Fun, fun, fun?
It all comes together for Carlos Forster as For Stars release ... It Falls Apart.

By Kimberly Chun

FOR STARS SONGWRITER Carlos Forster would probably be the first to advise you to trust the dream, not the dreamer. Take his San Francisco band's slow dances with industry showcases, major labels, the works, since the release of their 1999 second full-length, Windows for Stars (Future Farmer), and continuing through 2001 and their third, We Are All Beautiful People (Future Farmer). The band struggled to make commercial demos for two years after Beautiful People, until guitarist Mike Young finally declared, " 'I think people will love these songs, but I can't stand them,' " Forster explains. "I said, 'I think you're totally right.' I think we were trying to force out something that was a little more commercial. Supposedly we were thinking we need to take this to the next level. I was obsessed by the idea of having a bunch of money."

In the end there was little money and more problems, Forster confesses with endearing vulnerability: inflated expectations eventually upended the band and rattled the songwriter's equilibrium. And perhaps because he still feels its birth pangs, he's hesitant to focus on the final creation, ... It Falls Apart (Future Farmer), a dreamy, radiant, and yes, even sadcore avant-pop chronicle of dissolution loosely linked to Forster's longtime more-a-party-posse-than-a-band.

Instead, Forster, 31, seesaws between positive thinking and confessions that more than hint at his past troubles. Most people might tango around the disappointments, but as Forster confesses, he's always been a little different. "Nothing panned out," he admits shortly after picking up the phone. "I don't know if it was my not-so-killer instinct."

"At the time, I would have liked to be on a major label if I felt like I would have some money and I could afford to buy things in my life and stuff like that," he continues, feinting, ducking, and doubling back on himself like a manically self-effacing character from a Woody Allen comedy. "But it was, like, I don't think any of that stuff was really destined to happen, and so it didn't happen. And I don't know if I was that right kind of personality that was really willing to change my life."

But everything has changed because, as the title to the Chinua Achebe book goes, things fall apart, and For Stars are no exception. The group continue to hover in various patched-together states – including the lineup for the CD-release show July 9 at the Swedish American Hall with Forster and longtime bassist Christian Preja as well as early drummer Mike Funk and guitarist Abel Mouton – but the band of buddies are much altered. Young, Forster's high school buddy and Cal Poly roomie, recently relocated across the country for postgraduate studies in architecture at Princeton, and keyboardist Dan Paris decided to focus on his own career as an architect, and a new mortgage.

Yet somehow, from where this listener is lurking, the dream comes together exquisitely on ... It Falls Apart. Radiohead comparisons tend to get flung around willy-nilly, but here, for a change, the reference seems right on, though the For Stars cosmonauts might feel ambivalent about orbiting Planet Thom Yorke.

With ... It Falls Apart, Forster and Young attempt to break down tumescent beds of guitar, falsetto, and great expectations and broaden their scopes at the same time. Taking down the dream-pop genre, ... It Falls Apart also takes apart a fractured relationship with a diarist's intimacy. Forster's angelic vocals and distortion overture on "I Should Have Told You" set the tone: this narrator is feeling delicate, but he can't put his mind on hold.

The music sidesteps preciousness with its subtle pop dares. Exhibit A: the second track, "Calm Down Baby," slowly builds from almost minimalist folk to dissonant organ and finally to bare-faced R&B balladry, as Forster swoons, "Your bullets baby / You're leaving all these holes in me ... You don't really understand / I'm the only one who really can." The random Southern-fried soul twang of a guitar is his only witness, though the simple string of piano notes that ends the song runs like a thread through the album, despite morbid quasi-dance pop distractions such as "It Doesn't Really Matter" and the mechanical fascinations of "In the End." An affection for ambient arrangements and quirksome sounds, such as that ajar-car door bell tone that courses through "If It Falls Apart" and the plummeting piano clatter during "Shattered Glass," makes this the most dissonant and experimental For Stars album to date. But the key to ... It Falls Apart may lie in the idea that this is as much a tale of the tempestuous love affair between electric and acoustic, synth and piano, as it is about the ties between two lifelong chums.

It's little wonder that relationships are at the forefront of Forster's mind, a few days after our first talk, when we meet at his Duboce Triangle flat. There's his relationship to God and his Mexican-Irish family, which includes his songwriter brother Marco, who first got Forster interested in music, and his father, Tony, once the mayor of their hometown, San Juan Capistrano, and a relation of Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California. There's his Catholic high school and Cal Poly buds, some of whom have played in the band, and his wife, Celine. The only trouble at the moment seems to emanate from their curious, muscular yellow cat Misha, which Forster taps on the back tentatively.

"Don't pet our cat – he's supermean," he warns, settling into a chair in his tidy, spare living room, his jacket still on. "He used to be a source of a lot of tension – not to get too into it. Now I like him quite a bit. But I want him to be more friendly."

Forster's trying to cut the tension in his life – he's on the wagon after years of partying, playing basketball in a league, focusing on friends and family, working a day job at ARC, and trying not to worry about the reception of ... It Falls Apart, which he's not even sure he likes. It's a little too depressing for his current state, and he'd rather talk about fun things. Living and writing music in San Luis Obispo, where he met bandmates Young and Preja and close friends like singer-songwriter M. Ward, was fun. Moving to S.F. in 1992 and living and whooping it up in this same flat with Preja and others was very fun. Recording and touring with various versions of For Stars was mostly fun. Making the dark ... It Falls Apart was fun, even after struggling with its poppier incarnations, off and on, for three years.

The period prior to the making of the album, Forster remembers, was "very confusing, emotionally, for people in the band. I don't want to say who they were because one of them might be me. Basically I quit drinking, and that sped the process of finishing the record. Drinking did nothing but slow down the process and made my attitude crummier. So me and Mike spent a lot of time together, Will [Waghorn] did the drums, and Christian did a large portion of bass, and Dan did a little bit before he quit, and we hung out, and it was fun, and we finished it, which was kind of a miracle, because for so long it seemed like this weird thing that we couldn't wrap our hands around."

Despite all the fun, bleak matters continue to bob to the surface, even as we listen to his latest recording of Wire's "Outdoor Miner," which was done with drummer Funk. We watch the moving ragged bar on the monitor of the Pro Tools setup in Forster's bedroom, where he wrote much of ... It Falls Apart, and gesturing to the window above his bed, overlooking Duboce, he mentions that the album's song "Shattered Glass" reminds him of these panes, 9/11, and dirty bombs.

"I had this infatuation with the world ending when I was a kid growing up in the Reagan era, and I always somehow imagined the bomb dropping and sitting there with your mom and thinking, 'Bye, mom,' " he muses. "Weird things for young kids to go through, mentally. Especially for kids that weren't mentally supertough, like myself!"

He gets up, finds a CD, and pops it into the clock radio beside his bed. It's the 20-year-old Forster, singing his first songs and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, and it's one of many short, decade-old cassette songs that he, M. Ward, and the Old Joe Clarks' Mike Coykendall recently remixed for release on Ward's planned label, Nassau. Forster's voice pipes out of the little speakers, simple and pure, like that of his favorite vocalist, Roy Orbison.

Ward had been urging Forster to resurrect the songs for years. "Carlos has always been, um, just as clear as day in his songs," the Portland, Ore., singer-songwriter says later. "To express heart and humor so easily is a very difficult undertaking, and if you ask anyone who's actually heard the songs, they'll tell you the same thing. There's something very personal and strong in simple messages, in the messages that come through those songs."

And in some ways there's something perfect and poetic about the idea that Forster has come around to the songs from a happier time in his life, just as he's starting fresh with an unnamed project alongside Funk and contemplating life apart from For Stars, his onetime star – or as he might put it, ego – vehicle. This new phase might even turn out to be fun, fun, fun, to quote one of Forster's inspirations, Brian Wilson.

"I've done that thing where I thought if I sold more records, I'd be more successful and hip and people will like us," Forster observes. "I think the other guys in the band were more mature than me, but occasionally I do fall into that fantasy and the trap of being something I'm not. But personally I can't use record sales or reviews, any of that stuff, to show success or make me feel happier in life, because it doesn't necessarily work. I'm trying to learn what success is."

For Stars play an album-release party with M. Ward and Etienne de Rocher, July 9, 8 p.m., Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, S.F. $12. (415) 861-5016.