The band Bread released the song “Baby I’m-a-Want You” in October of 1971. The single, a prime slice of soft rock, shot to number one on the Billboard Easy Listening chart with relative ease. The track is smooth, sensitive, and meticulously produced. It’s so slick that it is easy to write it off as AOR schlock. Doing so would do it a disservice, for the depth and beauty of author David Gates’ expertly cut jewel of a song not only taps into a universal regarding love but does so in an admirably honest and vulnerable way. Plus, the song slaps (to put it in modern parlance).
Of course, not every honest and vulnerable artist of the 70s had Bread’s access to top tier studios or engineers. Enter Robert Lester Folsom, a golden throated troubadour whose output challenges Bread’s own acumen and ethos in their shared genre.
By all appearances, Music and Dreams looks less like a neglected AOR classic and more like a shaggy cousin of Jandek, a work of outsider art that wormed its way into the public conscious via grail-questing record collectors and arch hipsters.
The cover, a robin’s egg blue, features a rough (mildly put) ink representation of a youthful Folsom. Charming in retrospect, it hardly would have put him on the map at the time, and no A&R person worth their salt would have let him get away with it. But that’s just it. Folsom didn’t have an A&R person, or a label, or access to most of the tools that one needed at the time to have a shot at success. He simply had talent, and loads of it.
Not to harp on Bread, but they share a rather pesky penchant of the era to split their output between ballads and rockers, though Folsom fares far better. Whereas Bread’s uptempo numbers feel like crowd-pleasing roof raisers, Folsom’s work is consistent in its intimacy: he never loses track of who he is. In fact, the strength of his album (originally released in ‘76) is in its steadfast conviction to mining honest feelings in as honest a way possible. Well, that’s one of its strengths. The other is that this guy can write one hell of a catchy tune.
Laid back, summery, misty-eyed, and unapologetically romantic, the twelve tracks on Music and Dreams flow languidly one into the next, accented by a slightly psychedelic charm (mostly down to the flange effects of certain guitars and vintage synths) and a lysergic penchant for hypnotically even pacing.
And hey, if all this talk about Bread and AOR music puts you off, consider that the tunes on Music and Dreams could just as easily be compared to the fragility of Big Star and co. at their most balladic, or Todd Rundgren at his most “Hello, It’s Me”-ish. Folsom’s opus doesn’t sound small, or lo-fi, or backwards in any way. It feels like the labor of love that it was, a star-crossed attempt neglected in its time.
