Though he settled in New Orleans to hone his craft as a poet, the faces and voices of Florida still haunt Thomas Dollbaum’s songs. “Nothing good comes from Florida, including you,” he sings with a weary croon, and he could be singing about himself or that hooker “riding high with some trick” — or both. Indeed, the song “Florida” is the perfect lead track on Dollbaum’s debut, Wellwood, out this week on Big Legal Mess Records.
Imagine a Tampa kid who grows up seeing more than he bargained for. Caught between the metal and rap scenes, he holes up at home to write songs evoking the damaged, yearning souls around him. “Going to high school in Florida, heroin was becoming really big again,” Dollbaum says. “I wasn’t that involved with it, but a lot of my friends ended up getting addicted in the opiate epidemic. Seeing people you grew up with ending up lost, where you don’t even know where they are anymore, those kinds of stories have always been wild to me.”
Dollbaum is a songwriter who completely inhabits his characters. Points of comparison might be Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or other singers with a poetic bent, but unlike them, Dollbaum is writing from a land without a past. “Florida is cookie-cutter,” he says. “Everything’s new. Nothing’s got any history to it. People from all over move down there to start again. Everyone I knew as a kid was from somewhere else.”
The melodies are as sparing and unsentimental as the words, delivered unhurriedly, as when he sings “I walk hand in hand with my death.” The final result has a freshly minted quality, even where influences are apparent. Though the songwriters Dollbaum admires are in the mix, from the Silver Jews’ David Berman to Townes Van Zandt, Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young, every move grows organically from the songs, Dollbaum’s own distinctive voice, and the lives he conjures up.
As Dollbaum stresses, these songs are more than mere diary entries. “Even in poetry, everything’s moving more to confessional stuff. I just don’t have much interest in that. These are songs and characters coming from growing up in Florida, a mixture of my own life and some of it very fictional. Lou Reed does that too. A lot of it is made up, but he makes these interesting worlds. That’s always interested me.”
Music has always fascinated him as well, though not the polkas his father played on accordion in his youth. “I played bass first, until fifth grade or so,” he recalls. “And then I wanted to write songs, so I moved to guitar. I’ve always been playing music.” Extended family in Indiana both taught him guitar and introduced him to the music of John Prine, and folk-rock graced with a realist poet’s vision is what Dollbaum has aspired to ever since.
He first won accolades for his poetry, which in turn took him to the University of New Orleans. Having completed his master’s degree there, now laboring as a carpenter, he and friend Matt Seferian began recording the demos that grew into this album just before the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Work continued under lockdown conditions, as they slowly built up tracks that initially featured only acoustic guitar and singing. From those labors comes a painstakingly crafted album that sounds as airy, natural, and flowing as anything from the 1970s’ Golden Age of singer/songwriters.
But this isn’t the California of a half century ago. The setting of Dollbaum’s debut is more like today’s America: a broken land that wanderers still flock to, in search of whatever they can’t find at home. Perhaps growing up in such a land gives you a sixth sense for uprooted souls and the desperate dreams that drive them. They’ve burned themselves into Thomas Dollbaum’s mind in ways he may never shake. Instead, he builds worlds for them and invites us in.
Thomas Dollbaum appears with Bailey Bigger and Kate Teague at Bar DKDC on Saturday, May 28th, 8 p.m.