Forest Sun

Forest Sun was born in upstate New York to folksinging back-to-the-land hippie parents. His dad used to chop wood with neighbor Garth Hudson of the Band and literally built the floor that Bob Dylan stood on at manager Albert Grossman’s Bearsville studios in Woodstock, NY. His mom heard Pete Seeger and Joan Baez play when they filmed a TV show in her uncles living room in Boston, and she dated one of the Chambers Brothers before she met his dad. Weaned on a diet of Jackson Browne and Toots and the Maytals, some of Forest’s earliest memories are of his dad playing “Poncho and Lefty” by Townes Van Zandt and his mom singing Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train”. Forest wrote songs with Rory Block when he was six years old, learned to juggle with WavyGravy when he was 9, and studied drumming with the late African master percussionist Babatunde Olatunji as a teenager. In college he played in a band with SNL star Maya Rudolph. They opened for No Doubt at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz before Forest left to study art in Spain.

A pioneer of the DIY movement, he recorded his first record in his bedroom in San Francisco with bassist Seth Ford Young (Tom Waits, Edward Sharpe) and toured Europe for the first time, including playing at the Rally on Dam Square in Amsterdam for the Tibetan Freedom Concert where he first met Ben Harper, Alanis Morrisette and Thom Yorke.

With over 78 million plays on Pandora, Forest enlivens audiences around the globe with his wealth of songs and stories, all sung and told in a laid-back California style. Sun’s soulful music draws on a deep well of Americana and is compared to everyone from Jack Johnson and The Avett Brothers to Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. He’s played festivals from California (Strawberry Music Festival, American River Music Festival) to Europe (Belladrum in Scottland, Fiesta City in Belgium),opened for such luminaries as Lyle Lovett, Bonnie Rait, Steve Earle, Keb Mo, and toured with folks like Brett Dennen, Mason Jennings and the Beach Boys (Forest met famed Beach Boys producer Van Dyke Parks at a festival porch jam and later swapped songs on his piano at his house in LA). Musical collaborations on his records include members of Bob Dylan’s band, members of Calexico/Iron and Wine, Heather Massse (The Wailin’ Jennys, Prairie Home Companion) Jolie Holland (The Be Good Tanyas), JT Nero (of Birds of Chicago), Sean Hayes, jam band ALO, and bluegrass band Hot Buttered Rum.