Thomas Dollbaum, it might seem, is the beneficiary of good timing. His excellent new album, Birds Of Paradise (out Friday), is composed of countryish rock songs set in the seedier corners of his native Florida. Dollbaum, 32 and currently living in New Orleans, has an MFA in poetry and sings in a conversational drawl that conveys southernness despite his lack of a pronounced accent. He sounds a bit like Bobby Charles, an iconic scion of his adopted hometown who has a similar “guy you might meet at the dive bar” quality. Most notably — from a commercial perspective — the new record was made with MJ Lenderman, the current leading practitioner of this kind of music in indie rock. You can hear Lenderman’s voice singing backup on the single “Coyote” (one of 2026’s best songs), where it plays the Adam Duritz role to Dollbaum’s brawny lead vox.
But Dollbaum has actually been sitting on Birds Of Paradise for years now. Three years, in fact. Not long after the release of his promising 2022 debut Wellswood — and around the time he recorded the acclaimed 2025 EP Drive All Night — Dollbaum gathered some friends and fellow travelers at a studio in Water Valley, Mississippi in 2023. Among them was Lenderman, still a year away from putting out his breakthrough Manning Fireworks, who was recruited to play drums. Dollbaum taught the ad-hoc band his songs, and then recorded them, in just four days.
And then … he waited. A falling out with his old label over the dreaded “creative differences” put the brakes on Birds Of Paradise. Finally, the rising indie Dear Life Records — home to foundational 2020s alt-country acts Fust and Florry, as well as Lenderman’s Boat Songs – agreed to put it out, though they also had to wait a while before their slate was open.
When asked about this seemingly interminable lag between creation and release, Dollbaum is surprisingly laid back. “I mean, there was a while I felt a little in the wilderness. No one really was looking at it that much. Then Dear Life had reached out, but they were just busy. They only do a certain amount of records a year,” he shrugged. “I think they planned on putting it out a year and a half ago. I was like, ‘Well, I’ve already waited almost half a year, a year, so why not just wait and put it out with some people I like?’”
Dollbaum is equally noncommittal when considering that the delay might be a good thing, given the current audience for his style of music. “I don’t think it hurts, at all,” he replied. “I think it also got the amount of time it needed to be digested, even by me. Took a while to get everything in order. It’s in a good place, like it’s the best version of itself it can be.”
No matter his casual demeanor, Dollbaum looks like a potential star in the increasingly crowded scene he populates. On songs like “Florida” and “Whippits/Trailer Lights,” he exhibits a natural storytelling ability imbued with the regional specificity that’s set Lenderman and Karly Hartzman apart in that world. His work is populated by down-and-out losers and drifters in search of a break or maybe just a warm bed for the night. This immersive quality carries over to new tracks like “Big Boi,” based on a true story about two drug addicts Dollbaum inadvertently wound up taxiing around one morning on the way to a local “pill mill.”
Comparisons to Lenderman — as well as older indie troubadours like Damien Jurado, an acknowledged influence — are obvious. But Dollbaum’s music has an extra layer of sturdy, heartland rock muscle that also puts him in the Jason Isbell zone. Like Isbell, Dollbaum is an acolyte of John Prine, and that Americana strain ought to make Birds Of Paradise an object of obsession for that audience once they get around to hearing it.
