Robert Forster - Strawberries LP Vinyl RecordSKU UMA86775Barcode 4015698867756Manufacturer Robe FactoryBrand Robert ForsterMusic Genre Alternative / Indie, RockDimensions 12" Robert Forster – Strawberries LP Vinyl Record Strawberries is the stunning new solo album from Robert Forster—co-founder of Brisbane indie legends The Go-Betweens and one of Australia's most revered singer-songwriters. Marking his ninth solo effort, this intimate and reflective release begins with a quiet moment of inspiration: on holiday, post-swim, alone in the kitchen with a bowl of strawberries. The phrase “Someone ate all the strawberries” becomes the seed of a song, blossoming into an album full of warmth, honesty, and musical magic. Recorded over four weeks at Ingrid Studios in Stockholm, Strawberries is a testament to collaboration and creative trust. Produced by Peter Moren (Peter Bjorn and John), the record captures Forster in peak form, weaving personal memories into melodic storytelling. “I walked in and out with an album,” Robert says, “none of it possible without the extraordinary support and musical magic I got from everyone involved.” TRACKLIST SIDE A Tell It Back To MeGood To Cry Breakfast On The Train Strawberries SIDE B All Of The Time Such A ShameFoolish I Know Diamonds DescriptionRobert Forster is the rare case of an artist with a celebrated past whose current work continues to dominate our affections. "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 outside of 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's propaganda and there's truth / And there's a feeling that I get when I'm with you". We never quite learn what sinister plot lurks in the background, but these words combined with the subtle suggestion of a glam boogie groove imply a certain clandestine sexiness not usually 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 and a lot more story-orientated as well." As it turns out, this storyteller who sees the world through the eyes of a film director, has a way with romantic 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, it tells the story of a not-so casual romance between the two odd ones out in a bar full of rugby fans who end up spending the night in a hotel, laconically retold with possibly the most perfectly timed use of the word "fuck" ever encountered in a pop song. Inspired by an actual train journey through Scotland touring the previous album, 'The Candle and the Flame', with his musician son, Louis, this epic is an indisputable addition to the pantheon of Robert Forster's best ever songs while "Foolish I Know", a tender tale of unrequited same-sex attraction, has to rank amongst his bravest and most beautiful. Louis Forster, by the way, also makes an impressive appearance on lyrical lead guitar in "Such a Shame", the moving story of an exhausted young rock star ending on the beautiful line "No one 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 meeting a French woman in the album's bouncy opener "Tell it Back to Me". "Your world so different to mine", Forster sings, "I was corporate, you were folk." Clearly, this relationship was never going to last, but then again, as Robert observes in the next song, it's "good to cry". As his slapback echo vocals tuck into the rockabilly vibe of the song, you can hear Forster enjoying the company of his Swedish backing band: Producer Peter Moren (of Peter, Bjorn and John fame) on guitar, Jonas Thorell on bass and Magnus Olsson on drums, crucially augmented by Lina Langendorf on various woodwind instruments and Anna Ahman on keys. The idea, writes Forster in his liner notes, was "to arrive in a town with a clutch of songs, to rehearse, record and mix 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's INGRID studios. Forster and Moren, a long-time fan from the times of the Go-Betweens, had met and bonded at an 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 recordings began. "It's great working with someone who is truly an auteur," says Peter Moren, looking back on the intense, focussed 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 perceive 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 own personality and strengths." "I wanted to explode the sound of my records to an extent", is Robert Forster's somewhat different assessment of the collaboration, "I wanted to just bring in new colours."
