Robert Lester Folsom with special guest Kassi Valazza at MIssissippi Studios

Name: Robert Lester Folsom with special guest Kassi Valazza at MIssissippi Studios
Start: 2026-05-14T20:00:00-07:00
Location: Mississippi Studios

Schedule

Thu, 14 May, 2026 at 08:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Mississippi Studios | Portland, OR

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Robert Lester Folsom:
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.

Kassi Valazza:
"Sometimes it takes four or five tries to realize something just isn't working," says Kassi Valazza. "I wrote this after my thirteenth try." She's referring to the song "Roll On" specifically, but the stagnating pull of repeating patterns — and the brutalizing work of breaking them — inform every song on her new album From Newman Street. "In songwriting and in life, you can't keep expecting the same thing to work every time."
Valazza grew up between Prescott and Phoenix, Arizona. She penned her first song at age ten but in those early efforts to perform, found herself halted by stage fright of a clinical level. "I've gone to therapy for it," she says, half-laughing. She didn't stop writing music but she let less paralyzing means of expression lead the way, eventually enrolling in arts school for painting, an illustrative instinct that inevitably reveals itself in her vivid songwriting. It wasn't until she relocated to the Pacific Northwest as an adult that Valazza picked back up the proverbial — and actual — guitar.