The best
by Rob on 8/3/25The Drake Hotel - TorontoRating: 5 out of 5Best concert I’ve ever been to. Best band I’ve ever seen.

When Anthology’s reissue of Music and Dreams, the sole contemporaneous album released in 1976 by Robert Lester Folsom, surfaced in 2010, little else was known of the singer-songwriter's nearly five-decade deep archive of unreleased demos and fully formed studio recordings.
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, Georgia. 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. The music of RLF 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.
Best concert I’ve ever been to. Best band I’ve ever seen.