A singer/songwriter with a penchant for crafting warm and breezy soft rock/AM pop confections with a psychedelic twist, Robert Lester Folsom's one studio album (1978's Music & Dreams) amassed some regional attention upon its release, but remained largely invisible to the rest of the world until the Brooklyn-based indie label Mexican Summer reissued it in 2010. This reactivated Folsom's creativity, and he began recording and performing new material. Mexican Summer continued championing Folsom in the years that followed by releasing collections of archival demos like 2022's Sunshine Only Sometimes. Born and raised in Georgia, Folsom had his heart set on a music career from the very beginning, spending his formative years listening to the local AM radio station with his music-loving parents and soaking in the rich era's deluge of sounds, including Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. He played in bands throughout high school, eventually landing himself a Sears reel-to-reel four-track recorder, with which he began recording both himself and his friends. After attending South Georgia College he hooked up with the musicians who would eventually become his band Abacus, including Sparky Smith, Hans Van Brackle, Van Whiddon, and Jimmy Whiddon. The group honed their chops playing mixers, proms, and the like, eventually heading to Atlanta to look for a potential studio to record some original material. Unable to get on the same page creatively when it came to laying down tracks, Folsom made the decision, with some help from LeFevre Studios head engineer Stan Dacus, to go solo, though he ultimately enlisted the band's help in putting his songs to tape. Upon its release in 1978, Music and Dreams (only 1,000 copies were issued) garnered some airplay in both Georgia and Florida, but by the time Folsom got around to attempting a follow-up, the realities of life (financial and familial) had tempered his dreams of a career in music, and he became a full-time house painter. Folsom's career underwent a bit of a resurgence in 2010 after both Mexican Summer and South Korea's Riverman Music reissued the album in deluxe vinyl and CD editions. A collection of Folsom's old home recordings entitled Ode to a Rainy Day: Archives 1972-1975 followed in 2014. While new fans were discovering Folsom's '70s material for the first time, he was working on new material and in 2016 released Beautiful Nonsense, then in 2020 Abacus Atlanta Sessions. In 2022, a second volume of unreleased demos surfaced with Sunshine Only Sometimes: Archives Vol. 2, 1972–1975. Though culled from lo-fi home recordings made in the same time period as Ode to a Rainy Day, Sunshine Only Sometimes focused on more psychedelic and sometimes more somber material, offering up 12 more tunes from an archive that allegedly contained dozens and dozens of fully formed, if roughly captured songs. ~ James Christopher Monger, Rovi

Robert Lester Folsom, Kassi Valazza

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