02/11/2026
I remember Robert Lester Folsom when he came to my childhood home in Sparks, GA on Rountree Bridge Road. My father, investigative journalist and state editor of The Albany Herald at the time was writing an article about the young, serious artist. His wan voice and gentle disposition could almost hide how earnest he was about the music business.
His album release of Music and Dreams might not have gotten the listeners he wanted in the 1970s - think of all the heavy competition at the time.
But here's one for the myth makers - does true art from a true heart eventually rise to the top? In Robert Lester Folsom's world it does and has. He's a rarefied superstar these days, a far cry from his humble Cook County, GA roots.
The following is the cover story I wrote for Discover Cook Magazine.
The Right Kind of Star: Robert Lester Folsom’s Luminous Return
By Robin Postell
There’s a specific shimmer to certain lives—a frequency so attuned to grace that time seems to fold in its presence. Robert Lester Folsom is one of those rare beings.
You may not know his name. That’s part of the story. He didn’t “make it,” in the way we usually mean. No breakout hit. No platinum albums. No Grammy. But lately, something strange is happening. He’s playing sold-out shows at the LA Troubadour and Whisky a Go Go. Audiences full of young faces—some not even born when Music and Dreams was quietly pressed in 1976—now mouth every word of its songs like sacred text.
He’s still not famous. But he’s revered.
And something else is at play here—call it luck, call it grace, or call it the Muse. But whatever it is, it’s unmistakably working through Robert now, in a way it couldn’t have 40 years ago.
Music and Dreams: A Record That Refused to Die
In 1976, a 26-year-old Folsom pressed just 1,000 vinyl copies of Music and Dreams. It was a labor of love—recorded in Nashville with borrowed studio time and sheer will. The songs sounded like nothing else: earnest, melodic, dreamy, and unguardedly romantic. Not quite pop, not quite country, not quite rock. Maybe that was the problem. It didn’t sell.
Only about half the original pressings moved. The rest were boxed up, like an unsent love letter to a future that hadn’t yet arrived.
Decades passed. Robert married Sheila, raised kids, housepainted for a living, kept playing music when he could. Occasionally, a bootleg of Music and Dreams surfaced in Europe or Japan, One day, a small boutique label out of New York called Anthology Recordings tracked Robert down and reissued the album. That was 2010. Nothing much happened—at first.
But a slow burn had started.
The Long Game of Grace
By 2014, the mystique had grown. Cult vinyl collectors had started whispering about the album like it was a Rosetta Stone of indie dream-pop.
Young artists claimed it as a secret influence.
Robert reached out to buy the rights to some old photos taken by Charles Postell—my father, a Southern journalist who’d interviewed Folsom in 1976 for the Albany Herald. That day, Robert had stood beside our pool in Sparks, Georgia, with the open-hearted smile of someone about to take on the world. My father caught that glimmer in the lens.
So did I.
It wasn’t until 2024 that I asked Robert, flat-out, “Did you keep playing all those years?” I had only half-assed the original interview. The truth felt buried under decades of modesty and dust.
His answer was quiet and honest: “Not really.”
There was no bitterness in it. No ego. Just the kind of humility that can only come from someone who followed the muse even when no one else was listening.
Synchronicity, Reverb, and the Unicorn’s Horn
The last couple of years? Something’s shifted. There’s been a tangible uptick in synchronicities, uncanny openings, and what I call “unicorn horn moments”—when magic pierces the veil.
It started when musicians half Robert’s age began reaching out. In May 2024, he went on tour with a new band, mostly 20- and 30-somethings. “I didn’t expect to make any money,” he told me. “I just wanted to play.”
But he did make money. More than he expected. More than he had from music in decades. And better than money, he found something transcendent: connection.
His shows don’t feel like nostalgia trips. They feel like baptisms.
It’s not uncommon to see 19-year-olds crying during My Stove’s On Fire, or twenty-something men with tattooed arms swaying like schoolboys during See You Later I’m Gone.
And maybe that’s because Robert never quite belonged to the era he was born into. He wrote from a future that hadn’t yet arrived. Until now.
The Sound of What’s Real
Robert’s music is sincere in a way that makes cynics squirm. He didn’t posture. He didn’t chase trends. He didn’t try to be the next Plant or Dylan or McCartney. He was just Robert—a kid from Sparks who picked up a guitar in the fourth grade and started writing songs about love, longing, and the interior life of a heart too pure for the machine of the music industry.
And that purity is why he’s resonating now. His songs feel real in a world saturated by artifice. They have the ring of truth, the tremble of lived-in grace.
In our conversations, he mentioned his long-time friend and bandmate, Hans VanBrackle, also a Cook County native. Hans now lives in Texas, playing in a cover band. “I feel bad about that,” Robert confessed. “There’s this stigma attached to cover bands, but Hans is a real musician.”
They’re reuniting for an upcoming show in Austin—just one more full-circle moment in a season full of them.
A Return That Wasn’t a Comeback
The story feels supernatural because it is. Not in the ghosts-and-orbs sense, but in the way it bypasses logic entirely.
You don’t sell out the Troubadour at 71 years old by planning for it. You don’t re-emerge as a cult icon four decades after your only record quietly flopped.
You don’t write songs at 21 that only find their audience once you’ve got white in your beard and grandkids on your lap.
Unless…
Unless the Muse had a longer arc in mind. Unless the stars weren’t aligned in the ‘70s because they were saving their glitter for a time when the world needed what you had to say. Needed softness. Needed sincerity. Needed something real.
The Dream Continues—December 13 in Jacksonville
Robert Lester Folsom will be playing his home base of Jacksonville, Florida on December 3. I’m going. I’ll bring Anna-Marie and my nephew Will, who’s finding his own voice as a musician. The timing is right.
There’s something electric in the air, a convergence.
We won’t call it a comeback. That implies he left. He didn’t. He just wasn’t heard.
But now?
Now the world’s ears are open.
RLF's next show dates:
- March 17 in New Orleans
- March 20: Dallas, TX
NEW ALBUM RELEASE ON MARCH 20, 2026
