Birds of Paradise

Thomas Dollbaum recorded Birds of Paradise in four days, live, at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi – a working method that leaves fingerprints all over the title track. There’s tape hiss and room tone where a more polished studio session would have scrubbed both out, and a backing band (Jake “MJ” Lenderman on drums and harmonies, Nick Corson on bass, Josh Halper on guitar) that plays like people who learned the song together a day or two before tape started rolling, not a crew of hired session veterans running it for the hundredth time. Lenderman’s own profile has grown considerably since these sessions, which makes his presence here a small, pointed reminder of how much cross-pollination actually happens at the unglamorous end of the indie-rock and alt-country scene, well outside of what gets covered as a “collaboration.”

The song itself is a goodbye letter – to lost loved ones, to former versions of himself, delivered over dusty, unhurried guitar tone that splits the difference between barroom rock and plainspoken folk. Dollbaum, who grew up in Tampa and writes from New Orleans now, sets the song’s imagery in Florida’s pine flatwoods and the backroads running toward I-95, describing a place and its people with real affection but no illusions about what keeps them there. “Birds of Paradise” is the literal image the title promises – something migratory and bright passing through a landscape that mostly stays put – and the song never overplays the metaphor, trusting the specific geography to do the work a more abstract lyric would need extra lines to earn.

Dear Life Records, the small Chicago label behind this release, doesn’t have the kind of commercial footprint that puts an album like this in front of casual listeners – it’s a story that lives entirely in the space where this column keeps finding its most rewarding Saturdays, a record good enough to earn wide attention that mostly isn’t getting it. Following 2022’s Wellswood (on the equally small Big Legal Mess) and 2025’s Drive All Night EP, Birds of Paradise reads like a songwriter settling into exactly the scale of operation his songs actually need: four days, a handful of trusted players, and no label pressure pushing the record toward something glossier than the material wants to be.

7.8/10 – unhurried, specific, and recorded exactly as plainly as it needed to be.

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