Robert Forster – Strawberries (Tapete) (13th Floor Album Review)
Robert Forster, Ex-Go-Between and current solo artist has made Strawberries, eight literate, melodic and thoughtful songs that prove that age and creatively have little to do with each other.
Because, at age 67, Forster is making some of the best music of his career.
Like all of us of a certain age, he’s facing his, and his loved ones’ around him, mortality. Just a few years ago, his wife, Karin Bäumler was diagnosed with cancer and of course, his Go-Betweens bandmate Grant McLennan died in 2006…so he could be forgiven for making an album full of songs about death and disease.
But he hasn’t.
Instead, the Brisbane-based artist headed north to Sweden to work with Peter Morén (of Peter, Bjorn & John) to produce an album full of vitality and humour) mixed with the usual human foibles that make up our lives.
Forster has said that these songs are “something a little bit else”
Tracked “live” at INGRID Studios in Stockholm, over just a few weeks, with a small backing band, Strawberries immediately comes across as fresh and vibrant.
Tell It Back To Me gets things going with a jangle and a story…about an English teacher and a French woman who hook up briefly and then go their separate ways.
“I was corporate, you were folk” Forster observes, giving the listener just enough information to draw their own version of the characters…and I do like that harmonica that chimes in.
After the light-hearted urgency of Good To Cry we come to Breakfast On The Train as our hero counts in this nearly 8-minute tale of another tryst…this one between two old schoolmates who meet at a rugby game and connect.
Again, we get just enough information to form a picture in our minds.
“He remembers her from school…a year ahead, his sister’s year”, as she helps move the plot along…”the hotel was her idea, it was expensive but near”.
A beautiful, momentary simple twist of fate.
We hear Karin Bäumler duet with her husband on the title track…a melodic ditty that had me thinking of The Lovin’ Spoonful and Mamas & Papas via John Prine and Iris Dement.
Strawberries is populated with plenty of plots, people and poetry and every song has something different, yet equally delicious, to offer…just like that bowl of cherries on Paul McCartney’s first solo album. It’s a comparison Robert Forster has earned with his Strawberries.
Marty Duda
Strawberries: cd/lp/dd – Released 23rd May 2025 – Tapete Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.
