{"id":13317,"date":"2026-07-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=13317"},"modified":"2026-07-21T12:27:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T12:27:06","slug":"birds-of-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/01\/birds-of-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Birds of Paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Waterbirds and Scrub Jays<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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On his latest album, Thomas Dollbaum reckons with chaos, suffering, and loss alongside the stubborn beauty of his Florida home. <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Joseph Collum<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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\u2019ll 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, a Tampa native, gets down in the mud of his home on <\/span>Birds of Paradise <\/span><\/i>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\u2019s lens, channeling the harsh Florida sun, no creature, neither angel nor demon, can hide. The weight of Dollbaum\u2019s vision drives him to lamentation by the fifth track as he asks \u201cwhy the sunset is so ugly and long?\u201d The question, delivered in Dollbaum\u2019s quivering head voice, echoes Boris Pasternak in <\/span>Doctor Zhivago<\/span><\/i>: \u201cHow wonderful to be alive. . . but why does it always hurt?\u201d Dollbaum is looking at a broken place and wonders how he continues to find a stubborn beauty in it.<\/span><\/p>

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\u2019re circling, in moments of loss and moments of chaos, but often they\u2019re a comfort.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

When you awake in the loneliest hour
Turn me back to a scrub jay in the rain<\/p>

So I can know you as a flower<\/p>

That blooms in the dark desert day<\/p>

When your light goes out on this road<\/p>

Leave me in the only place I know<\/p>

I love to hang out in the mangroves<\/p>

I\u2019ll lie in your arms<\/p>

As the birds of paradise surround us<\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(\u201cScrub Jay\u201d)<\/p>

These lines show not only the titular birds but also the central emotional thrust of the album. Dollbaum\u2019s narrator has lost someone dear, and the loss feels more permanent than a breakup or relocation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

But the older I get the more I do magical thinking<\/p>

About how the birds ride out on the sky<\/span><\/p>

How the echoes hang out in the wind<\/span><\/p>

How them ghosts are here in the light<\/span><\/p>

And you can\u2019t talk to any of them\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(\u201cVisitation\u201d)<\/span><\/p>

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\u2019s in a conversation with these birds rather than watching them spookily tapping at his window.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

In general, there is no na\u00efve Wordsworthian naturalism in Dollbaum. \u201cHeard the coyote howl, looking for your cat for dinner,\u201d he opens on one of the album\u2019s finest tracks, \u201cCoyote.\u201d The imminent danger out there in the dark is mirrored in his characters\u2019 interior lives. \u201cSitting with you on your rooftop,\u201d he continues, \u201cYou\u2019re high and drunk, you\u2019re ready to jump. . . Bet you\u2019d set this house on fire just to watch it burn down.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2013esque chords fade out, you\u2019re ready for a reprieve. <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The album convicts with beauty, like Ecclesiastes, showing us just how much we have and how insufficient it seems.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A good litmus test for the American songwriter is to ask them to tell a joke. (See Townes Van Zandt\u2019s stage banter before \u201cMr. Mudd and Mr. Gold\u201d on <\/span>Live at the Old Quarter<\/span><\/i>.) If you laugh, they can probably write a song. Some songwriters\u2014Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, and James McMurtry to name a few\u2014can even make you laugh without knowing what you\u2019re laughing at or if you even should be laughing. I was first drawn to Dollbaum for this latter ability. \u201cFlorida,\u201d the first track on his debut album <\/span>Wellswood<\/span><\/i>, opens with the lines: \u201cWell look out Florida, you\u2019ve got a hooker on your back \/ she\u2019s riding high with some trick on Sly Street \/ She\u2019s in the corner store of the Sunoco trying to buy cigarettes \/ she says it\u2019s her birthday, God help her.\u201d There is nothing funny about that. It\u2019s 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 <\/span>Birds of Paradise<\/span><\/i>, \u201cBig Boi\u201d is a story about giving a stranger a ride, first to the AutoZone and then wherever the man tells him. \u201cPulled 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\u2019t say I never helped you, anyhow.\u201d Again, nothing funny here. But Dollbaum\u2019s clear understanding of his characters and the detached exasperation of \u201cDon\u2019t say I never helped you\u201d lifts the mood in a part of town where the mood desperately needs lifting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Birds of Paradise <\/span><\/i>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\u2014drums, guitar, and vocals). But the band\u2019s sound is the only artistic connection to the Lenderman world; Dollbaum\u2019s writing has more to do with the fiction of Denis Johnson or the <\/span>films of Sean Baker<\/span><\/a> than <\/span>houseboats at himbodomes<\/span><\/a>. Still, the band\u2019s sound is significant and allows Dollbaum\u2019s scenes to draw you in, unsettle you, and make you laugh. A band made up of four primary guitarists, the tone varies from jangly (\u201cRabbits\u201d and \u201cBlue Meets Blue\u201d) to chunky (\u201cBig Boi\u201d) to a Niagaran assault (\u201cDozen Roses\u201d and \u201cPulverize\u201d). 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 \u201c<\/span>John Henry Split My Heart<\/span><\/a>\u201d popping up in Appalachian singer-songwriter music where previously it belonged to Mastodon. The <\/span>Birds of Paradise <\/span><\/i>band is the closest impersonator of that Molina tone yet. The dynamic sounds of the record fill out Dollbaum\u2019s images, from strip mall romps to burning red sunsets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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\u2019t help but wonder if part of his mourning is for the place he called home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

When you\u2019re wondering where I\u2019ve gone<\/p>

I\u2019ll be somewhere out in the backyard<\/span><\/p>

Buried right next to Grandma and Grandpa<\/span><\/p>

Nowhere gives back what is lost<\/span><\/p>

It\u2019s just pain all across the water<\/span><\/p>

Watching birds all across the water\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(\u201cBlue Meets Blue\u201d)<\/span><\/p>

This memory of a person and memory of a place lands heavy. I find it hard to recommend <\/span>Birds of Paradise<\/span><\/i>, not because it lacks anything in quality but because of the way it presses in on you. Even with the humor of \u201cBig Boi,\u201d I find myself weighed heavier down after a few listens. This feeling testifies to the quality of Dollbaum\u2019s 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 \u201cwhere the waterbirds sleep at night?\u201d He\u2019s looking out to the ocean toward a new dawn in his native land, one beckoned in by the birds of paradise. <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Joseph Collum<\/b> 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\u2019s University. He teaches English at Cristo Rey Philadelphia High School and writes fiction.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Birds of Paradise<\/i><\/b> 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 <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his latest album, Thomas Dollbaum reckons with chaos, suffering, and loss alongside the stubborn beauty of his Florida home. Review by Joseph Collum 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