Drive All Night
out Sep 26, 2025 via Dear Life Records

Drive All Night is a new extended play from Thomas Dollbaum, six songs serving as a brief reintroduction to a singular and stirring voice on the southern landscape.

Dollbaum’s debut Wellswood was released in 2022, drawing comparisons of Justin Vernon and Damien Jurardo (Popmatters) to Richard Buckner and Arthur Russell (AllMusic) for his “compelling lyricism drawing as much from the dark caricatures of Harry Crews and Denis Johnson as Springsteen’s realism” (Beats Per Minute). Shortly after its release, Dollbaum drove along the gulf from his adopted hometown of New Orleans back to his family in Tampa. There, he learned an old friend had passed unexpectedly.
“We hadn’t been close in years, and finding out about his death sent me on a sort of journey through memories we had together, ” reflects Dollbaum, “places we grew up in and how sometimes you don’t understand how or why relationships change over time.”

On Drive All Night, Dollbaum excavates and reconstructs a sense of place from his past. Sometimes directly, like on the title track or “Lives of Saints,” which come across like conversations with that old friend. Sometimes indirectly, too: Dollbaum fills “Angus Valley” with amalgamations of people from his life as the protagonist loops around the titular neighborhood in a car going 110, itching for an exit sign. The ensuing “Whippits/Trailer Lights” is pure hushed tragedy, focused on a toxic couple trying to be sweet for once: “We can go up US 41 until it gets darker than the light can see / I got myself some cocaine from Joe, and maybe it will make you smile with me / Let’s get a smoking room, I got a motel up the street / We can fuck silence in the sheets, something to remember it.”

After the layered and labored recordings that became Wellswood, the songs from Drive All Night were tracked with ease by Clay Jones across 2023 in Mississippi, with Kate Teague, Josh Halper, and more from Dollbaum’s Nashville community joining. “William Duffy’s Farm” ends the EP on a cloudy note that pleases Dollbaum, and, like all good EPs, leaves the listener running it back until the new full length arrives. “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota is one of my favorite poems by James Wright,” he says. “Line after line is sort of a pastoral paradise, ending with ‘I have wasted my whole life.’ I love that ambiguity about wasting time, and I felt that fell well into the theme of Drive All Night.”