THE LETTING GO: HOW ROBERT FORSTER MADE TIME A WEAPON - part one
- Bernard Zuel
- May 21
- 5 min read
Updated: May 22
DAMN THAT ROBERT FORSTER. There he sits smiling at me benignly, magnanimously, with two of his finest, most enjoyable albums – The Candle And The Flame in 2023 and this week’s Strawberries – on hand, both having been made in his mid-60s. Is this late maturation, an Indian summer of creativity maybe, or is he just trolling those of us who are sliding into aged mediocrity, clinging on to what we did 20 or 30 years ago?
“I lean to the first option, obviously,” he chuckles. “I really don’t know. I thought I would be tapering off by this stage. It really does surprise me the quality of the material that I’m writing. The only thing I can really put it down to is I think I’ve relaxed.
“I think I have reached a point, it’s to do with age, where you let go a little bit and you look back at what you’ve done, and somehow that’s worked for me.”
Bastard. Nine albums into a solo career after two stints as one of The Go-Betweens, the beloved if not always bejewelled avatars of a certain kind of often droll, regularly passionate New York-meets-Brisbane pop music whose sound can still be heard in bands two generations on, and he’s “letting go”? The only letting go some of us are capable of now is of belts, suits bought 10 kilos ago, and unopened hair product.
“The other thing is I am still getting things out of the guitar,” says Forster. “I thought I had exhausted the guitar because I’m not a virtuoso player. I thought I had exhausted all the singer/songwriter tropes and moves some time in my late 40s/early 50s. I can remember very distinctly thinking this in my 20s and 30s: my guitar playing will eventually put me in a bit of a corner.
“But I’m finding new things on guitar and people who have seen me live with saying my guitar playing’s got better, and I started to feel that just before Covid. So maybe it’s a combination of the two: letting go and getting better on the instrument.”
Why is he more able to let it go now? What has he stopped worrying about?
“I think I have done good work, and I’m writing a novel. It’s very hard but I’m doing other things that I like so it’s taking attention off being just a singer/songwriter,” Forster explains. “I think that started when I worked for The Monthly [as their music critic, a job which earned him The Pascall Prize for criticism – bastard!] and that was a tremendous relief.”
Not focusing on your main job helps your main job? How that does work sensei?
“It was like if I’d just gone off to a part-time job working in a bakery or landscaping company. It was like ‘I’ve got this other thing’. I remember when The Go-Betweens went from 2000 to 2006, Grant would write endless songs basically and I was under the pump then, just like the first round of The Go-Betweens, to write material. But I think getting other things into my life, it’s a devil may care attitude.
“I see a song like Breakfast On A Train and I’m really surprised that I’m writing something like that, in a really good way. I’m amazed I’m still doing it … I’m in awe of it as well.”
There are two narratives being spun in the promotion of this album: the use of character-based rather than personal songs; and the album recorded in a quick burst in Sweden with local musicians and producer Peter Moren, once of Peter Bjorn & John. But there is that third element he’s mentioned, the other activities, that has underpinned it all: the decision to write a novel after a couple of non-fiction books.
Writing fiction, creating whole new lives and worlds, at least in theory, requires that Forster take himself out of introspection and towards exploration of others, which is in essence what writing character-based songs is about. Did these two strands run parallel or did one influence the other?
“I was wanting to take myself out of first person, narrative ‘confessional ’songwriting,” he says. “I thought I had done a bit too much of it, or I’d done enough. But it required a breakthrough.”
In a sense that breakthrough came through fate. After the intensely personal songs of his previous album, a couple of which were connected to the cancer diagnosis and treatment for his wife, Karin (Baumler, who has done some co-writing with him – you can hear her as well in the single, Strawberries – and is now doing well) Forster didn’t write anything for about 18 months.
“After I wrote [The Candle And The Light’s] She’s A Fighter, I couldn’t respond to any of that,” he says. “At times there wasn’t the time and space to do it, and I wanted to aim the camera somewhere else. Then suddenly I started to come into it from another angle, a little more playful, a little bit more distanced, and that opened it up.
“Perhaps that year and a half had to go by, and I made that very common discovery where you start to wander into a story and you realise all the choices you are making in that story are autobiographical in a way, but it’s not I did this or I did that.”
Instead he discovered the thrill of things happening organically in the story, whether it was asking why there was a rugby game on in background of Breakfast On A Train, or why characters in his novel moved the way they did.
“I’ve written one song just recently, the first song that I’ve written since the album, and this one is set 200 years ago. I don’t know how I got there, but again it’s a story song. The music is also a certain style,” explains Forster, who wrote his first songs some 50 years ago while in the thrall of both Television’s Tom Verlaine and television’s The Monkees.
“If you are writing a fast post-punk number, you can’t get story into it; it’s just [makes a brisk, cutting sound] but I wrote a piece of music that allowed for a story so I went into it, and realised after a couple of days, my God, I’m doing it again.”
And best of all … “I’m not the focus of the song, which is what I wanted.”
TOMORROW: Robert Forster gets into the weeds of character-building in and out of the studio, finding new musical friends, and why a novel just makes sense in his life. “Mistakes don’t matter. I’m not going to go back [in the studio] because people don’t really care or hear it. So you are perfecting something that doesn’t need to be perfected.”
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Robert Forster’s Strawberries is out on Friday.
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