Calling from a Country Phone is the second album by former Go-Between Robert Forster, and his first self-produced disc.

Drummer Glenn Thompson would later join Forster and Grant McLennan in a reformed Go-Betweens years later.

COW had never recorded an album before, and Thompson said the practice before entering the studio was, "relentless - he had a real holistic idea of what he wanted.

[4] Lisa Kearns, writing in the Melbourne Age of Forster’s ‘idiosyncratic brilliance’, praised the album as a ‘softly glowing, moody, and many-faceted concoction that gathers memories from the years Forster spent travelling the globe, from Los Angeles to Berlin.’[5] Andrew Stafford, in Pig City, said it was "perhaps Robert Forster's most full realised work.

The addition of boogie-woogie piano, violin and pedal steel also lent the music a certain grandeur.