Robert Lester Folsom

Songbyrd and U+N Booking Present

Robert Lester Folsom w/ Liz Cooper

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Sunshine Only Sometimes: Archives Vol. 2, 1972–1975 continues Anthology Recordings’ excavation, and exploration, of southern singer, songwriter, and psychedelic serviceman Robert Lester Folsom’s bountiful archives. Recorded across Georgia in various bedrooms, a barn, and a motel room with a reel-to-reel and a revolving cast of whip smart studio musicians in the first half of a dazed and confused decade, Sunshine Only Sometimes furthers Folsom’s place in the canon of long lost but eventually found independently spirited, high-flying American folk rock.

When Anthology’s reissue of Music and Dreams, the sole contemporaneous album released in 1976 by Folsom, surfaced in 2010, little else was known of Folsom’s nearly five-decade deep archive of unreleased demos and fully formed studio recordings. Born and raised in Adel, Georgia—both then, and now, a sleepy hamlet with a population of less than 5,000—Folsom was fortunate to be minded after extremely supportive parents. Exhibiting a precocious affinity for music, things went widescreen when he observed the same ferry from ‘cross the Mersey as many others of his generation, carrying the four musical moptops to their paradigm shifting appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Soon thereafter, Folsom began religiously absorbing every morsel of musical output The Fab Four offered, as well as that of their contemporaries. Yet, it wasn’t long before observation transformed into a motivation to create. Even a children’s record player bought by his parents as a gift to him was traded off to a neighborhood friend for a stringless, disheveled guitar (which Folsom’s father shined to prime and function for him in short order). As time went on, Folsom’s innate drive and field of vision broadened; he began enlisting neighborhood friends, classmates, and family members to fulfill his small-scale musical dreams, which would increase in weight with the passage of days.

Over the next several years, while employing ingenious, home brewed over-dubbing techniques with his “love at first sight,” a Sears 3440 two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, Folsom served as the de facto producer/arranger for any and all scrappy garage band or aspiring singer songwriter in the radius of Adel. Abetted by his mobile recording unit, across a number of unusual locations, and assisted by guitarist and collaborator Hans VanBrackle, this period produced the bounty of Folsom’s self-penned compositions which make up Ode to a Rainy Day and Sunshine Only Sometimes. And eventually, this period of woodshedding led to the formation of his rural-tinged, progressive, southern rock outfit Abacus. Though carrying Folsom’s own singular sound and vision, Music and Dreams, in equal measure, chartered the seas of smooth West Coast AOR before the yachts to come, while tracing the distinctly Californian sound of Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter soft rock Americana, which tussled on the waters before the large vessels overtook the big blue. Folsom’s earlier compositions found on Sunshine Only Sometimes reflect a darker-hued mixture of mellow folk, downer vibes, and rural tones, revealing his talent for melody and hook was intact far before Music and Dreams, with a keen sense of introspection making the dark and light equally resonant. Sunshine Only Sometimes offers up another sterling set of tonally-shifting, sub-underground, alternate timeline classic rock. The C&W-influenced, sprightly-pop of George Harrison—whose Dark Horse Records is one of a handful of record companies Folsom and VanBrackle submitted demos to—is invoked in the uber-melodic “Ease My Mind.” “Julie” brings to mind Nixon-era ragged ‘n’ ramshackled country-blues from the Glimmer Twins’ pen, and the semi-acoustic, heavily-flanged, out-of-time psych-pop of “Lonely Lovers” sits somewhere between a forward-looking glimpse at Music and Dreams and a demo from a would-be Cosmic American Music king.

Unlike similar iconoclasts with crystal vision who held forth with the oppressive thumb of a musical dictator, Folsom was ever in service of song, standing equally aside his collaborators, which uniformly engendered affinity and respect lasting to this day. While a tick higher than the second-tier, the mountaintop was always narrowly out his grasp. Though, with the right set of opportunities, bolstered by talent and drive, Folsom, if not as a stand-alone, star-quality artist, could have led the career of any number of songwriters behind the curtain who rode the magical musical continuum across the decades with faceless success. Perhaps it was Robert and company’s playing “weird spacey stuff and ballads,” as guitarist VanBrackle describes, in small town Georgia skating rinks, bowling alleys, and school dances expecting Top 40 dance-ready hits which held them down. Perhaps it was simply location. Though, the music of Sunshine Only Sometimes is composed of an intrinsic ability to hear the music truly playing, as opposed to the space in air heard by the lay-ear, which places Folsom’s music in a timeless space primed for perennial (re)discovery.

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The thing about finding yourself is there's always another corner to turn. The Vermont-based singer/songwriter Liz Cooper made her third album during a period of intense self-discovery and reinvention. She moved to New York for the first time, weathered a pandemic, came out to herself after falling in love with a friend, and experienced her first queer relationship and breakup, all in the course of a few years. New Day marks both a personal and a musical revolution for Cooper – a plunge into psychedelic pop depths and a fullhearted reflection of a whirlwind chapter in her life. These songs scintillate with the kind of self-confidence that only beams through after you've aimed a sharp gaze inward and realized that whatever you see will always keep darting ahead of you.

In making New Day, Cooper radically overturned her habitual approaches to making music. Rather than writing with a full band behind her, she recorded demos alone in her apartment, learning day by day to trust herself as she forged her new sound. “I needed to show up for myself to finish writing something that felt impossible,” Cooper says. “New York really challenged me to become a better writer, artist, and person. Living there made me ask myself, why am I making this? Why am I doing any of this? What's the point? I was tired of being pigeonholed as a guitar player and Americana artist. I needed to follow my own creative bliss.”

While recording, Cooper assumed production duties for the first time in her career, which enabled her to work bold new textures into each song. Together with co-producer Dan Molad (Lucius, JD McPherson), she wrung entirely new sounds out of her guitar with studio equipment she’d never tried before. For the album’s bristlingly optimistic title track, Cooper ran her guitar through a Kaoss pad synthesizer while Molad captured the sound by swinging a microphone around the room. They visited the War on Drugs’ studio to record feedback from Marshall amplifier stacks. Rather than focusing solely on composition and performance, Cooper took a sculptural and procedural approach to production. “Instead of writing my guitar parts note by note, I was experimenting on the spot,” she says. “It opened my mind up – and it felt really good.”