Waterbirds and Scrub Jays
On his latest album, Thomas Dollbaum reckons with chaos, suffering, and loss alongside the stubborn beauty of his Florida home.
By Joseph Collum
As you read this, almost 400,000 people are heading to Florida. Families screaming at each other in minivans on their way to Disney World, college kids speeding in hand-me-down sedans toward Daytona Beach revelries, one and all clogging up 95 South. They’ll be greeted by white sand beaches and retirement communities, pill mills and Medicaid scandals. Welcome to the Sunshine State: the most American place on earth.
Songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, a Tampa native, gets down in the mud of his home on Birds of Paradise and finds striking beauty there despite the Florida Man tropes and the general inhabitability of the place. The result is overwhelming at points, images and ideas raining too heavy for either Dollbaum or the listener to stand. Under Dollbaum’s lens, channeling the harsh Florida sun, no creature, neither angel nor demon, can hide. The weight of Dollbaum’s vision drives him to lamentation by the fifth track as he asks “why the sunset is so ugly and long?” The question, delivered in Dollbaum’s quivering head voice, echoes Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago: “How wonderful to be alive. . . but why does it always hurt?” Dollbaum is looking at a broken place and wonders how he continues to find a stubborn beauty in it.
Amid the sung landscapes of swamps and sugarcanes, there are birds here. A lot of them, spread from the cover to the final lines. They’re circling, in moments of loss and moments of chaos, but often they’re a comfort.
When you awake in the loneliest hour
Turn me back to a scrub jay in the rain
So I can know you as a flower
That blooms in the dark desert day
When your light goes out on this road
Leave me in the only place I know
I love to hang out in the mangroves
I’ll lie in your arms
As the birds of paradise surround us
(“Scrub Jay”)
These lines show not only the titular birds but also the central emotional thrust of the album. Dollbaum’s narrator has lost someone dear, and the loss feels more permanent than a breakup or relocation.
But the older I get the more I do magical thinking
About how the birds ride out on the sky
How the echoes hang out in the wind
How them ghosts are here in the light
And you can’t talk to any of them
(“Visitation”)
With an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans, Dollbaum is far from the first poet to use avian symbols for ghostly visitations, but the fact that he is already so rooted in a rural landscape makes it feel like he’s in a conversation with these birds rather than watching them spookily tapping at his window.
In general, there is no naïve Wordsworthian naturalism in Dollbaum. “Heard the coyote howl, looking for your cat for dinner,” he opens on one of the album’s finest tracks, “Coyote.” The imminent danger out there in the dark is mirrored in his characters’ interior lives. “Sitting with you on your rooftop,” he continues, “You’re high and drunk, you’re ready to jump. . . Bet you’d set this house on fire just to watch it burn down.” This track brings us the closest we come to whomever the narrator has lost and is looking for in the circling birds of coastal Florida. It’s raw, while never disclosing more of the moment than a few impressionistic descriptions of the deceased and an understanding of what the air felt like that night. But those disclosures are more than enough: by the time the final Crazy Horse–esque chords fade out, you’re ready for a reprieve.
The album convicts with beauty, like Ecclesiastes, showing us just how much we have and how insufficient it seems.
A good litmus test for the American songwriter is to ask them to tell a joke. (See Townes Van Zandt’s stage banter before “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold” on Live at the Old Quarter.) If you laugh, they can probably write a song. Some songwriters—Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, and James McMurtry to name a few—can even make you laugh without knowing what you’re laughing at or if you even should be laughing. I was first drawn to Dollbaum for this latter ability. “Florida,” the first track on his debut album Wellswood, opens with the lines: “Well look out Florida, you’ve got a hooker on your back / she’s riding high with some trick on Sly Street / She’s in the corner store of the Sunoco trying to buy cigarettes / she says it’s her birthday, God help her.” There is nothing funny about that. It’s a pretty stark description of a tragic existence, in fact. But something about how Dollbaum stands beside his characters and presents their realities without flourish forces us to laugh at the mess of it all. On Birds of Paradise, “Big Boi” is a story about giving a stranger a ride, first to the AutoZone and then wherever the man tells him. “Pulled up with Big Boi to the AutoZone / Bitched about Charlene the whole time, help her, Lord / Took him to the pill mill too / Came out with 200 blue / Don’t say I never helped you, anyhow.” Again, nothing funny here. But Dollbaum’s clear understanding of his characters and the detached exasperation of “Don’t say I never helped you” lifts the mood in a part of town where the mood desperately needs lifting.
Birds of Paradise has garnered Dollbaum some acclaim, partially due to his proximity to indie darlings MJ Lenderman and Wednesday. (Lenderman is part of the backing band on this record—drums, guitar, and vocals). But the band’s sound is the only artistic connection to the Lenderman world; Dollbaum’s writing has more to do with the fiction of Denis Johnson or the films of Sean Baker than houseboats at himbodomes. Still, the band’s sound is significant and allows Dollbaum’s scenes to draw you in, unsettle you, and make you laugh. A band made up of four primary guitarists, the tone varies from jangly (“Rabbits” and “Blue Meets Blue”) to chunky (“Big Boi”) to a Niagaran assault (“Dozen Roses” and “Pulverize”). The work of Jason Molina in the 2000s has had an outsized influence on the current thrust of indie rock, with imitations of the heavy gain SG Gibson guitar tone of “John Henry Split My Heart” popping up in Appalachian singer-songwriter music where previously it belonged to Mastodon. The Birds of Paradise band is the closest impersonator of that Molina tone yet. The dynamic sounds of the record fill out Dollbaum’s images, from strip mall romps to burning red sunsets.
While Dollbaum was raised and started writing in Florida, he now lives in New Orleans. The album does seem to focus on the loss of someone close to the narrator, but I can’t help but wonder if part of his mourning is for the place he called home.
When you’re wondering where I’ve gone
I’ll be somewhere out in the backyard
Buried right next to Grandma and Grandpa
Nowhere gives back what is lost
It’s just pain all across the water
Watching birds all across the water
(“Blue Meets Blue”)
This memory of a person and memory of a place lands heavy. I find it hard to recommend Birds of Paradise, not because it lacks anything in quality but because of the way it presses in on you. Even with the humor of “Big Boi,” I find myself weighed heavier down after a few listens. This feeling testifies to the quality of Dollbaum’s work. The album convicts with beauty, like Ecclesiastes, showing us just how much we have and how insufficient it seems. He asks us to look at the world, really look, past our closely cropped flowerbeds to the weeds in the driveway. He sits in loss and suffering and ponders the long and ugly sunset. But after he does that, he wonders “where the waterbirds sleep at night?” He’s looking out to the ocean toward a new dawn in his native land, one beckoned in by the birds of paradise.
Joseph Collum grew up in rural Mississippi and Kentucky. Now living in Philadelphia, he holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and a M.S. in Secondary Education from St. Joseph’s University. He teaches English at Cristo Rey Philadelphia High School and writes fiction.
Birds of Paradise by Thomas Dollbaum was released on May 22, 2026, by Dear Life Records, and was produced by Clay Jones and Thomas Dollbaum. You can listen and purchase your own copy here.
