    
Victor Prose
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2009 - 11:12 pm: | |
MY 20 FAVORITE ROBERT FORSTER SONGS
I’ve already saturated this board with two posts of listmaking esoterica, but thought it only fair that Forster be subject to the same assessment I granted McLennan – leaving one out would be like permanently refusing to listen to LP 2 of Exile on Main Street when you’ve only heard LP 1. Thus, a top 20 for my second-favorite songwriter of all time, once described to me by a reliable friend as “too John Cale”.
The problem here is that Forster’s music demands an entirely different approach – while the perfection of a melody or an indelible hook is McLennan’s hallmark of greatness, and as such is more easily graphed and mathematically analyzed, Robert’s more subtle approach has yielded an impossibly large catalog of perfect, stately poems-to-music that rarely leave me feeling as empty as Fireboy or In Your Bright Ray. At the same time, nothing soars as high as “Bachelor Kisses” or “Haven’t I Been A Fool” (well, almost nothing); the joys I get from an utterly perfect throwaway like “Thought That I Was Over You” are not the same joys I get from “Pandanus”, which is still too musically undistinguished to win a place on my list. The songs that hit highest with Forster inhabit and overtake a completely different realm of my critical psyche – so it’s almost odd that I enjoy him as much as Grant.
Individual songs are tricky to isolate – on Tallulah, 16 Lovers Lane, Calling From a Country Phone, The Friends of Rachel Worth and Oceans Apart, Robert’s five to ten are inextricable suites crafted with novelistic care, and those are only the flawless examples. So in more than a few instances, I haven’t even tried to break things up.
I’m pretty sure, being a pophound who grew up on the Beatles and Billy Joel, that I’m more predisposed to genuinely ‘liking’ McLennan’s music, but Forster is easily the greater object of my respect and fascination. I also posit that due to his differing approaches from era to era and lack of IdentiHits like “Streets Of Your Town”, every Best O’ Forster list will be different – so I hope this garners some responses.
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1. “Part Company”
Unlike “Draining the Pool”, the immediate favorite I sampled for the first time by way of iTunes on the very same day, this staggeringly beautiful breakup ballad is one of the slowest and most complete growers I’ve ever been subjected to. Few songs yield or encourage tears nearly ever time out, but this is more artistically potent than any final scene in any celebrated weeper-film. A rock Shakespearean sonnet. ’84 Yeats.
2. “Clouds”
This wasn’t as immediate as the last two 16LL songs until I noticed the utterly perfect, pristinely heartbreaking “they once chopped my heart/the way you chop a tree”. The manifesto-cornerstone for five of the prettiest love songs of all time.
3. “Man O’ Sand to Girl O’ Sea”
A candidate for one of the finest singles ever, this is rock & roll as earthy and visceral as “You Really Got Me” or “Brown Sugar”, but laced with a miraculous overtone of trademark psycho-dandy eccentricity. Best line: “Guitar!”
4. The five Tallulah songs
None of them jumped out the way the previous three do, but I couldn’t in my right mind deny that these almost conceptually linked relics of that “dark masterpiece” Forster bemoans upon reflection are all among my favorite of his tunes. Bleak, tender, decadent, erotic and ethereal, this is literate and expert bad-dream pop; whatever relationship Forster was in that inspired these, I’ll never envy it.
5. “Spirit”
The dandy would-be sex-God of the old GB’s departs his tumultuous middle-age and emerges a warm, wry, well-educated romantic, the more the better for his wife. Gentle, prosaic, and declaration-free, bar the heartrending titular appraisal. Telling: “I’m no trouble/not half the trouble I used to be when I was somebody’s double.”
6. Calling from a Country Phone
Cheating to the extreme, and if you want to know this hookmonger’s favorites they’re the two romantic anthems, “Falling Star” and the exuberant “121”. Including only these would’ve denied credit to the stirring “Drop”, the delightfully cynical “The Circle”, and all those elegant ruminations that render this CD a gorgeous challenge. Not just the best GB’s solo album – the only one that hits their collaborative heights.
7. “Spring Rain” & “Head Full Of Steam”
The shimmering Liberty Belle is probably my second-favorite GB’s album, but that doesn’t mean its deliberately arty songs always get me on their own. “Apology Accepted” is a soaring exception, as are these heavenly returns to pop from our wild-chord wielding wunderkind; the former an anthem that cuts all its contemporary competition, the latter the sweetest, hookiest, sexiest sex song ever essayed.
8. “Surfing Magazines”
Funny, buoyant, carefree, and as always elegiac; the beauty of later Forster summed up in an ineradicable earworm smirk. Best line, by a nose: “Da da, da da, da da.”
9. “Here Comes a City”
Few of Oceans Apart’s songs ever stick out as my favorites only because the record itself is such a willful tapestry, but when it’s on, I’m in production heaven with my two favorite balladeers. But this fierce, frenetic opening track transcends its setting more than its associates, and remains what is probably the album’s peak moment.
10. “I’ve Been Looking for Somebody” & “Danger in the Past”
At its worst, Forster’s debut album is arch, atonal and boring; songs like “Leave Here Satisfied” are dreary in an almost nihilistic way none of his Freakchild outtakes predicated. But he’s not wrong to suggest it contains some of his best songwriting, of which these two astonishing ballads are the easy highlights. Runner-up (I figured listing three songs would be excessive): the majestic “The River People”.
Continued on my next post... |