BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//360exp//Calendar//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:360exp REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VEVENT UID:23cdec38-8252-4aaa-a3a8-5b5d8c2e4d46@360exp.net SEQUENCE:29842997 DTSTAMP:20260928T175222Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260928T071707Z DTSTART:20261008T230000Z DTEND:20261009T030000Z SUMMARY:Robert Lester Folsom LOCATION:Songbyrd DESCRIPTION:Songbyrd and U+N Booking Present\n\nRobert Lester Folsom w/ Liz Cooper\n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\nSunshine Only Sometimes: Archives Vol. 2\, 1972– 1975 continues Anthology Recordings’ excavation\, and exploration\, of s outhern singer\, songwriter\, and psychedelic serviceman Robert Lester Fol som’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 lo st but eventually found independently spirited\, high-flying American folk rock.\n\nWhen Anthology’s reissue of Music and Dreams\, the sole contem poraneous album released in 1976 by Folsom\, surfaced in 2010\, little els e was known of Folsom’s nearly five-decade deep archive of unreleased de mos 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 paren ts. Exhibiting a precocious affinity for music\, things went widescreen wh en he observed the same ferry from ‘cross the Mersey as many others of h is generation\, carrying the four musical moptops to their paradigm shifti ng appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Soon thereafter\, Folsom began reli giously absorbing every morsel of musical output The Fab Four offered\, as well as that of their contemporaries. Yet\, it wasn’t long before obser vation 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 neighbo rhood friend for a stringless\, disheveled guitar (which Folsom’s father shined to prime and function for him in short order). As time went on\, F olsom’s innate drive and field of vision broadened\; he began enlisting neighborhood friends\, classmates\, and family members to fulfill his smal l-scale musical dreams\, which would increase in weight with the passage o f days.\n\nOver the next several years\, while employing ingenious\, home brewed over-dubbing techniques with his “love at first sight\,” a Sear s 3440 two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder\, Folsom served as the de fact o 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 colla borator Hans VanBrackle\, this period produced the bounty of Folsom’s se lf-penned compositions which make up Ode to a Rainy Day and Sunshine Only Sometimes. And eventually\, this period of woodshedding led to the formati on 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 ya chts to come\, while tracing the distinctly Californian sound of Laurel Ca nyon singer-songwriter soft rock Americana\, which tussled on the waters b efore the large vessels overtook the big blue. Folsom’s earlier composit ions found on Sunshine Only Sometimes reflect a darker-hued mixture of mel low folk\, downer vibes\, and rural tones\, revealing his talent for melod y and hook was intact far before Music and Dreams\, with a keen sense of i ntrospection making the dark and light equally resonant. Sunshine Only Som etimes offers up another sterling set of tonally-shifting\, sub-undergroun d\, 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 ube r-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 Lover s” sits somewhere between a forward-looking glimpse at Music and Dreams and a demo from a would-be Cosmic American Music king.\n\nUnlike similar i conoclasts with crystal vision who held forth with the oppressive thumb of a musical dictator\, Folsom was ever in service of song\, standing equall y aside his collaborators\, which uniformly engendered affinity and respec t lasting to this day. While a tick higher than the second-tier\, the moun taintop 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 acro ss the decades with faceless success. Perhaps it was Robert and company’ s playing “weird spacey stuff and ballads\,” as guitarist VanBrackle d escribes\, in small town Georgia skating rinks\, bowling alleys\, and scho ol dances expecting Top 40 dance-ready hits which held them down. Perhaps it was simply location. Though\, the music of Sunshine Only Sometimes is c omposed of an intrinsic ability to hear the music truly playing\, as oppos ed to the space in air heard by the lay-ear\, which places Folsom’s musi c in a timeless space primed for perennial (re)discovery.\n\n\\*\\*\\*\n\n The thing about finding yourself is there's always another corner to turn. The Vermont-based singer/songwriter Liz Cooper made her third album durin g a period of intense self-discovery and reinvention. She moved to New Yor k for the first time\, weathered a pandemic\, came out to herself after fa lling 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 pers onal and a musical revolution for Cooper – a plunge into psychedelic pop depths and a fullhearted reflection of a whirlwind chapter in her life. T hese songs scintillate with the kind of self-confidence that only beams th rough after you've aimed a sharp gaze inward and realized that whatever yo u see will always keep darting ahead of you.\n\nIn 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 apa rtment\, 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 i mpossible\,” Cooper says. “New York really challenged me to become a b etter 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 tire d of being pigeonholed as a guitar player and Americana artist. I needed t o follow my own creative bliss.”\n\nWhile recording\, Cooper assumed pro duction duties for the first time in her career\, which enabled her to wor k bold new textures into each song. Together with co-producer Dan Molad (L ucius\, JD McPherson)\, she wrung entirely new sounds out of her guitar wi th studio equipment she’d never tried before. For the album’s bristlin gly optimistic title track\, Cooper ran her guitar through a Kaoss pad syn thesizer while Molad captured the sound by swinging a microphone around th e room. They visited the War on Drugs’ studio to record feedback from Ma rshall amplifier stacks. Rather than focusing solely on composition and pe rformance\, 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.”\n\nBoletos: https://dice.fm/event/mx9kov-robert-lester-folsom-8t h-oct-songbyrd-washington-dc-tickets URL;VALUE=URI:https://360exp.net/events/23cdec38-8252-4aaa-a3a8-5b5d8c2e4d4 6 STATUS:CONFIRMED END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR