Songfacts®:

• "When I Was A Young Man" finds Robert Forster reflecting on the cultural lava that he couldn't have possibly known would harden to form the landscape of his musical world. "Once I had the idea, I wrote it quickly," he told Uncut magazine. "I could have written 10 more verses to that song."
• Robert Forster's son, Louis Forster (a former member of the indie pop trio Goon Sax), joins his father on the track, contributing bass and acoustic guitar. "Louis' playing - how he came up with that guitar line that echoes all of their words and all the melody is brilliant," said his proud dad. "And of course I'm sitting there and there's my son playing guitar to it. You can let a lot of important moments in your life go by, but not that one."
• "When I Was A Young Man" is the closing track of Robert Forster's eighth solo album, The Candle and the Flame. Forster recorded and co-produced the album in Brisbane's Alchemix Studios alongside his wife Karin Bäumler and Louis Forster. They laid down the record sporadically over six months between October 2021 and into early 2022 while Bäumler was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for ovarian cancer.
  
  "Sometimes, [we would record] just one or two days a month," Forster said. "That was all Karin's strength and condition allowed her to do. So, we had to record live, catching magical moments and going for feel – and that became the sound of the album."