Robert Forster’s 2023 LP, The Candle And The Flame, was a personal affair—so personal, in fact, that the Go-Betweens co-founder was dead set on heading in the opposite direction for the new Strawberries (Tapete). It’s interesting, then, that the title track’s playful sparring was inspired by a run-in with a particularly tasty bowl of fruit while on holiday with his wife. Hence the pivotal phrase, “Someone ate all the strawberries.” But that’s more the exception than the rule on Forster’s ninth solo effort—an album dominated by stories focused on assorted protagonists, most of them nuanced and complex.
Strawberries was mostly tracked live at Stockholm’s INGRID studios with a band that included producer Peter Morén on guitar, Jonas Thorell on bass, Magnus Olsson on drums, Anna Åhman on keys and Lina Langendorf on various woodwind instruments.
Forester recently chatted with MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland about, among other things, the new album’s Swedish connection, his upcoming novel and the abrupt loss of Go-Betweens co-founder Grant McLennan.
“Strawberries” is the most personal track on an album full of character studies or story songs. Why did you decide to head mostly in that direction for this LP?
I wanted to try and get away from singing about myself in the first person. For a year and a half, I didn’t write anything. Then I found a way of writing that was a little removed from myself and grew into story songs. It was a gradual process—almost unnoticed by me. The “story” stories gathered, and I realized I had an album’s worth of material.
At eight minutes long, “Breakfast On The Train” is the album’s “epic,” so to speak. Discuss how that one came to be.
Thank you for describing the song as an “epic”—I haven’t written many songs that would fit that description. I wrote the melody and was looking for a lyric. While on tour in late March 2023, playing shows around the release of The Candle And The Flame, I traveled by train from London to Glasgow for the first show. I passed the dining carriage, and I suddenly thought about what kind of situation might result when a person or two people have breakfast on the train. Not morning tea, lunch or dinner, as usual—but breakfast. And so it started.
How did the whole the Swedish connection come about for this album?
In 2016, I met Morén from Peter Bjorn and John at a rock festival in Australia. He very generously offered to put a band together if I ever wanted to do a few shows in Scandinavia. The following year, we did five shows there, and I loved playing with Peter and the band—Jonas on bass and Magnus on drums. It was so good, we had to do something more. It took until 2024—and me having eight songs—for me to realize that the band and Stockholm were right and ready.
The 2006 death of your Go-Betweens bandmate Grant McLennan was so sudden. How have you dealt with it over the years? One would assume the Grant & I book was one way of processing it.
Grant’s passing was sudden and sad, and it took me years to process what happened and what it meant for me. I knew I had to carry on, and I wanted to write more songs. At the same time, I was working as a music critic and writing Grant & I. I was busy—and these were new things for me to do. That helped. In short, I miss Grant as a musician, but I miss him more as a friend.
Tell us a bit about your upcoming novel.
Ah, the novel. I began it in early 2017, wanting to tell a story. The early drafts were rough, so thank goodness it’s improved over time. The last touches are being done now, and I’m very happy with it. It’s set in June 1991, and the music world is involved and evoked.
