Singer-songwriter Thomas Dollbaum has an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans, so you would think he would apply his studies to his Americana-leaning indie rock songs.
Think again.
“Mostly I try to keep them separate because [for] music, it isn’t as important,” the 33-year-old guitarist says. “I mean, I like good lyrics, but melody is more important to me.”
While he acknowledges “that you’d write better lyrics if you understand poems,” there are pitfalls to trying to translate poetry into song lyrics. “If you try to make a poem into a song, it could be kind of bad, where the language doesn’t really fit,” says Dollbaum, who is headlining DC9 on Saturday. “If you write a poem and you’re really into it, then it’s hard to cut stuff. Making the music fit the words doesn’t always make sense to me.”
That doesn’t mean Dollbaum’s songs aren’t poetic. His second album, “Birds of Paradise,” opens with a clever bit of wordplay: “This long year has been short at the very same time,” he sings over an arpeggiated guitar line on “Visitation.” Later, on the jangly “Rabbits,” he paints a vivid picture of Florida, where he grew up and went to undergrad. “Chasing rabbits through a burned-out field/ Okeechobee in the early morning sun,” he sings. “Dodging tractors and their blades of steel/ Got to keep ’em on the run.”
Dollbaum was raised in the rural suburbs of Tampa, listening to Bob Dylan, John Prine, Damien Jurado and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, but there wasn’t a scene for that kind of music. Instead, he played guitar in a reggae-leaning jam band. “It was a very Florida vibe,” he says. His own songwriting was more Prine than Sublime, but he didn’t have an outlet for those songs.
When he moved to New Orleans to study poetry in 2015, he found community in the local DIY indie rock scene (not the brass, funk and Cajun-inspired bands the Crescent City is known for). “The New Orleans DIY scene is pretty underrated, especially at that time,” he says. “There’s just so much cool music going on in New Orleans, and seeing that was like, oh, this is a group of people that I would like to play music with.”
In grad school, he worked as a carpenter and later used coronavirus relief funds to open his own business because it was more lucrative than using his MFA to pursue academia. He released his first album, “Wellswood,” in 2022, toured and started meeting more like-minded musicians. At a gig in Asheville, North Carolina, writer Ashleigh Bryant Phillips introduced him to a guitarist named MJ Lenderman. They hit it off, and Lenderman ended up joining Dollbaum to play drums and sing backup on the November 2023 sessions that would lead to “Birds of Paradise.”
Record label issues left the album on the shelf for nearly three years before Dear Life Records, Lenderman’s onetime label, released it in May. In that time, Lenderman, who also plays guitar in the noisy alt-country band Wednesday, released his 2024 album, “Manning Fireworks,” to rave reviews and became one of indie rock’s biggest stars. Suddenly, Dollbaum’s brand of heartland rock was en vogue and his music sounded ahead of the curve, even if he didn’t feel that way.
“All the people in the same genre kind of were coming up at the same time, doing the same things, so not too ahead of the curve,” he says. “There was just a lot going on in the ether or something.”
Dollbaum has a knack for writing very specific, story-driven songs that mix real life with half-truths. Nature and Florida often play a supporting role. “I think that being specific, even though it’s specific, becomes even more general in the mind,” he says. “If you have a specific image, then someone can kind of grasp onto that and put their own [image onto it], compared to very general, clichéd language.”
Dollbaum clearly thinks a lot about language but says he doesn’t write much poetry these days.
“I would like to get back into writing more poetry,” he says. “But the songs are what I’m thinking about mostly now.”
Saturday at 7 p.m. at DC9, 1940 9th St. NW. dc9.club. $19.57.
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