Music and Dreams: 50th Anniversary Edition

Some albums land like lightning; others slowly reshape the world around them. Originally self-released in 1976, Robert Lester Folsom’s Music and Dreams has travelled from hand-to- hand obscurity to cult classic status, finding new generations of listeners and renewed acclaim.

For its golden jubilee, Anthology Recordings now present Music and Dreams: 50th Anniversary Edition, an LP that pairs a remastered treatment of the album alongside the original reel- to-reel demos, adding new contour and colour to music that continues to find an audience in its own time. Never before released, the demo material has been miraculously sourced by Folsom’s longtime collaborator Don Fleming and mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Jessica Thompson.

The connection this music has forged with younger audiences isn’t so surprising. Folsom wrote these songs while he was still working through the same questions and uncertainties that come with growing up and falling in love, albeit from the perspective of a music-obsessed small-town visionary tucked away in rural Southern Georgia.

Alongside an early and undying loyalty to The Beatles, songwriters like Hank Williams, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Joni Mitchell gradually broadened Folsom’s sense of what a song could do.