The realest-deal storyteller in indie-rock today is the Tampa-born, NewOrleans-based singer/songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, and Birds ofParadise is his most powerful and dynamic work yet.

Following up hiscritically acclaimed Wellswood (Big Legal Mess, 2022) and Drive All NightEP (Dear Life Records, 2025), Birds of Paradise is a goodbye letter to lostloved ones and former selves.

These songs find Dollbaum searching foracceptance in the transient in-between places: Florida's pine flatwoods,backroads leading to 1-95, where birds fly across the water.

And eventhough the ghosts of his alt-county predecessors Townes and Molinaare definitely present, on Birds of Paradise, Dollbaum emerges fromtheir shadows-waving to the past, sounding all the more like himself.This moment-this album-is long overdue.

Both of Dollbaum's previousreleases had taken way too long to record, due to circumstances out ofhis control, leaving him frustrated.

And after having been away from hishome for eight years, the place he had left was no longer the place heremembered, and the unchanging of the natural world felt like aconstant he wanted to write about.

With a sense of immediacy, he wroteBirds of Paradise in three months. Called up the musicians he trustedand admired the most-Nick Corson, Josh Halper, and Jake Lenderman-and asked them to meet him at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley,Mississippi with producer/engineer Clay Jones.

They learned andtracked the album in four days, capturing lightning in a bottle, a sonicrevelation Dollbaum's writing has always been waiting for.With the help of Lenderman, Halper, Corson, and Jones, Birds ofParadise is Dollbaum's hard-won breakthrough.

Alive and echoing likethe poems and short stories you can't shake: coyotes howl, birds flysouth, kids chase rabbits through the sugar cane, and cigarettes arefour dollars a pack.

Birds of Paradise reminds us where we come from-the things inside ourselves we've forgotten-we just needed Dollbaum toshow us.

Here's how to look back without fear or shame. Here'sauthenticity.