How sweet it is! Strawberries and other juicy surprises from Robert Forster
Robert Forster’s ninth solo album, Strawberries, is full of detail and experimentation – just the way his fans like it!
Robert Forster has just released a new album, Strawberries. His ninth solo record, the album comes a sprightly two years on from 2023’s highly praised The Candle and the Flame.
At 68, Forster, co-founder of The Go-Betweens, remains one of Australia’s most original songwriters. With Strawberries, he’s written a far more observational album than usual. He recorded the LP – quickly – late last year in Sweden.
“I wanted this one to come together in a concentrated way,” explains Forster over a mid-morning cup of tea in Brisbane. “When I flew to Sweden last year, I had this idea – to record it, mix it and meet the mastering engineer — all within a few weeks. I didn’t want months of emails and tweaks. I wanted to walk out of the studio knowing exactly what I’d made.”
The result is classic Forster – full of wry detail, subtle melodies and unexpected lyric turns. The title track was inspired, quite literally, by a punnet of strawberries.
“I’d written a melody on acoustic guitar during a holiday in Peregian,” he continues. “One afternoon I’d polished off a punnet of strawberries, and Karin (Bäumler – Forster’s wife) just looked at me, smiling. The line popped into my head: ‘Someone ate all the strawberries, someone could’ve been me.’ It’s not something you’d ever write down in a notebook. But it felt right. The whole song opened up from there.”
Karin joins him on the record, in a sparkling duet on the title track.
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“Karin’s always loved those Johnny (Cash) and June (Carter) duets, and she really wanted to do one,” he says. “We tried different arrangements – who sings which verse, what harmonies – until it worked. That was a lot of fun.”
Forster first met the album’s producer Peter Morén – of Peter Bjorn and John – backstage at Splendour in the Grass in 2016. The meeting eventually led to Forster visiting Stockholm to play a series of shows with Peter.
‘If I’ve got the budget, I want to make a record in a place that feels alive’
“I loved the idea of stepping into a different city, a different soundscape,” Forster says. “When I first went over to play shows, Peter had assembled a band. It just clicked. I thought, ‘We have to capture this on tape someday’.”
That “someday” came last year at Ingrid Studios in Stockholm.
“I’ve always had a romantic notion of recording,” he adds. “I’ve never been one to sit at home with a laptop. If I’ve got the budget, I want to make a record in a place that feels alive. It’s like a filmmaker going, ‘Where am I going to do my next film?’”
The sessions were deliberately methodical, with Forster and Morén spending time with just an acoustic guitar breaking down the material before bringing in the full band.
“That goes back to Grant and me,” he explains. “You make sure the song holds up on its own. Then, when you get to the practice room, there’s no panic.”
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One of the record’s standouts, Breakfast on the Train, runs over eight minutes – a hypnotic, live-to-tape performance.
“That song was a key,” he says of the track. “I’d wanted to make an eight-song album for years – the symmetry of it appealed to me – and that song tipped it that way.”
It’s striking how much space and air there is in the album’s final mix.
“That’s partly the studio,” says Forster. “You walk into Ingrid Studios and it’s like it’s 1971. Our mixing engineer usually works on pop and dance records, so he brought something modern but understood what I was going for. There was a moment on Breakfast on the Train where he’d separated my guitar and vocal too much. I said, no – this is a man standing at a mic with a guitar around his shoulders. Bring it back to that. And he did.”
Forster says he deliberately leaned away from writing in the first person.
“I wanted to get away from first-person explanation stories. I wanted to get away from myself a bit. And so, I just drifted into this sort of telling of stories. There’s a lovely ‘remove’ when you write that way. I really enjoyed that.”
We talk about humour in his work — always a hallmark. This is the man who wrote the classic line, ‘Why do people who read Dostoevsky look like Dostoevsky’ on The Go-Betweens’ Here Comes a City.
“It’s something that I’ve always been attracted to in movies, in music and in other things. Right from the start. A lot of what (Bob) Dylan was writing in the early, mid-60s, was very funny. Someone like Ray Davies has that dry, laconic humour.”
On Strawberries, Forster even experiments with falsetto, on the closing track Diamonds.
“I’d never done that on record before,” he says. “But it was one of those magic moments where you move your hand, find a chord, and just think, ‘I have to try and sing that’. I’m swallowed up by the band on that one, but going up high put me above it all. And it worked.”
Robert Forster’s Strawberries is out now on vinyl and CD and is streaming everywhere.