Robert Forster – The sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday
“The decisions to record those albums where I did were some of the bravest I’ve made,” Forster says. “I mean, I had to make records that sold. I might have gotten further if I based myself in London, put all my chips there, gotten a budget and worked with name producers. But I had to follow my heart.
“I love the fact that those are three very different records, because they were recorded so differently. Place and location were always enormously important to Grant and me. We talked about doing a Paris album, a Dublin album, a Lisbon album. Being in a place during the four to six weeks it takes to make a record seeps in. It gives character to a record.”
Forster didn’t mention the 1995 covers album, from which he included only one song, Newbury’s “Frisco Depot”, on Intermission, a great 2007 collection consisting of one disc of Forster songs chosen and sequenced by him, and one chronological disc of McLennan tunes chosen by him shortly before his death. (McLennan made four solo albums, including 1995’s remarkable nineteen-song Horsebreaker Star, recorded in Athens, Georgia, with Syd Straw prominently featured on backup vocals.)
The covers record, with its painful rendition of Spirit’s “Nature’s Way” and a decidedly unresonating version of Martha & the Muffins’ “Echo Beach”, induces a bit of head-scratching. But it also has its strong moments, the most appealing of which is Forster’s handling of Bob Dylan’s “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” from Nashville Skyline. Like other talking-singing vocalists, Forster has had his delivery compared to Dylan’s. Here, he puts a knowing smile on the great one’s mannerisms, as only a Dylanologist could.
Forster shared his Dylanian insights in a column for The Monthly, in which he ranks Blood On The Tracks as the artist’s greatest achievement and the Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out Of Mind as his best recent work. As much as he admires Dylan, though, he had no qualms calling him out for underachieving on 2006’s Modern Times — or calling the rock press out for over-praising the album.
In Forster’s estimation, Modern Times needed a better producer than “Jack Frost,” Dylan’s nom de studio. “The songs need more,” he wrote, “especially when Dylan calls upon a set of pre-rock ‘n’ roll influences, as he increasingly does. Lanois understood this: Those old records had atmosphere and they had arrangements. Dylan is arrangement-shy and always has been. A typical Dylan-produced song, in the studio or on stage, consists of all the musicians starting together and finishing when Dylan gives them the nod. No one sits out. No one comes in just for a chorus. It’s all pretty flat, and that’s fine when the songs are topnotch and we listen to Bob sing. But as soon as they slip — as they surprisingly do on much of this album — you realize that someone else is needed to push Dylan on his material and the way it might sound.”
“The blues is a cornerstone of Dylan’s work,” Foster continued in his column, “but he always needs an angle on it — some outrage, a big dose of humor.”
Reading Forster on Dylan — and Forster on Bryan Ferry doing Dylan on his recent Dylanesque, which contains a version of “Positively 4th Street” that Forster praises for finding “sadness, pathos and warmth” in what originated as a “caustic mid-’60s putdown” — you’re struck by how unusual it is for an active pop musician to write critically of other active pop musicians. Authors regularly review each other, but when was the last time we were treated to the kind of honest, informed insights Forster brings to bear on his contemporaries? (He’s a lively historian, too. “Those that follow Petula Clark,” he writes in his notes to That Striped Sunlight Sound, “I’ve always found to be grittier and more clear-minded than those who follow Dusty Springfield, who I’ve always found to be a little dreamy and highly strung.”)
“I was hesitant at first to do the column,” he said. “I had never done anything like it before. Was it really rock ‘n’ roll to do this? But what are the rules of rock ‘n’ roll anyway? I accepted the position that doing this was unique and good and valuable. I was surprised at how sorting things came naturally to me. I know about sequencing an album, putting musicians together, working with a producer, the role people play in the studio. Why not share that knowledge?”
Surprisingly, to anyone seduced by the image of a songwriter scrawling lyrics on napkins in restaurants and knocking out albums in the marathon bursts of inspiration, Forster writes, by his accounting, no more than three songs a year. Three. There is no slush pile of unused Forster gems, though one piece he is extremely fond of, “Don’t Touch Anything”, made it onto The Evangelist ten years after it was written. For reasons Forster said were never clear, McLennan didn’t like it. By the rules of their partnership, they would each have an equal number of songs on their albums, and each would have veto power over the material.
Why does Forster write so few songs? “It’s always been that way,” he said, adding that he typically worked out the tunes with McLennan at his or his partner’s place, one running guitar lines through the other’s singing and strumming. “I just like the melody to be fresh. I mean, I could write twenty songs a year, but they would sound similar in themselves. If you crank out songs, they all end up sounding like Tim Hardin’s ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ or Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’. There’s a reason Dylan made no album [of original material] between 1990 and 1997. He didn’t have ten songs he thought were good enough.”
Forster originally planned on using the brooding “If It Rains” as the title track of the new album. But he got convinced that “The Evangelist” was a stronger, snappier title. And the song, about him uprooting his family from Germany in 2001 and moving back to Australia for the promise of a better life, carries a theme of renewal that speaks to his artistic reawakening.
Yes, the sun is shining in Brisbane. The darkness hasn’t gone away, but the possibilities McLennan envisioned still abound in his absence.
“I’m interested to see where it’s all gonna go. It’s been twelve years” since his last solo album, Forster notes. “These were unique circumstances. I’m happy with the album. I very much like the sound of it and the songs. We’ll see how it goes when I play live. That’s when the emotions come out the most. But so far I’ve been able to handle it. The music can really carry you, you know? There’s just so much in it that lifts you up.”
Contributing editor Lloyd Sachs, a music writer living in Chicago, Illinois, hates it when great things end, but basks in their lasting achievement and the promise they inspire.