Feb 15 2025 32 mins
Brendan Forrest considers the folk tradition as his primary music pursuit. He focuses on bluegrass and Americana-adjacent styles, including singer-songwriter and flatpicking as a solo artist and roots with a full backing band.
Forrest has been playing traditional music from a young age. He started playing the highland bagpipes at ten years old, falling in love with Celtic music through his Irish-American heritage. At the age of sixteen, he started teaching himself guitar after delving into the folk and rock worlds for the first time.
By the time he got into college, even though he had played music on his own for years, he didn’t feel confident in his abilities. However, while in college, a jazz drummer complimented Forrest’s abilities and encouraged him to explore and expand them more. In response, Forrest switched to a music major, started exploring jazz and bluegrass, and never turned back.
After graduating college, Forrest decided to pursue a musical career, even discovering his grandmother was an opera singer. From hip-hop to electronica to jazz and classical, he’s explored whatever he can, initially releasing projects under an abbreviated name, B Forrest (those releases, including his 2015 album Back to Bodhi, are still available).
In his late teens and early 20s, living in Chicago, he played blues on electric guitar in Buddy Guy’s Legends. In his twenties, he traveled the world, busking in Paris, playing with African musicians, and teaching music in underserved public schools in rural Colorado.
Now, releasing music under his full name, he has fully settled into the Americana tradition. His debut record, Daydreaming Music Fiend, is a dream come true for him. Half instrumental and half vocal, he considers it his dissertation on his musical background and inspirations.
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