Spider Hands

"In a world filled with musicians that strive to sound like others Keith Forrester is his own man. His music is provocative and reflects sounds that journey from the delta to the middle east to traditional thumbpicking".Bill Piburn - Editor, Fingerstyle Guitar MagazineKeith Forrester was born in Atlanta Georgia to a working class family. His love for music started with listening to his dad, who was a jazz and rock musician, play guitar and piano. At the age of eight he began his own experimentation on a very poorly made classical guitar that, for reasons unknown, had steel strings on it and ridiculously high action. Keith’s formative years involved a lot of time listening to old 45’s (or “funny records” as his dad called them) of Louis Armstrong and Hank Williams along with a horde of 33’s of The Ventures, Chet Atkins, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, and Lynyrd Skynyrd to name a few. Living in Bible Belt country, Keith’s upbringing was imbued with local, charismatic churches that preached in every style short of revival tent-style snake-handling. It was in one such church that a traveling “prophet” told him he was not meant to pursue music. This message had a devastating effect on the young Forrester as playing music was almost all he cared about at the time, and being spoon fed religion his whole life he had great inner turmoil about the possibility of disobeying God’s word. Keith spent a lot of time playing his guitar alone after that experience often taking great measures to keep it a secret from everyone. One night, after sneaking into the living room to play, he turned on the television and came across some old footage of Phil Keaggy playing an acoustic instrumental piece. To hear him tell it, it was nothing short of a revelation. He dug out his mom’s acoustic guitar and began a new journey, latching wholeheartedly onto steel string instrumentals. Through all the places life lead him: bands, seminary, the Army, a woodworking career, a painful disenfranchisement from the religious establishment, he always found solace in the acoustic guitar.Ultimately, Keith’s collective experience formed the perfect backdrop for his current pursuit of solo guitar and with each new discovery of a guitarist who has paved the way before him, with the writing of each new song, with every session of wood-wire voodoo he realizes that he is not alone and that there is a musical family out there for him after all.I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)