Robert Forster – Strawberries

Description

Picture one of our greatest living singer-songwriters in a kitchen. He is on holidays, he’s just had a swim.

His wife is out on the beach, and he finds himself faced with a bowl of irresistible strawberries. They’remeant to be shared, of course, but their taste is out of the ordinary, so he just can’t help himself.Minutes later all of the delicious fruit are gone, but there’s the germ of a song as the phrase Someoneate all the strawberries has just popped into Robert Forster’s mind, sounding so weird, but normal.Thankfully, he has taken his guitar with him.

As the story goes, his wife Karin Bumler not only forgave her husband, she actually joined him on a duetof what was to become the title song to his ninth solo album. What can ordinary be? is its wistful question,befitting the life’s work of Robert Forster who has perfected the art of being outr in a least ostentatiousway, from his time in the Go-Betweens to his solo career, now spanning almost three decades, interrupted only by the old band’s reformation in 2000 which ended with his songwriting partner Grant McLennan’suntimely death in 2006.

As that traumatic blow struck almost two decades ago, let’s bring you up to speed: Since then, Robert Forsterhas maintained a solid career on his own terms through tireless touring, writing (the books Grant & I and TheTen Rules of Rock’n’Roll, a forthcoming novel) and recording. Strawberries follows a recent spate of deluxereissues of four of his older solo albums as well as the 3rd and final volume of the career-spanning series of GStands For Go-Betweens boxsets with a much awaited helping of new material. Next to admittedly biggernames such as Bob Dylan or Nick Cave, Robert Forster is the rare case of an artist with a celebrated pastwhose current work evokes genuine interest among a faithful fan base.

But back to our scene in the kitchen, to Robert, Karin, a guitar and an empty bowl: As a straight-up personalsong, Strawberries is a bit of a red herring in the context of this new album that, unusually for Forster,deals almost exclusively in observational character studies or, as the author would have it, story songs.

The last album was very personaI, says Robert, I didn’t write anything for about a year after I’d finished’She’s a Fighter’ for the last album. And then I just started to write songs that were something a little bit else.They just came naturally. I didn’t really have a theme, it was just sort of lighter, a situation a little bit outsideof myself. And I thought that was good. That was a place I could go to.

The first song to point in this new direction was All of the Time, starting with the ominous couplet There’spropaganda and there’s truth / And there’s a feeling that I get when I’m with you. We never quite learn whatsinister plot lurks in the background, but these words combined with the subtle suggestion of a glam boogiegroove imply a certain clandestine sexiness not usually associated with the Forster canon. It was just thissort of language that I normally didn’t use, says the man himself, It meant I wasn’t going into my presentsituation. It just pushed me out there and made it less confessional. A lot more playful and and a lot morestory-orientated as well.

As it turns out, this storyteller who sees the world through the eyes of a film director, has a way withromantic fiction that is as emotionally involving as it is economical and free of all sentimentality, as show-cased on Breakfast on the Train, the obvious centrepiece of the album. At almost eight minutes length, ittells the story of a not-so casual romance between the two odd ones out in a bar full of rugby fans who endup spending the night in a hotel, laconically retold with possibly the most perfectly timed use of the wordfuck ever encountered in a pop song.

Inspired by an actual train journey through Scotland touring the previous album The Candle and the Flamewith his musician son Louis, this epic is an indisputable addition to the pantheon of Robert Forster’s bestever songs while Foolish I Know, a tender tale of unrequited same-sex attraction, has to rank amongst hisbravest and most beautiful. Louis Forster, by the way, also makes an impressive appearance on lyrical leadguitar in Such a Shame, the moving story of an exhausted young rock star ending on the beautiful line Noone I’ve met has seen me yet at my best / No.

As on most of the album, the narrator clearly isn’t Forster himself, just as he’s not the English teacher meetinga French woman in the album’s bouncy opener Tell it Back to Me. Your world so different to mine, Forstersings, I was corporate, you were folk. Clearly, this relationship was never going to last, but then again, asRobert observes in the next song, it’s good to cry. As his slapback echo vocals tuck into the rockabilly vibeof the song, you can hear Forster enjoying the company of his Swedish backing band: Producer Peter Morn (ofPeter, Bjrn and John fame) on guitar, Jonas Thorell on bass and Magnus Olsson on drums, crucially augmentedby Lina Langendorf on various woodwind instruments and Anna hman on keys.

The idea, writes Forster in his liner notes, was to arrive in a town with a clutch of songs, to rehearse, record andmix an album with local musicians over a number of weeks, and then leave with the record done. In this spirit,almost all of Strawberries was rehearsed and arranged to be tracked live, with very few overdubs, at Stockholm’sINGRID studios. Forster and Morn, a long-time fan from the times of the Go-Betweens, had met and bonded atan Australian festival they both played in 2016. They had toured together with the core of the Strawberries band(Olsson and Thorell) the year after that, so their musical common ground was well explored years before recordingsbegan.

It’s great working with someone who is truly an auteur, says Peter Morn, looking back on the intense, focussedfour week period working on the album in September/October 2024, That sense of direction that ‘This is what Ido, and this is who I am as I perceive it.’ He does what he does in the only way he can and changes and evolves inthat sphere, but never loses sight of his own personality and strengths.

I wanted to explode the sound of my records to an extent, is Robert Forster’s somewhat different assessmentof the collaboration, I wanted to just bring in new colours.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the album’s monumental closing track Diamonds, which starts off as across between Lou Reed and Buffalo Springfield, then takes off via Astral Weeks into an (almost) Albert Aylerdirection, with Lina Langendorf given free rein on the tenor sax and Forster himself relinquishing his trademarkunderstatement for some unexpected outbursts of falsetto. It might just be a challenge for the more conservativeend of Robert Forster’s fan community, and that, he says, is a good thing. I really love it. It’s the last song. And youthink you know the album, and you think you know Robert Forster. And then this last song comes in that’snot like anything I’ve done, you know, sonically and musically.

It all sounds much like the musical equivalent of a 67-year-old man standing in front of a bowl of strawberriesthat taste out of the ordinary who can’t help himself but gobble them all up. After all, what can ordinary be?

Tracklist:

A1 Tell It Back To Me

A2 Good To Cry

A3 Breakfast On The Train

A4 Strawberries

B1 All Of The Time

B2 Such A Shame

B3 Foolish I Know

B4 Diamonds