forrest whitlow

I am from kentucky. I went to college in Tennessee. I went to graduate school in Kansas City. I lived three years in the lone star state (DFW). The heat became unbearable and so did the weather. I left her or she left me and i moved around a bit from texas to michigan to kentucky to kansas to missouri and now back to kansas. i studied religion and philosophy at Trevecca College in Nashville, got my BA and missed out on the music scene while there. Too much in my head at the time. my "musical life" rebellion started relatively late. though i was given an electric guitar when i was a wee tike, and there was a piano in the house, and i sung in church and college choirs. i didn't start writing songs on acoustic guitar till my late 20's. Poetry came first in college and graduate school and then after my world view collapsed in texas or as it was collapsing i started writing songs on the Fender acoustic i got in my early 20's. When i finally worked my way back to Kansas City to stay in the early 90's...i traded my fender straight up with a friend for a black yamaha acoustic that i still have. i started attending less church and more bars and playing my own creations to the public. Back in the 80's...on my first tour of KC... i got my master's of divinity at Nazarene Theological Seminary. where, still too much in my head, i concentrated in philosophical and theological studies. My return to KC (after a 3 year ministerial assignment in Fort Worth, Texas) was a breaking free from the weight of being a minister of dogmas in organized religion, to a new life of observing and creating a world i hadn't experienced or let myself fully experience before. by the early 90's i considered myself a songwriter(playing for whomever would listen) and an agnostic. i joined a songwriter's guild, built my confidence there, playing out in coffee houses every weekend. then i started getting my own solo gigs. by then i had surrounded myself with musician friends and made my first studio recording of 8 songs back in 1993. That one was never released. My first studio recording for release came in 1995. November 24. In one day we recorded 10 songs and added another from another session which was the title track "Vacation". Everybody loved that acoustic quiet record. rick gray, todd wiseman and rechelle malin were on that record. to this day it's the fave of many of my fans. in fact, some like nothing else i've done since. HELLO!...in the next 10 years i've recorded and self-released 5 more full length recordings on my Neitzsche influenced record label "Eternal Return Music"(ERM): Love and Garbage '98, Patch of Blue '01, Into the Gloaming '02, Land of X '03, and Sunrise in Reverse '05. "7" was released in May of '08...a record that took me almost 2 years to finish. Jeff Harshbarger played bass and did a wonderfully creative job on string arrangements especially for "Banda Lou" and "Vanilla Stoli". John Bersuch recorded it at his studio and played drums. Great musicians on this one: Jeff Williams and Rick Gray on lead parts and Mark Southerland on sax. Laurel Morgan's violin was majestic as she was on SIR in '05. A new album tentatively titled "Gazillion Sunsets" is in the works for release late 2010. So music became an increasing story in my life and still is. However, music must be rationed. i still read philosophy (lately Martin Heidegger) and write essays and short stories. I paint in my garage these aweful creations that somedays grandiose into masterpieces. ha! and i garden. My soul loves it. a return to the farm. yes! this is all my sanctuary and my parish. I'm a minister through music of sorts now, spreading the "gospel" for the soul, mine and hopefully yours. Sometimes it gets through and sometimes it's only in my head. but i've been stubborn enough to keep creating worlds through music and i still believe live music is better and in making full length records. Music and songwriting is an integral part of me, can't not do it. but only a part. Yet it is a consuming part. For when ya come up with a good song, a good record, a good performance, you wanna keep doing it, keep sharing it...it becomes a real world, a relational world, created from the same. "This is everything/the alchemist's dream. This is nothing! this is the WORLD...This IS!"