Listen to Thomas Dollbaum’s Fantastic New EP Drive All Night

These songs stick with you, just as Dollbaum's art always has. Listen below.

By Matt Mitchell  |  September 26, 2025 | 1:00pm
Music News Thomas Dollbaum
Listen to Thomas Dollbaum’s Fantastic New EP Drive All Night

One of the best records you’ve never heard is Wellswood, the 2022 LP from New Orleans picker and talker Thomas Dollbaum. I think about that music often, especially a song like “Florida,” and I think about these words always: “I promise you my teeth if you promise me your hand. I’m going to give you the most beautiful funeral that I possibly can. We may never grow old but we sure as hell can’t stay young.” Dollbaum is an archivist and curator I look to for guidance in my own remembering. He’s part Jesus’ Son-age Denis Johnson and part Nebraska-age Bruce Springsteen; his words, fenced by weapons of Americana and swampy, twangy pastorals, will show you life and death through the necessary, oft-harsh artifacts found in-between. But there is beauty in that, just as there is beauty in Dollbaum’s new EP, Drive All Night. Tracked by Clay Jones in Mississippi two years ago, Dollbaum’s longtime co-conspirators Kate Teague and Josh Halper are back again, interpreting the sounds and movements of his folktales and histories.

Dollbaum likens these songs to James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” and it’s impossible to think of “Lives of Saints” or “Angus Valley” in any way but Wright’s poem’s concluding revelation: “I have wasted my whole life.” These songs stick with you, just as Dollbaum’s art always has. “I wrote Drive All Night after I learned that an old friend had unexpectedly passed away,” he says. “Even though we hadn’t been close for years, I spent a lot of time remembering him. These songs are my recollection of memories and places we grew up in.”

Stream the EP in full below.

 
Join the discussion...