Description
The songs that became Robert Forster’s eighth solo album The Candle and the Flame were mostly already written when his wife and musical partner Karin Bäumler was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in July of 2021. The former Go-Betweens member’s songs often held a certain brooding character, and even before this life-shaking illness became part of Forster and Bäumler‘s days, the songs that had accrued for The Candle and the Flame were already heavy and reflective, looking at how things change as the stages of life pass. All these specific factors– Forster’s predisposition for melancholic self-reflection, the intensity of a family going through cancer, and the organic, mellow sound captures necessitated by unsteady health — all combine into a bittersweet beauty on The Candle and the Flame. The spare instrumentation and soft sadness of “The Roads” ranks up there with some of Forster’s best loved Go-Betweens materia. Forster’s straightforward songs find him looking back thoughtfully over various points in his life from an older, wiser, and perhaps more forgiving perspective. The songs are honest, deep, and direct, but never heavy-handed. Mostly, The Candle and the Flame finds Forster taking stock of his long and storied life, and grasping at some of the many moments of love and beauty he experienced along the way.
