The ability to draw out the extraordinary from the everyday is one evergreen hallmark of engaging songwriting. Robert Forster has been sketching self-contained emotional vignettes and spinning semi-autobiographical yarns since his days in The Go-Betweens, the Antipodean high-water mark of guitar jangle. On his ninth solo album, Strawberries, Forster once again knits together the ordinary and the remarkable, furring the edges with a craftsman’s dexterity.
The ability to draw out the extraordinary from the everyday is one evergreen hallmark of engaging songwriting. Robert Forster has been sketching self-contained emotional vignettes and spinning semi-autobiographical yarns since his days in The Go-Betweens, the Antipodean high-water mark of guitar jangle. On his ninth solo album, Strawberries, Forster once again knits together the ordinary and the remarkable, furring the edges with a craftsman’s dexterity.
Take “Breakfast On The Train”, among the most involving songs this storied chronicler of the heart has ever penned. Beginning with just his guitar and laconic drawl, Forster spins out the tale of a night of loud hotel sex into a poignant epic – funny, dry, full of detail, told in retrospect over nearly eight elegant minutes as other musicians swell surreptitiously around him.
Aristotelian unities are at play – one night, plus breakfast; various locations in Edinburgh, selective contexts, nothing extraneous. “Fuck!” exclaims one of the lovers in the morning, a rare instance of earthy language in Forster’s catalogue, in sharp contrast to all Forster’s word choices throughout.
It all ends on the 9.04 train. “Love can be a winning game,” muses the all-seeing narrator; who sounds as surprised as Forster’s veteran listeners at this glad turn of events. We never do find out the result of the “rugby game in town” which, alongside the weather, plays as out as a subplot to the song’s action.
The other seven tracks on this self-contained album are no slouches either. A few are wistful, not least the unrequited love song, “Foolish I Know”, told from the point of view of a queer protagonist. But the overall feeling here is one of playfulness: Strawberries finds Forster in an exploratory mood, trying novel things out with a newish band. Some ideas are more fully realised than others – the bells on “Such A Shame”, for one, makes this touring musician’s lament strangely Christmassy. (More dry wit: “Why can’t you just play the hits?” moans a manager to the musician.) But Forster’s changes of perspective, of tempo – a little country, a little rockabilly on “Good To Cry” – keep things moving briskly.
More unities of space and time come into play, too. These songs were rehearsed and recorded in less than a month at Stockholm’s Ingrid Studios in autumn 2024 with producer and guitarist Peter Morén (Peter, Bjorn & John), Jonas Thorell on bass and Magnus Olsson on drums, musicians who had previously served as Forster’s backing band on Scandinavian tours in 2017 and 2019. The Hammond organ on tracks like “Breakfast On The Train” and the sax and woodwinds – “Diamonds”, “All Of The Time” – were supplied by additional fluent players from the extended Stockholm scene.
Ironically, perhaps, Strawberries does actually mark a return to more normal programming after Forster’s last outing, a record also extraordinary in its own way. The Candle And The Flame (2023) was recorded partly at home and partly in the studio, in bursts between the rounds of chemotherapy Forster’s partner Karin Bäumler was undergoing at the time. Their son Louis featured on electric guitar.
Bäumler is now well again, duetting with Forster on the title track like a more Pollyanna-ish Nico, concerned at the fate of a punnet of ripe fruit. But in the interstices of Strawberries you sense the long road travelled; a subtle gratitude in some of Forster’s asides.
The Beatley romp “Good To Cry” finds characters weeping cathartically in various locales – on an island, in a restaurant. But we’re not in crisis mode anymore. The breezy title track, indebted to The Lovin’ Spoonful, repeatedly wonders “what can ordinary be?” with a sense of blithe curiosity. Louis Forster’s eloquent guitar cameo on “Such A Shame” is another subtle link between then and now.
All of Forster’s explorations come to a head with “Diamonds”, a love song which begins as a kind of Velvet Underground pastorale, but swiftly pushes out in all directions. Forster’s voice becomes a strangled falsetto; atonal elements kick in, scoring the big feelings Forster is wrestling with before it climaxes in the skronk of Lina Langendorf’s free jazz sax. “Everything is good!/Lay down your arms!” Forster half-yells, half croons – to himself, you suspect, as much as anyone else.
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