Widowspeak w/ Thomas Dollbaum

Widowspeak’s seventh album Roses explores love, longing, and everyday restlessness through intimate, cinematic scenes. The songs use small moments—pouring water at work, catching a cold on a day off, daydreaming about escape—to reflect deeper questions about purpose and connection. It’s their most romantic and most realist record, where love becomes both subject and lens: the light that keeps life moving even when it hurts.

Core members Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas have spent sixteen years shaping Widowspeak’s lush, naturalistic‑meets‑noir sound. From early days in NYC’s DIY scene to years of touring highs and quiet off‑seasons, they’ve grown into a band that thrives on slow, steady evolution. Now married and working day jobs between records, they recorded Roses on the Greek island of Hydra with longtime collaborators, later finishing it with Alex Farrar and Greg Obis.

Drawing on dream‑pop, power‑pop, Americana, and classic influences from Petty to Cat Power, Roses highlights the duo’s signature interplay: Hamilton’s textured vocals and Thomas’s evocative guitar work. The album captures the raw magic of songs found in the studio—fragile, real, and deeply human.

Tampa‑born, New Orleans–based songwriter Thomas Dollbaum returns with Birds of Paradise, his most powerful work yet. Following Wellswood and Drive All Night, this album serves as a farewell to lost loved ones and former selves, set against the landscapes of Florida backroads and the liminal spaces where memory lingers.

Written in three months and recorded live in four days with trusted collaborators Nick Corson, Josh Halper, Jake Lenderman, and producer Clay Jones, the album captures the immediacy Dollbaum had long been chasing. His storytelling—gritty, generous, and steeped in Southern complexity—evokes writers like Townes Van Zandt and Jason Molina while carving out a voice unmistakably his own.

Songs like “Big Boi,” “Pulverize,” and “King’s Landing” move between dark humor, danger, childhood imagination, and the search for escape. Birds of Paradise is Dollbaum’s breakthrough: vivid, lived‑in, and echoing like the short stories you can’t shake, reminding us where we come from and how to look back without fear.