Imagine one of our greatest living singer-songwriters in a kitchen. You’re on vacation, fresh from a swim. Your wife is at the beach, and he comes across a bowl of irresistible strawberries.
Of course, they’re meant to be shared, but their flavour is “out of the ordinary,” so you can’t help yourself. Minutes later, all the delicious berries are gone, but the germ of a song remains, as the line “Someone ate all the strawberries” pops into Robert Forster’s head, sounding “so strange, yet normal.” Luckily, he had his guitar with him.
As the story goes, his wife Karin Bäumler not only forgave her husband but also joined him in a duet that would become the title track of his ninth solo album. “What can be ordinary?” is his wistful question, befitting the life’s work of Robert Forster, who has perfected the art of being less ostentatiously extravagant, from his time in the Go-Betweens to his solo career, which now spans nearly three decades, interrupted only by the reformation of the former band in 2000, which ended with the untimely death of his songwriting partner Grant McLennan in 2006.
As that traumatic blow happened nearly two decades ago, let’s catch up: since then, Robert Forster has maintained a solid career on his terms through tireless touring, writing (the books Grant & I and The Ten Rules of Rock’n’Roll, a forthcoming novel) and recording. Strawberries follows a recent series of deluxe reissues of four of his older solo albums, as well as the third and final volume in the career-spanning G Stands For Go-Betweens boxset series, with a long-awaited dose of new material. Alongside recognisably bigger names like Bob Dylan or Nick Cave, Robert Forster is a rare case of an artist with a celebrated past whose current work is generating genuine interest among a loyal fan base.
But back to our kitchen scene, for Robert, Karin, an acoustic guitar and an empty bowl: as a purely personal song, “Strawberries” is a bit misleading in the context of this new album which, unusually for Forster, deals almost exclusively with observational character studies or, as the author would say, “story songs”.
“The last album was very personal,” 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 have a theme; it was just sort of lighter, a situation a little bit outside of myself.”
The first song to point in this new direction was “All of the Time,” opening with the ominous couplet “There’s propaganda and there’s truth / And there’s a feeling that I get when I’m with you.” We never quite know what sinister plot lurks behind the scenes, but these words, combined with the subtle hint of a glam boogie groove, hint at a certain clandestine sensuality not normally associated with the Forster canon. “It was just this sort of language that I normally didn’t use,” says the man himself. “It meant I wasn’t going into my present situation. It just pushed me out there and made it less confessional. A lot more playful and a lot more story-oriented as well.”
It turns out that this storyteller, who sees the world through the eyes of a film director, has a way with romantic fiction that is as emotionally engaging as it is economical and free of all sentimentality, as demonstrated in “Breakfast on the Train,” the album’s obvious centrepiece. At nearly eight minutes long, the film tells the story of a not-so-casual romance between two strangers in a bar packed with rugby fans who end up spending the night in a hotel, tersely retold with possibly the most perfectly timed use of the word “fuck” ever found in a pop song.
Inspired by a real-life train journey through Scotland on tour for his previous album, The Candle and the Flame, with his musician son Louis, this epic is an undisputed addition to the pantheon of Robert Forster’s greatest songs, while “Foolish I Know,” a tender tale of unrequited same-sex attraction, has to be among his bravest and most beautiful. Louis Forster, incidentally, also makes an impressive appearance on lyrical lead guitar on “Such a Shame,” the heartbreaking tale of a jaded young rock star that ends with the beautiful line “No one I’ve met has seen me yet at my best / No.”
As with most of the album, the narrator is not Forster himself, any more than he is the English teacher who meets a French woman on the album’s upbeat opening track, “Tell it Back to Me.” “Your world so different from me,” Forster sings, “I was corporate, you were folk.” This relationship was never going to last, but as Robert observes in the next song, it’s “good to cry.” While his echoing, slapback vocals fit the song’s rockabilly vibe, you can hear Forster enjoying the company of his Swedish backing band: producer Peter Morén (of Peter, Björn and John fame) on guitar, Jonas Thorell on bass and Magnus Olsson on drums, supplemented by Lina Langendorf on various horns and Anna Åhman on keyboards.
The idea, Forster writes in his footnotes, was “to arrive in a town with a clutch of songs, to rehearse, record and mix an album with local musicians over several weeks, and then leave with the record done.” In that spirit, almost the entire Strawberries album was rehearsed and arranged to be recorded live, with very few overdubs, at INGRID Studios in Stockholm. Forster and Morén, a longtime fan from their Go-Betweens days, met and bonded at an Australian festival they both played in 2016. They toured together with the core band Strawberries (Olsson and Thorell) the following year, so their musical commonalities were well explored years before recording began.
“It’s great to work with someone who’s a real gamer,” says Peter Morén, recalling the intense and focused four-week period working on the album in September/October 2024. “That sense of direction that ‘This is what I do, and this is who I am as I understand it.’ He does what he does in the only way he can and changes and evolves in that sphere, but never loses sight of his personality and strengths.”
“I wanted to blow up the sound of my records to an extent,” is Robert Forster’s somewhat different assessment of the collaboration, “I just wanted to bring in new colours.”
Nowhere is this more evident than on the album’s monumental closing track, “Diamonds,” which begins as a cross between Lou Reed and Buffalo Springfield, then takes off via Astral Weeks in an (almost) Albert Ayler direction, with Lina Langendorf giving free rein on tenor sax and Forster himself forgoing his signature voice for some unexpected bursts of falsetto. It may be a challenge for the more conservative part of the Robert Forster fan community, and that, he says, is “a good thing. I love it. It’s the last song. And you think you know the album, and you think you know Robert Forster. And then this last song comes in that last song I did, you know, sonically and musically.”
It all sounds a lot like the musical equivalent of a 67-year-old man standing in front of a bowl of unusually flavoured strawberries and can’t help but devour them all. After all, what could be ordinary?
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