four years pass...
Two of Forster’s albums are not only being reissued but revised as well:
Dear friends,
It’s taken a long time to get to this momentous announcement, but I’m so happy to share with you news of Robert Forster and Needle Mythology’s expanded, reconfigured reissues of his third and fourth solo albums, “Beautiful Hearts” (formerly “I Had A New York Girlfriend”) and “Warm Nights”.
Originally entitled “I Had A New York Girlfriend”, “Beautiful Hearts” was Robert’s first and, to date, only album of other people’s songs. Originally released in 1994, many of you will remember that the album saw Robert tackle a diverse array of favourite songs – among them Mickey Newbury’s “Frisco Depot”, Martha & The Muffins’ “Echo Beach”, “Alone” by Heart and Guy Clark’s “Broken-Hearted People”.
The album has never seen a vinyl release until now. Having had three decades to reflect on the record, Robert took this chance to revisit the album’s title and artwork. “I Had A New York Girlfriend” had been an eleventh-hour decision, a line taken from the Modern Lovers song “Old World”. The working title had always been “Beautiful Hearts”, a phrase borrowed from another song, “For Those” by Tindersticks. With the old title gone, the artwork – a New York street scene – no longer made sense. “So, in its place,” explains Robert, “comes a contemporaneous photograph of me conducting a set of musicians crashing into the album’s opening cut ‘Nature’s Way’. Well… that’s the fantasy.”
“Beautiful Hearts” was a decision partly undertaken by Robert, back in 1994, to buy him time. He had found himself in a song drought, but he had read enough about the travails of songwriters in trouble to know that, sometimes, an album of other people’s material can often move artists to a place where the songs start to come again.
And so, it came to be. Recorded a year later, Warm Nights repositioned Robert’s standing as one of the great songwriters of the post-punk era. Robert recalls that producer Edwyn Collins “got the (intended) sound of the album completely: a dry low-end groove pitched somewhere between Creedence Clearwater Revival and Willie Mitchell’s early ’70s Hi Records work.”
It was only towards the end of the sessions that some complications arose – and it’s these complications that Robert has seized the chance to remedy for this new release of Warm Nights. “It was Edwyn’s idea,” explains Robert, “to bring in a three-piece brass section – it fitted some of the songs beautifully, but it was in the mixing of the brass and the effect it had on the running order that things got complicated, [resulting in] two changes to the album that have been bugging me for 25 years.”
Finally, Robert can sleep easy. The horns removed from “Fortress” have now been restored – brass that’s also present on "Half The Way Home”, a song that Robert rashly demoted from the album, making it a bonus track on the “Cryin’ Love” single. Finally, "Half The Way Home” assumes its rightful place on Warm Nights, replacing “Rock ’n’ Roll Friend” – itself a Go-Betweens b-side that had slipped onto Warm Nights on account of its presence in the Australian live shows that had immediately preceded the album’s recording sessions.
As with the Robert Forster reissues on Needle Mythology that preceded these expanded releases, the vinyl versions of “Beautiful Hearts” and “Warm Nights” will come with bonus seven-inch singles. “Beautiful Hearts” is completed by a single that features Robert’s versions of “The Lady Don’t Mind” (Talking Heads) and “Freddy Fender’s Sohn” (F.S.K.).
Complementing the revised iteration of “Warm Nights” is an EP featuring the original album version of “Fortress”, “Rock ’n’ Roll Friend”, “Hypnotized” (originally the second extra track on the “Cryin’ Love” CD single) and “Did You End Up With The One You Love", a beautiful, hitherto forgotten song which only surfaced when Needle Mythology’s Pete Paphides and Craig Caukill listened back to the original reels from the West Heath recording sessions. As you can imagine, for two long-time fans of Robert and The Go-Betweens, this moment was truly the stuff of dreams.
In keeping with all Needle Mythology’s releases, the exceptional attention to detail is sure to make these the definitive iterations of “Beautiful Hearts” and “Warm Nights”. Both titles come in gatefold sleeves with printed inners and feature newly-written liner notes by Robert Forster. Now a celebrated artist in her native Germany, Leni Hoffman flew to the UK to personally oversee the printing of the original artwork she created for Warm Nights back in 1995. The new artwork for Beautiful Hearts was created by Matthew Cooper, who has worked closely with Robert on the continuing G Is For Go-Betweens series of archival box sets. For the mastering of “Beautiful Hearts” and “Warm Nights” by Abbey Road’s Sean Magee (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols), Robert got to realise a long-held ambition and attended the session at the legendary studios.
“Beautiful Hearts” and “Warm Nights” will be released by Needle Mythology in strictly limited runs of 1500 vinyl copies. One thousand of each will be available on black vinyl, while 500 more copies of “Beautiful Hearts” and “Warm Nights” will be available, respectively, on aubergine and nectarine coloured vinyl discs to match their cover art. There will also be 1250 CDs of each title.
“Beautiful Hearts” and “Warm Nights” are released on Needle Mythology on February 2nd, 2024.
Here's a photo of Robert at the mastering session with Sean Magee at Abbey Road Studios last March. And on this link, you can have a closer look at the records and choose your purchase options. Thank you for your patience!
Click on these links to purchase:
https://townsendmusic.store/product/124869
https://townsendmusic.store/product/124867
https://townsendmusic.store/product/125199
https://townsendmusic.store/product/125203
https://townsendmusic.store/product/125205
― birdistheword, Tuesday, 5 December 2023 14:23 (four months ago) link