Robert Lester Folsom with special guest Kassi Valazza

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.

 

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.

 

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.