwriting mix CDs indie folk