{"product_id":"robert-forster-strawberries","title":"Robert Forster - Strawberries","description":"Robert Forster is the rare case of an artist with a celebrated past\nwhose 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 \n'She's a Fighter' for the last album. And then I just started to write songs that were something a little bit else. \nThey just came naturally. I didn't really have a theme, it was just sort of lighter, a situation a little bit outside \nof myself. And I thought that was good. That was a place I could go to.”\n\nThe first song to point in this new direction was “All of the Time”, starting with the ominous couplet “There's\npropaganda and there's truth \/ And there's a feeling that I get when I'm with you”. We never quite learn what\nsinister plot lurks in the background, but these words combined with the subtle suggestion of a glam boogie\ngroove imply a certain clandestine sexiness not usually associated with the Forster canon. “It was just this \nsort of language that I normally didn't use,” says the man himself, “It meant I wasn't going into my present \nsituation. It just pushed me out there and made it less confessional. A lot more playful and and a lot more \nstory-orientated as well.”\n\nAs it turns out, this storyteller who sees the world through the eyes of a film director, has a way with \nromantic fiction that is as emotionally involving as it is economical and free of all sentimentality, as show-\ncased on “Breakfast on the Train”, the obvious centrepiece of the album. At almost eight minutes length, it\ntells the story of a not-so casual romance between the two odd ones out in a bar full of rugby fans who end \nup spending the night in a hotel, laconically retold with possibly the most perfectly timed use of the word \n“fuck” ever encountered in a pop song.\n\nInspired by an actual train journey through Scotland touring the previous album The Candle and the Flame \nwith his musician son Louis, this epic is an indisputable addition to the pantheon of Robert Forster's best \never songs while “Foolish I Know”, a tender tale of unrequited same-sex attraction, has to rank amongst his \nbravest and most beautiful. Louis Forster, by the way, also makes an impressive appearance on lyrical lead \nguitar in “Such a Shame”, the moving story of an exhausted young rock star ending on the beautiful line “No \none I've met has seen me yet at my best \/ No”.\n\nAs on most of the album, the narrator clearly isn't Forster himself, just as he's not the English teacher meeting \na French woman in the album's bouncy opener “Tell it Back to Me”. “Your world so different to mine”, Forster\nsings, “I was corporate, you were folk.” Clearly, this relationship was never going to last, but then again, as\nRobert observes in the next song, it's “good to cry”. As his slapback echo vocals tuck into the rockabilly vibe \nof the song, you can hear Forster enjoying the company of his Swedish backing band: Producer Peter Morén (of\nPeter, Björn and John fame) on guitar, Jonas Thorell on bass and Magnus Olsson on drums, crucially augmented \nby Lina Langendorf on various woodwind instruments and Anna Åhman on keys.\n\nThe idea, writes Forster in his liner notes, was “to arrive in a town with a clutch of songs, to rehearse, record and\nmix an album with local musicians over a number of weeks, and then leave with the record done.” In this spirit,\nalmost all of Strawberries was rehearsed and arranged to be tracked live, with very few overdubs, at Stockholm's \nINGRID studios. Forster and Morén, a long-time fan from the times of the Go-Betweens, had met and bonded at \nan Australian festival they both played in 2016. They had toured together with the core of the Strawberries band \n(Olsson and Thorell) the year after that, so their musical common ground was well explored years before recordings\nbegan.\n\n“It's great working with someone who is truly an auteur,” says Peter Morén, looking back on the intense, focussed\nfour week period working on the album in September\/October 2024, “That sense of direction that 'This is what I \ndo, 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 \nthat sphere, but never loses sight of his own personality and strengths.”\n\n“I wanted to explode the sound of my records to an extent”, is Robert Forster's somewhat different assessment\nof the collaboration, “I wanted to just bring in new colours.”","brand":"TAPETE","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":53022075355478,"sku":"MRM-02793","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1000\/6088\/9430\/files\/3f1122b9f931650413e0dac29fa7f54f.jpg?v=1775201660","url":"https:\/\/monorailmusic.com\/products\/robert-forster-strawberries","provider":"Monorail Music","version":"1.0","type":"link"}