Thomas Dollbaum’s music is God’s country

Thomas Dollbaum spent his childhood looking up. In the boonies outside Tampa, his family owned property near a private airport, where little Cessna planes would cross overhead all day. You can get a private pilot’s license at age seventeen in Florida, but you can start practicing even earlier, so Dollbaum’s mother inquired about lessons. “I was like, ‘This is a possibility!’” he remembers. “But it definitely was not. It’s not cheap. I was just stoked on the idea of just being able to fly anywhere.” The dream faded. These days, Dollbaum says flying freaks him out. “You don’t have much fear when you’re younger.” 

Dollbaum and I are sitting in the sun outside a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard while LAPD copters circle the air east of us. The night before, he and Esther Rose played at Gold Diggers together on Santa Monica. Right as I walked in, Rose joined him onstage for a song from his Drive All Night tape. “Angus Valley” established him as a picker and a talker who’s part-Jesus’ Son Denis Johnson and part-Nebraska Bruce Springsteen. There is beauty in “we just go from streetlights to the dark, to the dark, darkness,” a line in “Angus Valley” that loops like the absence of an old friend. Across twenty winding minutes, Dollbaum sings about an uncle buying his nephew beer and cigs, watermelon growing in a girl’s belly, the Texas job corps, penitentiary friends, and school expulsions. Hearing his music, I feel like I’ve driven “Angus Valley” a million miles. 

Drive All Night was part-funeral, part-archival, and part-folktale. Upon returning to Tampa a couple years ago, Dollbaum learned that an old pal had passed away suddenly—maybe one of those “dumbass friends” in “Angus Valley.” “I randomly ran into a friend of his at a bar. I checked in to see how he’s doing, and they were like, ‘Oh, you didn’t hear? He’s gone.’ It was a surprise, and I felt like I should have been doing more. But there was really nothing to do.” So he wrote not about him but about the hot and wild flatwoods life they shared together before growing apart like most childhood friends do. “It’s fun to build that world out, because you have the memories there but they’re not the same as they were, anyway. It’s fun to go with what you have.” Oddly enough, he’s not sure his late friend would’ve liked Drive All Night much. “He probably wouldn’t,” Dollbaum laughs. “I was always hanging out in the hardcore scene, which he was really into. I would always be the odd man out, because I would go to these shows and I was doing singer-songwriter, country stuff. I’d just go and get in where I fit in.”

He tells me about starting a reggae band at age thirteen, because it was the music he grew up hearing. When he and his buddies got to playing it, he found out he had a pretty neat voice for it. “I was killer at it,” he adds, smirking. “We would fill rooms.” Even in his band days, Dollbaum never caught wind of music being a job. But when he left Tampa for New Orleans, he found a good group of people, started playing house shows around town, and wrote his debut record, Wellswood. Dollbaum had a buddy at Fat Possum’s Big Legal Mess imprint and sent him the tracks. “Dude, do you want to put this out?” he said. Dollbaum wrote back, “Of course, I just didn’t know that was an option!” Dollbaum still hasn’t wrapped his head around being a touring musician, treating it sometimes like an accident. He owns a carpentry business in NOLA, working on piers, hip roofs, and shotgun houses in the city’s North Shore. After making a fence for a customer, they asked Dollbaum to build them an A-frame. He’d worked on crews before, but this time he did it all by himself. It’s cool that the guy who wrote “your puppy eyes stare me down with cowlick / in this town, honey, even the trees lean with a grudge” is the same guy who built a home for someone.

Dollbaum earned an MFA in poetry at the University of New Orleans, but only because the University of Mississippi waitlisted him. “I could wait a year, or I could get the fuck out of town,” Dollbaum says. “I said, ‘I want to go.’ I was ready to leave Tampa.” He’d been in the big guava his whole life, living in a “truck stop” near the Hillsborough River under a bald cypress canopy, where the charcoal kilns and moonshine stills used to run. New Orleans gave him a different but needed view, away from the shopping malls of North Tampa where his family is. After grad school, he thought about moving back, but the city went from sleepy to bougie. Dollbaum’s new record, Birds of Paradise, still goes home now and then, to a place where every star belongs to somebody he knew. 

But New Orleans showed Dollbaum the option to play different kinds of music. There wasn’t a strong enough singer-songwriter scene in Tampa to make an impression on him, but then he moved to a town with concerts boasting three different genres on the same bill. “Do you feel like your music fits into the city like it did ten years ago?” I ask Dollbaum. “I think so,” he says. “The city is larger in name than it is in size. You pretty much know everybody playing, and even the new bands that show up are good.” I bring up how some artists don’t like New Orleans’ bar-show culture. “You can’t pick your crowd,” Dollbaum emphasizes. “It’s hard to predict if a show is going to do well there, because there’s so many other things around that are fun to do.”

Dollbaum has “not been interested in the busk,” despite it paying so many NOLA musicians’ rent. It’s probably because his entry into music was much more random than that. He was doing house shows intermittently, working construction, and writing songs at home just to write. Making money on the street never seemed necessary. But, Dollbaum tells me, he knows a juggler who makes five, six hundred bucks a day in Jackson Square. “It’s a great hustle, a sick living.” Then there’s the tarot readers and the folk singers. But having drunk people ask for “Proud Mary” over and over didn’t appeal to Dollbaum. 

He liked learning about craft, scansion, and getting to siphon experience from his UNO cohort’s vast writing style instead. Workshops gave him a thick skin. “If you work on a poem, it’s not precious,” he says. “You get so attached to stuff, but if you can replace something and make it so much better, even if it’s not exactly what you thought, that’s an awesome thing. None of this is really sacred. You can cut anything, start over, and it’s completely fine.” Dollbaum’s school of thought is an immediate descendent of Richard Hugo’s; The Triggering Town is his holy writ, because it uses narrative threads as levers to make writing less predictable. 

He’d go back and do another writing program in a heartbeat. I ask him if he wants a doctorate. “I don’t know if I’d want to do a PhD,” he says, “because that’s more lit-based. I was a little burned out on academia by the end of it, because I didn’t want to teach afterwards. But I really liked having workshops. It was the best time to hone my writing. No one wants to read your writing and help you, but if they’re forced to as a class, it’s awesome. If you have people you really trust, it’s hard to get that anywhere else outside of an academic community.” You could try starting a writer’s group, I tell Dollbaum. “But that always falls apart,” he replies. “No one’s showing up, no one’s doing the work.” 

The songs are like historical fiction, as if Dollbaum’s got shades of Breece D’J Pancake in himself and doesn’t fight them. He doesn’t think of himself as a short story writer outside of his records, gravitating instead to “narrative poetry.” I’d call a record like Birds of Paradise “geographical folktale,” because all of Dollbaum’s songs are based in memory and place. “The record went somewhere that wasn’t real for me, even though it was all based in places that were in Florida,” he says. “It’s like its own imaginative thing beyond an actual spot.” Sometimes, his yarns become a coalescence of different places.  “King’s Landing” is especially magical about that, with its anecdotes about COPS reruns and building homes out of “water and snakes.” “Pulverize” is based on a girl Dollbaum once tried to drive to the coast with before their “hoopty to the promised land” stalled out halfway there. Literary references crop up in Dollbaum’s art, too. Last year’s “William Duffy’s Farm” is his ars poetica, reinterpreting the famous James Wright poem. This year’s “Visitation” cites Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, but not on purpose. Josh Halper, who plays guitar on Birds of Paradise, clocked that one immediately. “Dude, are you quoting Didion on this?” he asked Dollbaum, who shouted back, “Oh, no, I forgot all about that book. I haven’t read it.” It’s still on his to-read pile, FYI. 

Dollbaum spends his records trying to distill things and places he remembers but never catches. It’s better, he argues, to never catch them. “Memory changes all the time. You can try, but I don’t think it ever gets to where you really capture it. The best I can do is make someone feel like they’re there, even if they’ve never been there.” Birds of Paradise, like Drive All Night and Wellswood before it, is never completely correct. Van Zandt and Molina are obvious lodestars, but Dollbaum rarely sounds like them, his voice reaching a twang that could be from a hundred places at once. “[The album is] really just for me,” he says, chuckling. “Those places are for me, no one needs to get the reference.” In “Warlock’s House,” there’s a line—about a landlord shutting off the breaker and killing all the lights—that belongs to a friend’s memory. “We were all meeting up to smoke weed somewhere, and they were telling me about this guy’s dad who was a carnie and would travel,” Dollbaum remembers, “But he would come in and shut the power off and scare all the kids that were in his house—this house everyone was hanging out in. That can never capture the real thing.” The carnie dad has nothing to do with how the “gargoyles all smile out beneath the horses of Pasco County,” but it still hits with a strange, lived-in thud. 

I ask Dollbaum if he writes more honestly about Florida now that he’s away from it. “Less honestly,” he admits. “Or, I have less knowledge of it. It becomes a place that I can think about but I don’t know.” He thinks his music has said plenty about that part of his life, though he’s not so sure he has much to say about Louisiana now, either. “It’s been written about so much, it’s a hard world. New Orleans is home, but you’re never really from there.” Despite growing up in Tampa and living in NOLA, Dollbaum gets lumped in with the Asheville crowd. It’s probably because Jake “MJ” Lenderman plays in his band. The two musicians met through Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, a North Carolina writer whose story collection Sleepovers is on the bookshelf behind me as I work on this profile. She planned to interview Dollbaum about Wellswood after his show at the Grey Eagle and brought Lenderman along. They became fast friends, and Lenderman invited Dollbaum to play at his Boat Songs release show. That’s how he found the rest of the Dear Life crew, meeting Fust and Sluice and Michael Cormier-O’Leary at the gig. Fast-forward three years and Birds of Paradise is poised to become one of Dear Life’s defining releases. Phillips did end up writing about Dollbaum for the Southwest Review, but it was a fictional portrayal with kernels of truth, much like the characters in his music. 

Lenderman, the Convenience’s Nick Corson, and fellow Dear Lifer Josh Halper round out the Birds of Paradise band—a funny amalgam, considering they’re all guitarists. “Everyone was really good at guitar but me,” Dollbaum laughs. “So I just got a whole crew of shredders to come.” I tell him that his guitar sounded great at Gold Diggers. “I make do,” he quips. He’d heard Lenderman drum on Indigo De Souza’s Any Shape You Take and asked him to sit behind the kit, while Corson handled bass and Halper got to tear it up. But that thick, ragged-glory guitar tone on “Dozen Roses” is all Lenderman. “It felt like starting a band in high school,” Dollbaum explains. “You’re like, ‘This is super fun and this is really good,’ but it actually was good. You have the excitement of hanging out, chilling, little pressure. It wasn’t on a label, I paid out of pocket. I said, ‘Let’s have a fun session, see what happens.’ Producer Clay Jones—who’s engineered and mixed albums by Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello, Counting Crows, and Townes Van Zandt—owns a cabin in Taylor, Mississippi, and let Dollbaum and the band crash there while they tracked Birds of Paradise for two hundred dollars a day at Matt Patton’s Dial Back Sound. It was a step up from the “podcast studio in Oxford” he used to cut Drive All Night with Halper and Katie Teague. 

Jones was somebody Dollbaum could trust. “I’m really bad at recording myself,” he admits. “It’s just too much work, getting into Pro Tools. It’s not for me. I’ve downloaded Pro Tools so many times, started messing with it, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, let me check out this effect,’ and then I do that for three hours and I get nothing done. There’s like a four second clip of me testing.” It was Jones’ suggestion to do minimal overdubs. Dollbaum and the band would record all day for a week, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Then they’d play shitty cover songs from 8 p.m. until they got tired, usually at 3 a.m. At some point, Lenderman told Dollbaum he could hear harmonies on “Coyote,” and then he added his voice to “Pulverize” and “Waterbirds.” Cut live without any bells or whistles, Dollbaum says that Birds of Paradise “captures the time.” 

The Birds of Paradise lead single, “Dozen Roses,” returns to his Tampa childhood memories: “When you were a kid the whole world felt like a lonesome ocean, closing in with every wave that seems to come your way. I look now and it’s just tide pulled out of motion, a couple walks and then a dozen roses on their way.” With accompaniment from Corson, Lenderman, and Halper, Dollbaum’s best songs remember the light and timber. He and his bandmates interlock for five soaring minutes, tailing ghosts and preserving a noisy groove even when Lenderman’s lead lines pull the song sideways. “Dozen Roses” runs on numbered days, as Dollbaum tells us there’s not enough of them. 

Phillips said something about Dollbaum I’ve been thinking a lot about, that his “survival and imagination are the same thing.” I suppose I like him so much because I recognize magic and monotony in his voice, in the atlas of K-Marts, dancing rednecks, cocaine, and Pensacola air “thicker than blood” he’s left in the glove box for us to find. Birds of Paradise lives somewhere between a fib, a confession, and a god dang. Months ago, a white-label test pressing of the record landed on my doorstep and it’s lived on the office turntable ever since, my room filling up with pictures of sugar cane, I-95, and flatwood splinters. The pack of cigarettes in Dollbaum’s music seems more real than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. But once I’m in my car after the interview ends, I notice him at the corner of Sunset and Fountain past the McDonald’s with a missing drive-thru sign, torching a dart. A plane heading for Burbank flies above him mid-drag. The crosswalk turns green, but he’s still looking up. 

Birds of Paradise is out May 22 on Dear Life. 

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.

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