The touring outfit for Jacksonville-based singer songwriter Robert Lester Folsom (center) is made up of (from left): Jeremy Marshall Blanton, Landon Gay, Owen Barrett, Brooke Garwood, Jeremy Prince and Kevin Peacon | Tyler Valley
Published on September 22, 2026 at 4:02 pm
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Life as a touring musician is an endurance test: An ultramarathon of early-morning van calls and long drives, punctuated by fits of hurry-up-and-wait between load-in and soundcheck, all of which is borne for an hour or so under the stage lights (and, if you’re lucky, in front of an audience of ticket buyers). Boredom is a feature, not a bug. You either fish – build a tolerance for monotony, sure, but also gas station-cribbed sustenance and a severe lack of personal space. Or you cut bait.
Since the spring of 2025, the musician Robert Lester Folsom and his Jacksonville-based band have pounded the pavement, performing in all corners of North America. In between gigs in iconic venues from New Orleans to Nashville to San Francisco, the multigenerational ensemble has developed strategies for coping with the tedium of tour.
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“We like to find good coffee and, if there’s time after a soundcheck, we’ll find a thrift store,” offers Brooke Garwood (27, glockenspiel, background vocals), as members of the septet settle into a high-top table at Strings Brewery in Jacksonville Beach.
“We love to get tacos!” adds Folsom (71, guitar, vocals).
“If we have a night off, we might watch a stupid movie like Borat or something,” offers Jeremy Marshall Blanton (40, bass).
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The band’s enjoying a late summer respite after a run of nearly 30 dates that took them from Pensacola to Vancouver and wrapped in late May. As members of the group share road stories over pints of beer, their collective comfort with discomfort is evident in their ability to tune out – or at least tolerate – piercing screeches from a gaggle of unsupervised elementary schoolers running amok around Strings’ outdoor patio. (Missing in action on the evening of our interview are guitarist Kevin Peacon, 26, and L.A.-based hired-gun drummer Owen Barrett, 29.)
The group describes Folsom as an easygoing bandleader, a characterization that inspires an eyeroll and a hue of pink around the portions of the musician’s face visible between his Georgia Bulldogs ballcap and iconic facial hair: a flowing, Santa-Claus-white beard.
“Dude, you’re super flexible,” urges Landon Gay (29, pedal steel guitar).
“He wants everybody to have fun,” Blanton adds.
“Let’s turn that thing off,” Folsom says, smiling as he points to my audio recorder. “We’ll go off the record for this.”
A band, especially a road tested one, is like a family. And there’s a kindred kind of ease to the group’s interpersonal dynamics, which is complicated only by the small detail that none of the members of Folsom’s current band were alive when he cut Music and Dreams, an album of largely homespun cosmic country and psychedelic folk, in 1976. In fact, Folsom was younger than every member of his band when he recorded his magnum opus.
Given the age gap, the group regards Folsom with the reverence of a tribal elder. But they also razz him gently, as one would a peer, about a range of topics, including the heavy hand he deploys when strumming his acoustic guitar.
“It was Brooke that really made me aware that I didn’t need to strum so hard on stage,” Folsom says, before Blanton jumps in: “Dude, I gotta call bulls***! People have been telling you not to play so hard for years.”
In between rehearsals for an upcoming tour, the Jacksonville-based members of Folsom’s band have been performing with their side projects and working odd jobs. Gay teaches music lessons and plays folky singer-songwriter fare under the nom de plume Howdy. Jeremy Prince (28, keyboards, saxophone) also teaches music, and performs alongside Peacon in Garwood’s band Sun Child. Garwood co-founded a cold-pressed juice company, Galaxy Juice. Blanton, a longtime member of locally based retro-country group Dean Winter and the Heat, performs Americana-tinged tunes under his own name and bartends a few nights a week.
Among the band’s current lineup, Folsom’s actually the only one without a side hustle. After some three decades painting houses, he only recently quit to play music full time, due in large part to a touring schedule that, since he joined up with this group of Jacksonville musicians, has been newly demanding.
Band on a run
Folsom’s musical career dates back to the early ‘70s in his hometown of Adele, Georgia. But it was reignited in the early aughts, after the reissue of Music and Dreams. The album had been slowly amassing cult status, with pressings of the record floating around Japan, and shoutouts from prescient Millennial music bloggers and acclaimed indie artists like Noah Lennox (AKA Panda Bear) of Animal Collective fame. In 2010, the album was reissued by the ultra-hip Brooklyn label Mexican Summer’s Anthology imprint, garnering even wider critical acclaim for Folsom, who’d long since relocated to Jacksonville. But even after the reissue, opportunities to perform his music for a live audience were scattershot and inconsistent.
Enter Garwood.
In 2023, Folsom caught a Sun Child set at the Riverside Arts Market and introduced himself.
“He kept saying, ‘I’m Robert Lester Folsom,’ and I remember being like, ‘Why does he keep saying his full name?'” Garwood says to knowing laughs from the group. “I pulled up his music on the way home and was like, ‘Oh my god, that Robert Lester Folsom!’”
“I told her she reminded me of myself when I was her age,” Folsom remembers.
The two struck up a friendship, and, shortly thereafter, when Folsom was asked to play a one-off show in Chicago, he recruited Garwood to sit in on backing vocals and glockenspiel, an instrument she’d never played before. Struck by the audience’s enthusiasm, Garwood says she started needling Folsom about taking the show on the road for a proper tour. She cold called the Troubadour, the storied West Hollywood venue. The talent buyer turned out to be a fan.
“They called me back and were, like, ‘No way, really?’” Garwood remembers. With the Troubadour as an anchor, a West Coast tour fell into place. Members of Sun Child – Garwood, Peacon and Prince – would make up the core of the band, with Gay and Blanton rounding out the local contingent.
For Blanton, it was a full circle opportunity. He’s known Folsom since childhood, and his mother and older brother have both been in bands with Folsom. “We were estranged musically,” Blanton says, smiling at Folsom, who responds: “If we were estranged, I didn’t know it.”
Still, with a tour booked and an ensemble of eager and talented young musicians assembled, Folsom was skeptical an appreciable demand to hear him live existed, let alone whether the group could meet that demand. A local show, a kind of warm-up set for the tour, was poorly attended, Folsom says.
“It wasn’t until the San Diego show, the first real show of the tour, that I knew we had something,” he says. “There was nothing like that first time with this band in front of a crowd of people that had come to hear my songs.”
People came to hear the songs again in San Francisco: an audience of 500 at The Chapel. They showed up in Pioneertown when the band played the funky, Joshua Tree-adjacent outpost Pappy & Harriet’s. The band filled rooms in Colorado and Idaho and Seattle, the mostly Millennial audiences listening intently from the opening notes of the instrumental “Ode to a Rainy Day” to perennial set closer, the uptempo crowd-pleaser “My Stove’s on Fire.”
“It’s the sickest audience,” says Gay of Folsom’s fans. Like most members of the band over the course of several tours now, Gay has had the opportunity to perform his own music as an opening act.
“It’s a very listening-oriented crowd,” says Blanton, who called the opportunity to open a show “uneasy.” “It’s not like a drinking crowd, they’re not there waiting on the rock ‘n’ roll show. They’re really emotionally open.”
‘Lesterisms’
As they’ve learned Folsom’s catalog, each band member says they’ve gleaned much about songwriting: Chord changes and lyrical flourishes that the group refers to as “Lesterisms.”
Folsom’s idiosyncratic doctrine continues to proliferate. In April, Mexican Summer released If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes, the third installment in a series of archival excavations of the songwriter’s music. Later this year, they’ll celebrate Folsom’s delayed breakthrough with a remastered 50th anniversary reissue of Music and Dreams, which features rare demos and a cover by Millennial dreampop duo Beach House.
For its hometown audience, Folsom and his group will headline a small, limited-ticket anniversary event at Atlantic Beach bridal shop/speakeasy Be-In, before heading out for more than a dozen dates up and down the East Coast and across the pond in the UK and Europe. All this as – nearly two years and dozens of shows later – Folsom’s band hits its stride.
That a group of younger musicians has helped to bring Folsom’s music to a wider audience is fitting: It was a handful of Millennial artists and listeners who championed Folsom’s music in the years before its wider revival. As for why his music has resonated so deeply with audiences half his age, Folsom points to the ad hoc, what he calls “flawed,” nature of his ‘70s recordings, reckoning that it reminds them of something they missed.
“I think it takes them back to a time when music was a little bit more loose and raw, not so perfect,” he says.
“Now there’s actually kids bringing their parents to the show,” he says. “They’re turning their parents on to my music.”
