Birds Of Paradise - Vinyle Rose

Description

The truest storyteller in indie-rock today is, without question, Tampa-born, New Orleans-based singer-songwriter Thomas Dollbaum. *Birds of Paradise* is his most powerful, most dynamic work yet. Following his critically-acclaimed EPs, *Wellswood* (Big Legal Mess, 2022) and *Drive All Night* (Dear Life Records, 2025), *Birds of Paradise* is a farewell letter to lost loved ones and his former selves. In these songs, Dollbaum searches for acceptance in those fleeting places: Florida pine forests, country roads leading to I-95, where birds soar over the water. And while the influence of his alt-country predecessors, Townes and Molina, is undeniable, on *Birds of Paradise*, Dollbaum steps out of their shadows, saluting the past and finding his true identity. This album was a long time coming. Dollbaum’s previous two records took an inordinately long time to record due to circumstances beyond his control, leaving him frustrated. After eight years away from home, the place he’d left wasn’t the same, and the immutability of the natural world felt like a constant he wanted to explore in his writing. With a sense of urgency, he wrote *Birds of Paradise* in three months. He reached out to the musicians he trusted and admired most (Nick Corson, Josh Halper, and Jake Lenderman) and asked them to join him at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi, with producer and engineer Clay Jones. They learned the songs and recorded the album in four days, capturing a magical moment, a sonic revelation Dollbaum had been waiting for his entire life. With Lenderman, Halper, Corson, and Jones, *Birds of Paradise* marks the hard-won, decisive turning point in Dollbaum’s career. Alive and vibrant like the poems and short stories that haunt you: coyotes howl, birds migrate south, children chase rabbits through sugarcane fields, and the pack of cigarettes costs four dollars. *Birds of Paradise* reminds us where we come from (those parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten)—we just needed Dollbaum to reveal them to us. This is how to look back without fear or shame. This is authenticity.