Small Studio Saturday: Four Days, One Mississippi Studio, and MJ Lenderman on Drums

Thomas Dollbaum has been building toward Birds of Paradise in public view for a few years now, in the quiet, unhurried way small-label songwriters usually do – 2022’s Wellswood, on the independent Big Legal Mess, drew real critical notice without turning into a career-launching moment; 2025’s Drive All Night EP, his first for the Chicago label Dear Life Records, read as a bridge to something bigger. Birds of Paradise, released this past May, is that something: ten songs, recorded live over four days at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi, with a touring band rather than a rotating cast of session hires, built around a description Dollbaum has used himself – a goodbye letter to lost loved ones and former selves, written from inside Florida’s pine flatwoods rather than about them from a safe distance.

The title track, reviewed alongside this feature, is the clearest statement of what the whole record is doing: patient, dusty, heartland-adjacent songwriting that trusts specific geography – backroads toward I-95, birds crossing water – to carry an idea about impermanence that a vaguer lyric would need to spell out directly. Dear Life Records is small by any commercial measure, a label that doesn’t have the marketing weight to put a record like this in front of casual listeners regardless of how good it is, which is exactly the gap this column exists to point at. What makes this particular small-label story worth a closer look is who’s actually in the room: drummer and backing vocalist Jake “MJ” Lenderman has, since these sessions were recorded, become one of the more closely watched names in the broader alt-country and indie-rock underground. His presence on Birds of Paradise isn’t a marquee collaboration or a calculated crossover move – it’s two working musicians on the same unglamorous circuit, showing up for each other’s records the way that circuit has always functioned, well out of view of anything that gets covered as an event.

That’s the actual case for paying attention to a record like this: not that it’s secretly a bigger deal than its label size suggests, but that the scale is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. Four days, a trusted band, a studio built for exactly this kind of live-to-tape session, and a songwriter who didn’t need a bigger budget or a longer schedule to say what he was trying to say. Birds of Paradise sounds like a record that got to exist precisely as its maker intended – the same outcome this column keeps finding at small labels, and keeps finding rare everywhere else.

Hero image: “Birds of Paradise” album cover art, Dear Life Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.