

Music
Forest Blakk: “I found a lot of hope in words and writing and expressing myself…”
In our latest Cover Story, singer-songwriter Forest Blakk talks about his torrid childhood, his music, and his hopes for the future…
For some children, life growing up was tough. Whether those came from family issues, school, friendships or just trying to navigate through an everchanging life, those years, good or bad, can shape your life and who you grow to become.
For singer-songwriter, Forest Blakk, life dealt him a rough hand almost from day one. Working out who he was against a backdrop of growing up homeless, moving around the world and surviving a family life amongst gang members, the troubled teenager discovered music, and since joining his first band in school, has forged forward to make sure he never returns to a life that, quite honestly, could have finished him off.
In our latest Cover Story, V13 sat down with Forest Blakk to talk about his life story from his torrid childhood, the importance of his Grandmother, his discovery of music, his recent marriage and his hopes for the future.
I wanted to go back to your childhood and growing up as, from reading about it, that was quite a torrid time for you. On the other side of that though, what were your dreams and aspirations as a child growing up?
“I think when kids like me grow up, it’s as dark as it is. Literally just before getting on, I just made a post about how I’m playing in my hometown. I’m playing where I grew up tonight and, on the way in, we were driving past the train station and I remember I was homeless and my Nana had bought me a ticket to come to Montreal to live with her. I showed up at that train station with nothing but two garbage bags. To lead into your question, I think kids like me, you don’t really dream much, man.
Sad as that is, you’re just hoping to make it through the day. So much stuff is happening around you and most kids are learning how to process at that age. They’re learning how does a toy work or how does a hockey stick work for a lot of us Canadians. For me it was why is life like this? Dreams were so far on the other side, there wasn’t enough time to dream. I didn’t know what that was. Maybe if you’d asked me when I was a kid, I’d probably would have told you, if I could grow up and be a hockey player, but I didn’t know what that even meant, I just didn’t want to be hurt anymore.”
Given all the noise that was going around on you, looking at children that go through, maybe not similar things, but tough childhoods, they talk about having an oasis of peace that they can go to as a get away from it all. What was yours?
“Jamaica. When we were young, we would travel a lot. We were always all over the world, all over the place. It was crazy. Weirdly enough, one of the only places that felt like a break from it all was in Jamaica. I think it was just because my parents had stuff to do and we were left to our own devices so you would make friends with tourists who were coming in for a week or two. We’d have these people that would just overwhelm you with attention. They would be kind to you.
So, for me, Jamaica is… it’s a very important part of who I am. As I’m done with the tour, I fly right to Jamaica. I try to go back every year. It’s a really interesting retreat because it’s the only place where the noise stops in the head and in the heart. I feel at peace. As you get older, with anything, you look back in hindsight and you go, ‘Oh, I can process this now and understand like why that was’, and that’s because abusive things weren’t necessarily happening as much there.”
“I was homeless and my Nana had bought me a ticket to come to Montreal to live with her. I showed up at that train station with nothing but two garbage bags.”
As a child left to your own devices you must’ve had some incredible experiences from that…
“To a degree. You definitely gain a whole new world of people skills when you’re trying to figure out life on your own and you don’t really have parents who are teaching you much. You’re just picking up all the pieces from wherever you can. There was a lot of that, a lot of connecting with strangers and strangers became friends. I think that’s probably why I do what I do, in the way in which I do it now as an artist. My family is a lot of them, it’s a pretty makeshift family. I really turn strangers into fans and then fans turn into friends and friends turn into family. It’s something I take a lot of pride in and I think I’m just trying to fill that endless void inside my heart with that.”
Taking away everything that you grew up with, as an artist alone, just having people to connect with your music must be an incredible feeling for you?
“Yeah, I think you tend to find what you don’t have. The juxtaposition between these two worlds, they’re so far apart from each other. I think, like anybody, if you don’t really know what it is to feel love as a child, hopefully you tend to look for the antithesis as an adult. It’s a bit scrambled in the middle, you’re trying to unravel a little bit of it, because, again, you don’t really necessarily have the process to get there. Same with me. I didn’t have a lot of friends and I didn’t have a lot of consistency and we weren’t rooted in one place so, for me, I found a lot of hope in words and writing and expressing myself. Pages became friends and words became best friends.
Eventually, those became congregations for stories and songs to be born and spoken words then you have this innate and inherent desire to be heard so you sing or you express yourself. In that dark garbage and bullshit of life, that’s your crucible. Look at the Beatles. Would the Beatles have been the Beatles if they didn’t go to Germany and play to nobody in Hamburg and suck miserably but then learn every pop song under the sun. Would they become what they’ve become? Would their writing be the same if they didn’t know every single pop song for like 20 years? It’s just the thing that makes you you tends to come from the things that suck and are hard and you push through it.”
Throughout all the bullshit of life, where did music fit into that?
“Music was almost an accident. I liked music when I was young, but it was a weird situation growing up. I wasn’t really allowed to listen to much music so it was whatever my dad would let me listen to which would typically be an album or an LP he liked… it was really weird. Here’s this guy who’s a mobster and a gangster and all the conditions and weird psychological games that were going on but, that to be said, for me, I discovered Eagles, Prince, Elton John. Then I discovered Nirvana and then I discovered Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Then it was the era of Backstreet Boys then Slipknot and Deftones and Limp Bizkit and it kept going.
For me, I never became necessarily an album guy. I didn’t know much. There was no one to teach me this is what a band is. This is how cool it is. It was just, I guess, I would hear one song over and over again. So for me, “Esperado” by the Eagles is entrenched in part of my psyche at this point so music had this weird place. Jamaica… we lived in Jamaica when I was a kid and I would hear the bass travel through the sand and into the hotels that we’d be in so the bass became a blanket that cradled me and that movement had something that connected with my body. Fast forward, it was all a happy accident. I am… I was a poet. I still am. I love poetry but I didn’t know what that meant. I could just articulate and it made sense to me. I would hear of people like Robert Frost and be like, ‘Oh, I really liked that.’ I didn’t know why, but I gravitated towards that type of storytelling. So, here I am. I’m writing poetry.
I remember when I moved in with my Nana, when I got off that train and I went and lived with her, she gave me a guitar. It was a gift that she offered me. I was very bad at it. I went to this high school in Montreal and at this high school there’s these guys who were jamming and they were kind of cool. They were like, rock guys, 16 years old and had beards and I thought they were so cool. I was such like a hustler kid who had gone from being homeless and like having to kind of hustle my way through life and I was like ‘Hey man. You guys need a guitar player?’ and they’re like, ‘You can be a guitar player?’
So I ran, I grabbed my guitar, I ran back to the school. I didn’t know how to tune it. I didn’t even know it needed to be tuned. I knew how to play one string, barely. I plugged it in. I must’ve played 10 seconds of it and they immediately knew I was not a guitar player. That inner hustler in me was looking around the room and I don’t see anyone with a microphone. So I’m like, ‘Wait. You guys need a singer?’ They all look and say ‘You sing?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll be right back.’ I ran my car back home. I picked up this poem I had just written and I ran back to the school with the poem and I knew I could at least sing better than they could play guitar or at least the same so I did. I didn’t know shit, but I had sang to a couple of girls. I could do this and that’s it, that became a song. I had the confidence to be confident enough to just sing. They’re like, ‘That’s our singer.’ and so that started it.
“I liked music when I was young, but it was a weird situation growing up. I wasn’t really allowed to listen to much music so it was whatever my dad would let me listen to…”
The feeling of being accepted and part of something outweighed any fear of not being good at that thing. Intrinsically, I just wanted to be liked so I was like, ‘I’m going to get better at that.’ Then, when someone tells you, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at that.’ you feel a certain way. It’s like, ‘Okay. Shit. I’m going in the right direction.’ You kind of suck at that but you’re thinking, ‘Okay, I got to figure that out.’ That’s how music ended up shaping my life. It was all this series of really happy accidents.”
Going through music from Eagles to Slipknot, it’s a great way to discover music because you’re not following a trend…
“I don’t know a lot about bands. I feel a bit stupid sometimes because my guys will be traveling and they’ll be talking about people and albums and records and eras and I’m thinking, ‘Shit, I don’t actually know much.’ Obviously I’m a lot more versed now because I’ve been in it long enough, but I’m still just a song guy. I really just love a great song. I love a great story. I’m not the best to sit here and tell you every B-side a band has.
I’m not a fan. I’m not a fanatic like that. I’m a fan of something being said so honestly. At least it reaches me so honestly that I feel something. If you can make me feel something, I don’t care what genre you are. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care about anything. It expresses something I didn’t know how to express or didn’t even know I needed to express.”
Do you want that feeling for somebody that listens to your music?
“I don’t want anything. The truth is, people connect to what they connect to. Every song I wrote I feel is a great song for whatever reason. Some songs hit people more than others. There’s a reason why I have two hits and a whole bunch of other songs and songs that have landed in movies and songs that don’t. What I’m building is a world and, if the hits are the front door, some of the other songs are the plants in the corner, I’m decorating. I’m saying, ‘Here’s a feeling. Here’s a feeling.’
I don’t know why some feelings connect with people more than others. I don’t know why some feelings are doors rather than placeholders so I don’t concern myself with it. I’m not writing to try to convince people to make me famous or to make hit songs. I’m writing because I have no choice. I have to get it out. It’s like a jackhammer in my heart and in my head every day. If I don’t say what’s happening here, then I feel like a fraud for myself. I’m very grateful that people have liked some of my stories enough to give me a platform to do this professionally. I’m still trying to process it every day.”
You’ve talked about stories and poems. Most children, at some point, keep a diary. Did you write your thoughts, feelings and emotions down and, if so, at what point did they start turning into songs?
“I tried. I never really found comfort in writing my thoughts in a diary and I think it’s probably because I grew up with a gang mentality and writing stuff down was a quick way to get caught. You learn that you’re not allowed to. So, for me, a lot of my feelings are just locked inside of myself. I would write lyrics all the time. I would hide my thoughts behind poems. Maybe that’s why I like poetry so much? It’s because I could say whatever I wanted and I could be cryptic about it. I think part of the learning how to do this at this level is trying to unravel some of the crypticness of words and saying things quite straight on. That’s just so uncomfortable and foreign to me so I think it’s been just a lifelong process of figuring it out.
Sometimes I can’t distinguish between, am I writing a poem or am I writing a song? Sometimes they’re one and the same, sometimes they’re very different. I think it’s this constant fight of, again, ambiguity, how to tell the truth without putting fat all in the way of the viewer. How to not coddle the listener and allow the listener to accept, this is what I want to say, you know, and I think of people like, let’s say Glen Hansard or someone like that and “Say It To Me Now,” that’s a song that there’s no bullshit around it. It’s straight meat… this is how I feel. I think I’m chasing my own versions of those. I’m trying to learn how to say things honestly without care.”
You’ve mentioned your grandmother a number of times. She was obviously a big light in your life through some tough times. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve taken away from her? What’s the best piece of advice she gave you?
“She never been one to overwhelm you with advice. It’s been more of, I don’t know how else to put it other than like quiet learning. Sometimes it’s saying less that does a lot more and I definitely learned that from her. She provided me with an opportunity to catch my breath and it was me who took that opportunity. That’s probably the biggest life lesson is ‘Give the opportunity, but it is up for other people to take it,’ and, unfortunately, I have siblings who didn’t, and they’re in really hard places.
So my Nana, she gave my head a place to rest and my soul place to rest. She gave me the time to piece back together who I was. She just gave me an opportunity to be a person. She changed my whole life because of that. Now I walk around the world trying to give people opportunity and trying to make people feel seen because, at that age, when I went and moved in with her, I felt pretty invisible to the world. I felt really overlooked and passed up and I always believed that of course I’m worth more than being invisible so I think, to break it down as I think about it, it’s just trying to make people feel that same way, seen, valued, heard, respected.”
“It’s been more of, I don’t know how else to put it other than like quiet learning. Sometimes it’s saying less that does a lot more and I definitely learned that from her.”
When you get yourself into that situation and the fog clears and you can see life a bit clearer, does that change your outlook on life or does that change the way you approach things?
“I don’t know. I think I’m still trying to figure it out. I am still trying to survive. Five years ago, I was homeless again. Life has its moments and its ups and downs, you’re sitting there and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, how am I in this position again? I thought I’d never be here.’ The truth is, for me, I don’t know if I’m chasing a dream, rather I’m running from failure of one. I don’t have really many options in life. I don’t have an education. I don’t have degrees. I wasn’t in a position where I could do school. I was homeless on and off in my teen years for quite a bit of it so I struggled and I have a lot of street smarts.
I have a lot of know how but, as an adult, I’m acutely aware that my two options are I’ll probably either be a laborer, having to hurt my body and break my soul, which I’m already tired of, or I do this thing that is working for me, and I can see a direct impact on the community in which I’m providing myself. I can see that by being open and vulnerable and honest about my experience that it’s affecting other people positively. I don’t know if I’m necessarily trying to hit the dream or if I’m more so running from the other options. People like me don’t often get opportunities like this. There’s no money. There’s no safety net. I’m on a tightrope and I’m in the middle of it.
Am I on the tightrope for the joy of the circus or am I on the tightrope and the fear of falling? That’s the question I’m wrestling with every day. Do I see things differently? I think so. I think that I don’t have false humility in this. I know what this is. I’m very, very fortunate. I do work really hard to get where I am and I do a lot to do what I need to do but I think that I see this whole experience maybe differently than some people. I’m not in it for fame. I understand that that’s a byproduct of what this can be but I always make this joke… I didn’t know how to sing or play guitar to save my life so I learned how to sing and play guitar to save my life.”
Looking out from the stage and seeing people that know your songs must make all of the bullshit go away. Is that another oasis for you?
“To be honest, it’s not my favorite part of the night. Like, I love it, I think it’s cool, but I think that it’s a transaction. That’s what I pay in order to meet fans after the show and to earn the vulnerability for them to share what it means to them. At the end of the day, rock stars kill themselves. It’s lonely. I’m here in this empty green room by myself, my guys are all building a stage downstairs, I’ll warm up by myself, I’ll walk on stage, I’ll play my songs, and then typically what would happen is I’d walk off stage by myself, the cheers stop, and then I go and I sit in a hotel by myself, or I get in a van or a bus and I sit by myself, and we drive to the next place. The exchange is really at the end of the night.
“I understand that that’s a byproduct of what this can be but I always make this joke… I didn’t know how to sing or play guitar to save my life so I learned how to sing and play guitar to save my life.”
I’ve been doing this my whole career. I meet every single fan that wants to meet me after every show. I spend hours doing it and to hear the stories of what these songs mean to them and how they’re connecting with them, that to me is like what I live for. It really breaks down the band/fan barrier and that wall and you become human with people. I know what it’s like to sit right on these streets behind this window and be completely invisible to two and a half million people so I’m the most visible thing in that room. I’m playing a venue tomorrow and they just posted a picture of the dates that are coming up this week and I had this really cool surreal moment.
When I was 17 and a half, I worked on a ski hill north of Quebec, in northern Quebec. I was a doorman among many things. I was young and I was in a rough place and I was part of gangs and things were getting rough. Life was tough and I’d made this demo with that band from high school. Every night at this bar that I was at, before the bar would open, they had a mic and I would sing one of the songs on the radio or on CD. People came to know that I was rough but I would sing. One night the bar doorman, from the bar adjacent to us came over and he’s like, ‘I know you really like music. There’s a band…’ and he said the name of the band, and I knew them. So he said, ‘Well, come say hi.’ So I ran over, and I met these two guys, their names were Brian and Bruce. I was like ‘Hey man, I’m Forrest. I sing. Can I go get you my demo?’ They’re just chilling and say, ‘Yeah, whatever kid.’
I run down the mountain, I get in my car, I race like 25 minutes out of town, I get to this apartment, I grab the tape, I drive to a friend’s house, I put the tape next to a tape, I record the tape, it must take me an hour and a half, and I run up the hill, not even thinking that they would be there or not be there and I run into the venue, and there they are. They’re still sitting there. I give them my tape then they talk to me for the next five or ten minutes. Now the truth is, did they listen to it? Probably not. Could they have ever done anything? No. I know this now from where I stand but they gave me five minutes of their time and that exchange. This is years and years and lifetimes since that happened and i’m talking about it like it’s just happened this week.
So, this venue posted a picture and it’s that band who’s playing the same venue that i’m playing. They’re called I Mother Earth and it just like hits me in the heart. That is so fucking cool, man. They have no clue and they don’t need to know. It’s not about that, but it did something to this kid. It made me want to do this. It made me live my life this way. That one small experience of five minutes shaped my whole life and how I run my career and how I interact with fans. I think about that every night. I realize that the position that I’m in is to be that for other people if they need that. When they need to tell me their story or they ask me if I can wait two minutes, I don’t know what it’s gonna do.
I’m not here to be a martyr or anybody’s hero, but I am acutely aware that that can be that. So there’s a responsibility in this position to be at least aware of that these aren’t just strangers on the street. They’re human beings with real stories and sometimes they need a minute of your time in order to feel something to be human. That moment could change somebody’s life. It did for me. I’d be pumped if some kid became successful or a success in their life where they maybe wouldn’t have otherwise been, to make it outta what shit they’re in.”
On a happier note, the EP is out and you recently got married. What was that moment like when you connected and realised you wanted to spend the rest of your life with this person?
“Oh, the world was black and white until the moment I met her. I thought I knew every colour in the book. I knew nothing. I only knew shades of white and black and the whole world changed colors. It lit up. I saw things that I, in myself and in other people, that I’d never seen. My wife…I describe her as the place of the improbable, the impossible. She’s where sunsets and sunrises meet. For lack of better ways of putting it, she’s my hero. She makes me softer and gentler and she makes me see life from a different perspective.
I’m just out here trying to make sure that we have the best opportunity to live a life that’s full of love and just to be the best husband and best friend I can be to her. You don’t know where you’re going to be in life. I was signed to one of the biggest record labels on the planet. I didn’t tell anybody but, at the time, I was going through really bad heartache. My ex and I split up and I was living in a car in Los Angeles. The time before that I was living in Germany, I didn’t know where the hell I was going to be. I didn’t want to blow my last couple of bucks on setting myself up if I was going to potentially go back with my ex. So, over like a futile eight months of falling apart and lots of therapy, the relationship died.
“I’d be pumped if some kid became successful or a success in their life where they maybe wouldn’t have otherwise been, to make it outta what shit they’re in.”
I was there in LA wondering what the hell am I going to do? I’ve got no money. I’ve signed this record label. I got no hit songs. I got nothing. I just kept writing every day and I didn’t know that I had written “If You Love Her” at that point in time. I didn’t know that was going to change my life. Not long after I met Tuli, my wife. I met her when I had nothing. The cool thing about Tuli is that I say I had nothing and she would say I had everything. That’s her. She made me feel like I had everything in the world to offer. I did, I had me and it was the thing that went overlooked my whole life. The humanity of me and here she going, ‘I see you for who you are.’
So, the fact that we met in that place and now all the success and stuff is happening. It just makes it that much sweeter. She’s real. She’s always been real. I would sleep on my buddy’s couches in LA, try and grab a break here and there and she’d come sleep on the couch. We went through a couch that only fit one person too. We’d have to sleep, heads both on different ends and feet matched just so we could fit on the couches. She’s everything. I wrote the next song that blew up about her and got to write it with fricking Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20!”
There’s obviously a lot of positivity going on in your life, but talking to you, there’s still a lot of reflection on your past. Do you feel that’s a good way to describe your approach to songwriting – that there’s reflection and positivity?
“I’ve been working on an album in secret for five years of trying to dig into the like the hardest stuff of my life. I’ve been able to tell stories about love and stories of death and incarnations of love, iterations of love. I’ve shied away from speaking my truth because the dark, deep stuff, you never know how people are going to carry it. I’m in a season of life where we’ve had the hit songs and all that great stuff and I’m super grateful that the world has allowed me that opportunity but there is a five year old kid inside of me who is yelling at the top of his lungs to say the shit that happened.
It’s trying to figure out how to say it so it’s not trauma dumping on the world. It’s trying to figure out how to be sensitive and soft with words, whilst also dealing with some of the hardest experiences I’ve ever dealt with. You have to be careful when you’re throwing rocks in glass houses, and these songs are all rocks.”
What do you get out of writing your songs in 2024?
“It’s just to figure out how to be even more vulnerable and honest. I’ve got one life to live, and I just want to say the things that matter before I die. If I can do that, then we’re good. It’s a world that I want to live in. I want a safe place to talk about the stuff that’s real. I want to share my poetry and my art and my heart. Being an artist is learning how to cut yourself open in front of people and accept whatever it is they feel about it. My past isn’t pretty, my present looks better and the future is unknown and I’m just trying to ravel them or intertwine all of them so it makes you a whole person at the end…”
-
Country/Americana1 day ago
The Sheepdogs: “We learned a lot because people weren’t willing to give us a chance because we didn’t sound like band A, B, or C, ”
-
Alternative/Rock1 week ago
Papa Roach: “It was indicative of the era musically but I think that the music and the lyrics they can transcend that.”
-
Alternative/Rock2 days ago
Origami Angel Bring Their Boundary-Pushing Emo to Manchester Gorilla [Photos]
-
Alternative/Rock1 day ago
James Bay Gives Fans a Magical Night at Manchester’s O2 Apollo [Photos]
-
Metal4 days ago
The Hara (w/ Eville) Bring Chaos to Brighton’s Green Door Store [Photos]
-
Metal1 week ago
Trivium and Bullet For My Valentine Celebrate Classic Albums at Manchester Co-Op Live [Photos]
-
Album Review2 weeks ago
Russ Taff – ‘Cover Story’ [Album Review]
-
Music1 week ago
The Weeknd Announce Massive Stadium Tour Supporting ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’