“The last album was very personal,” notes Go-Betweens co-founder Robert Forster of 2023’s The Candle & The Flame, After taking a year off from writing, the songs began to flow again and he found them to be in a lighter mood. “A situation a little bit outside of myself, Robert says, “and I thought that was good. That was a place I could go to.” Strawberries consists of eight character sketches, all with Forster’s still keen eye for detail and ear for dialogue. The album was made in Stockholm with producer Peter Morén of Peter Bjorn and John, who also plays guitar throughout as part of an all-Swedish band that includes Jonas Thorell on bass and Magnus Olsson (The Last Days of April) on drums, with Lina Langendorf on woodwinds and Anna Åhman on keys. Forster’s songwriting style, indebted to Lou Reed, David Byrne and Bob Dylan, hasn’t changed much since The Go-Betweens and he remains at his literate best here. It’s a great album and you can listen below.
For more on Strawberries, Robert was nice enough to pick five influences for the album, which he groups in interesting ways and includes more than five artists. Those include Television, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Vampire Weekend, Albert Ayler and more. You can watch Robert tell us about them and read it as well, below.
Robert Forster – Five Influences on ‘Strawberries’
Eight-Song Albums
An influence doesn’t have to be musical. It can also be structural. And this is my first eight-song album. I’ve wanted to make an eight song album for decades. The first really strong one for me was Marquee Moon by Television, and I just used to look at those four songs on each side, and it was just so neat and beautiful. I used to listen to that a lot in the late ’70s, in the mid-’90s, I listened a lot to Roberta Flack’s first album, First Take, and that has got four tracks a side. I listened to that intently. Gene Clark’s No Other is another one. Anyway, eight songs: always wanted to do it. Loved albums that did it. Now it’s on this one.
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New York Bands The Lovin’ Spoonful, Talking Heads, and Vampire Weekend
The second influence, or shading on what I did with this record, is there’s three New York bands that I love: The Lovin’ Spoonful, Talking Heads and Vampire Weekend. And to me, these bands are the same — they just do the same thing, but in different decades with different sounds. But all three bands are trying to make brave, intelligent pop music, and I hope that’s always been a part of what I’ve done right back from the late ’70s. So the first two songs of the album, I can hear echoes of that on “Tell It Back To Me” and “Good to Cry.”
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Leonard Cohen – “You Want it Darker”
You Want it Darker, from his late period, I hadn’t heard much of. But I’d read a book recently, two books actually, written by a Canadian journalist who’s interviewed all of Leonard Cohen’s contemporaries. And that really opened my mind to Leonard more. And then I listened to his late period stuff and it’s really, really strong. And on Strawberries, I’d been wanting to get away from doing first-person stuff. I was tired of all the “I did this, I did that” — I wanted to keep writing songs, but from different viewpoint with a different narrator, and Leonard helped me. I only use this on one song, “All of the Time,” which is Track 1, Side 2, and the lyric is unusual for me. “There’s propaganda and there’s truth, and there’s a feeling that I get whether I’m with you.” Second verse: “There is surveillance that no one knew, and there’s a feeling that I get when I’m with you.” [Begins to whisper] I’m trying to do a little bit Leonard here, “There was a murder with just one clue, and there’s a feeling that I get when I’m with you. There are sensations, they just aren’t true. And there’s a feeling that I get when I’m with you.”
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Bob Dylan
He’s been someone that I’ve been with all along. I don’t know how much he ever flowed into my songwriting, but there’s a strain of his songs that like, songs like “Visions of Johanna” or “Tangled Up in Blue,” or “Standing in the Doorway” or “Highlands” where Dylan starts a seven or eight minute song and it’s quite simple, musically, and then you just float, the song just goes, no new instrumentation comes in. It’s just this sort of rhythmic core of melody and sound, and he tells a story over it. It’s a very, very hard thing to do. I thought it was beyond my reach, and I didn’t think it might’ve been in my style, although I wished that it was. Anyway, there’s a song on the album that’s eight minutes, which is two minutes longer than anything I’ve ever written. It’s called “Breakfast on the Train.” And I flattered myself to think that it just might be in that train of songs that I just mentioned.
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Albert Ayler
The last influence, that’s the wrong word, it’s flavor that you don’t even see coming. You think of influencers and you think, oh, it’s you sitting around with the record collection and just soaking it all up and then writing the songs. Sometimes something can come from your past and it’s just like a really minor thing on the record but then it sticks in your mind when you look back. The last song on the album, “Diamonds,” is an unusual song for me. It’s got a quiet verse, but a big bolshy chorus. It’s a real loud and quiet dynamic. And the band who, the Swedish band with Peter Moren producing, they were handling it beautifully. We’re in the practice room just before we recorded, and Lena, who was playing the saxophone, she was playing in the choruses too, and they were sounding fantastic. We decided on the third chorus that we’d have an instrumental fake chorus. So we’d go from the third verse and then suddenly, instead of me singing wailing, we’d come in with really a thick sax texture, although she was playing on other stuff. I was standing in the practice room and she just looked at me. Lena, who’s a wonderful person, a great player, she just said to me, “What do you want? What should I play here?” And in that moment, I just said, “Albert Ayler.” And believe me, I’m no jazz aficionado, know very little of the music, but Albert Ayler, I heard a bit in the early ’80s, and I knew that that signified something. And she went, “yeah, great.” And we went through, played it the next time in the practice room, and she just was fantastic. And so, I mean, that’s not really a musical influence. It’s just a moment where a musician looks at you and asks you what you’re thinking of, and a word just comes out that describes what you want. And in that moment, although you haven’t listened to that artist in decades, and suddenly that becomes an important little component on the album.
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