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Nick Forster

Musician · b. 1955 · Beirut, Lebanon · Wikipedia
Best known for Bass Lead Vocals

Nick Forster is the bassist, harmony singer, and on-stage MC of Hot Rize — the Colorado bluegrass band he co-founded in 1978 that won the first-ever IBMA Entertainer of the Year award in 1990 and was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2025. He is also the founder, host, and driving force behind eTown, the long-running nationally syndicated public radio program combining live roots music with conversation on environmental sustainability, which he launched on Earth Day 1991.

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  • Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1955, while his father was stationed there with the U.S. State Department (his mother, Clare Chanler, was a granddaughter of Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler). The family returned to the United States in 1957.
  • Raised on a farm in Garrison, New York, in the Hudson River Valley. Started playing drums at age ten, quickly abandoned them for guitar a year later, and was in folk and folk-rock bands as a teenager.
  • At 17, hitchhiked from New York to Colorado. Moved there permanently in the mid-1970s, taking a job as an instrument repairman at the famed Denver Folklore Center.
  • At the Denver Folklore Center in 1978, met Tim O’Brien, Pete Wernick, and Charles Sawtelle. The four formed Hot Rize in January 1978; Mike Scap played guitar briefly, with Forster replacing him on electric bass in May 1978 — cementing the classic Hot Rize lineup.
  • Played bass, sang lead and harmony vocals, and — when the band transformed into its Western Swing alter ego Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers — played inspired period-accurate Western swing guitar as Wendell Mercantile.
  • Hot Rize toured full-time for 12 years (1978–1990), releasing six studio albums and performing on Austin City Limits, the Grand Ole Opry, and A Prairie Home Companion. Called him out as “an exceptional songwriter” in Rolling Stone.
  • 1990: Hot Rize won the inaugural IBMA Entertainer of the Year award; 1991 Grammy nomination for Take It Home. That same year the band collectively decided to move on to other projects.
  • In 1990, while on a State Department tour of post-Soviet Eastern Europe with Sam Bush, John Cowan, and Laurie Lewis — playing the first public concerts in Prague in 60 years and witnessing the region’s environmental degradation — Forster conceived the idea for a radio show that would combine live roots music with conversation on sustainability.
  • Launched eTown on Earth Day, April 1991, in partnership with his wife Helen, the show’s co-host and executive producer. The show grew from 40 NPR affiliates to roughly 300 stations today, recording at the solar-powered eTown Hall — a renovated church — in downtown Boulder, Colorado.
  • Hot Rize reunited for periodic shows throughout the 1990s. After Charles Sawtelle’s death from leukemia in March 1999, guitarist Bryan Sutton joined the band in 2002; they released When I’m Free (2014) and toured internationally. Hot Rize held its 40th Anniversary Bash at the Boulder Theatre in January 2018.
  • Hot Rize was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in September 2025 at the IBMA Awards in Chattanooga.
  • Also launched “Hippy Bluegrass Church,” a non-denominational Sunday morning community sing-along, at eTown Hall in 2019. Lives in Boulder with his wife Helen; has three daughters and grandchildren.

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