Shannon Forrest
Shannon Forrest is a drummer, producer and engineer who has spent more than twenty years as a Nashville session player, on records by Brooks & Dunn, Taylor Swift, Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, Merle Haggard and many others. He was Toto’s touring drummer from 2014 to 2019 and again from 2024, and he has produced albums for Michael McDonald.
He started out at The Sounding Board, his father Otis Forrest’s studio in Easley, South Carolina, recording Southern gospel groups and local country artists. His earliest record credits are on gospel albums of the 1980s and 1990s by groups such as the Speers. By the late 1990s his credits included country records such as the Kinleys’ Just Between You and Me and Ricky Skaggs’s Life Is a Journey (both 1997) and Brooks & Dunn’s If You See Her (1998).
His work reaches into bluegrass and acoustic music. He played drums on “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on Big Mon: The Songs of Bill Monroe (Skaggs Family Records, 2000); on most of the Chieftains’ Down the Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions (RCA Victor, 2002), including “Sally Goodin” and “Tennessee Stud”; and on Jerry Douglas’s The Best Kept Secret (Koch, 2005), on drums and percussion. On Sarah Jarosz’s Follow Me Down (Sugar Hill, 2011) he played drums on several tracks, among them “Annabelle Lee,” with Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Viktor Krauss.
In country music his credits include Carrie Underwood’s Some Hearts (2005), as well as albums by Willie Nelson, Lee Ann Womack, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Trisha Yearwood and Toby Keith. The Academy of Country Music voted him its top percussionist/drummer. He also produced, engineered and drummed on Michael McDonald’s Through the Many Winters: A Christmas Album (2005), and produced, recorded and mixed McDonald’s Wide Open (2017).
From 2010 to 2012 Forrest played on the Dukes of September tours with Donald Fagen, Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs. He had sat in with Toto in 2009, when the band was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville, and in 2014 he replaced Keith Carlock as the band’s touring drummer, staying until 2019. In January 2024 he returned to Toto for a North American tour. He announced in May 2026 that he was leaving the band.
