Award-winning singer-songwriter, humorist and record producer John Forster made his debut as a recording artist with the 1994 album Entering Marion, which earned an Indie Award HM (the independent record labels’ Grammy) for Best Comedy Album. The title song is included in Dr. Demento’s 50 Greatest Novelty Songs Of All Time. He’d begun his career at Harvard University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in 
music. He founded the school’s long-running revue The Proposition and wrote several musical shows for the Hasty Pudding Theater. Since then, his songs have been recorded by many artists, including Christine Lavin, Judy Collins and Rosanne Cash. Forster is also Grammy-nominated for his music for children and for the Tom Chapin album Some Assembly Required. Forster has also written for musical theater, including Eleanor—An American Love Story, as well as Into The Light on Broadway and the Off Broadway revues Pretzels and A Good Swift Kick. His latest is Mariel, an Afro-Cuban immigration story commissioned by the Cincinnati Playhouse.
Forster brings his unique brand of musical mischief to Don’t Tell Mama with Too Clever by 20%—John Forster in Concert, for three nights: Sunday, April 16 and Mondays April 24 and May 1, all at 7 PM. The show is the artist’s return to the NY stage and a celebration of his new album, Location, Location, Location. Reservations: donttellmama.com
NiteLife Exchange (NLE) asks John Forster (JF) Six Questions:
NLE: What was the first song you ever wrote? What inspired you to write it? Was it funny?
JF: It was called “He Flunked English II.” I wrote it with my brothers Bill and Bob. Was it funny? Hard to say. What was funny (in retrospect) was three tween choirboys, armed with Sears Roebuck guitars and six chords, singing the blues about a spelling test that went sideways.
NLE: As you moved deeper into comedic songwriting, were there those who inspired you or who you felt were songwriters whose work you wanted to live up to?
JF: Oh, sure. For comedic songwriters of my generation, the master is Tom Lehrer, without a doubt. I discovered him at about age 7, and quickly sensed he was saying something very naughty, very smart and powerfully condensed. I immediately memorized every word, without actually knowing what any of it meant. For instance, from “Be Prepared:”
Don’t solicit for your sister. That’s not nice…
Unless you get a good percentage of her price.
I asked my mom to explain and got nothing but evasion. Which confirmed its value in my young eyes.
Right up there with Lehrer, in my book, is Sheldon Harnick, with great revue songs like “Merry Little Minuet” and “The Shape Of Things,” not to mention the “Fiorello” satirical gems “Little Tin Box” and “Politics & Poker,” written with Jerry Bock. I also, adored Dudley Moore’s musical pieces for Beyond The Fringe, Danny Kaye’s special material, by a variety of fantastic writers, Comden and Green’s work with Bernstein, lots of Gilbert and Sullivan… it’s all stuff I memorized early on. I suspect that what you memorize early becomes a subconscious well you draw from for the rest of your life. Though I don’t know… because it’s subconscious.
NLE: To date, what work or project are you most proud of?
JF: Because I’m self-critical, sometimes I don’t know when the song is actually finished. And it’s hard to be proud of something you don’t consider finished. With a comedy song, the audience tells you pretty quickly whether it’s working. But they don’t tell you when it’s finished. One of the many things I love about the recording studio is that a record freezes a song and allows me to accept it as finished… at least for the moment.
I’m very fond of my first album on Rounder Records, which is called Entering Marion. Everything just kind of went right with it. And I’m very excited about my new one, Location, Location, Location, which is being released 
June 1st. Like Entering Marion, it’s a musical humor album, my first in over a decade, with 12 cuts in 12 different genres of music. Did I mention that I’m stylistically restless? Kind of a musical magpie. I’ll write in any style, choosing whatever genre helps me make my point. I guess that’s a theater writer thing, where style is just another form of content. But let me not get into the weeds.
NLE: You’ve won many awards over the length of your career, and you’re Grammy-nominated. Your “Zoom Song” just won a MAC Award. What does that particular accolade mean to you?
JF: Recognition from the cabaret community means SO MUCH to me, probably because I love cabaret so much. I love the intimacy, the immediacy, the connection of the cabaret experience. And New York is so rich in master practitioners of the form. I’ve been elated many times in recent years by cabaret singers performing my songs.
I did my own cabaret act in the 90s, down at Eighty-Eights, but then got diverted into writing theater, making children’s records and touring as a singer-songwriter. But when 
Tom Toce invited me to join the New York Songwriters Alliance in 2015, I met, re-met, and have become friends with a lot of wonderful cabaret writers and performers. And I’ve finally worked up the audacity to do an act again (directed by Jeff Harnar, produced by Hillary Rollins). Re-entering the cabaret world after a long hiatus has really been a thrill. And this recent MAC Award is a thrill upon a thrill!
NLE: Songwriting has become what seems to be a requisite skill for those who play instruments and who vocalize. Increasingly the latter self-identify as singer-songwriters. What is your best advice for those who wish to include songwriting as part of their artistic/creative toolkit. What makes a song good?
JF: I’m not sure I agree that songwriting is a requisite skill for instrumentalists and vocalists. I’d sooner say that great singers and players are a songwriter’s indispensable best friends. Songwriters need great performers, because even a great song falls flat without a great performance. Songwriting, like math or dancing or computer programming, is a specific way of thinking, a calling. Either your brain works that way or it doesn’t. Songwriters are miniaturists; we compress what we have to say down to 3 or 4 minutes. If you have a brain that does that, you don’t really need much advice. You just obsess on songs, figure out how they work, and eventually you turn into a songwriter.
As for what makes a song good, my best answer is: a good song finds some way to force you to pay attention, to move you. A good song goes in at the gut level, it somehow docks with your limbic system and jacks your joy meter up a couple notches. Duke Ellington famously said, “There’s two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And I like ‘em both.” The power of a song doesn’t hinge on good craft, although that can help. Plenty of well-crafted songs are not “good.” And plenty of naïve, break-all-the-rules songs are terrific. There are A LOT of ways to write a song. The older I get the more I like to experiment.
NLE: Are there worlds you haven’t conquered yet? What do you aspire to creatively as a “next thing?”
JF: Haha. Aren’t you nice!? Are there any worlds I have conquered yet? Next up creatively is finishing a “various artists” cabaret album, with wonderful performances already in the can by such fine artists as Eric Michael Gillett, Emily Bindiger, Jim Caruso, Marissa Mulder, Mark Nadler, Joyce Breach and others. The songs on the upcoming cabaret album are both funny and serious.
Also, I’ve been collaborating a lot lately, which I love to do! When you collaborate you create something that neither of you would have made on your own. That way you grow, learning from each person you work with. So I think an album of collaborations is also in the cards.
And I’m hoping I’m not done with Broadway. I know I’ve got more shows in me.
