Prine Time Road Dog
February 2026
Forrest McCurren is a road dog. You hear it in his songs. The grit. The gears. The unexpected turns that produce a favorite mantra: You got to get lost to get found. His delivery is a pearl-snap shirt on a Saturday night, a Prinelike glimpse into sticky life, sycamore-sweet in the Texas heat, sparkling in his native Ozarks sun where the sacred Osage flows into the Missouri River.
He raises a beer to trailer park lovers with matching tats and waitresses wise beyond their barstools. His ballads salute good people who got bad grades in school, drunk on dreams, still trying to figure out if life is sour or sweet. Then he drives off in a van that looks like it might be your plumber.
Equally at home quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, McCurren’s pluck and dirt songwriting prompted Blake Shelton and Taylor Sheridan to stick him in the lineup to compete in the series, “The Road,” which airs on CBS.
That’s a feather in his cap. But his big break came a few years back when he met his muse.
I got lucky,” he says rhetorically, “in a life-changing course that shifted my focus from sports to music.”
He played soccer at Helias, a Catholic High School in Jefferson City, and ended up turning down a soccer scholarship at Saint Louis University, opting instead for William Jewell in Liberty where he might play more minutes.
The move was fortuitous for two reasons. At Jewell he met Margaret, and he picked up the guitar. Margaret, a bright eyed multi-talented musician who learned to read music before she learned to read words, grew up on her family’s suburban farms in St. Louis, then Boston.
Margaret encouraged his development. Her fiddle paired with Forrest’s voice and lyrics like a whiskey chaser. It wasn’t long before she had him playing more minutes in music than soccer, in venues that shouted Missouri character, like the Frank James Saloon in the postcard town of Parkville on the Missouri River.
Every road is a road home for somebody. McCurren’s latest album, “Small Prayers, Big Blessings” captures both road and home. “There’s a rowdiness that comes from the road and then there’s a thoughtfulness when we’re off the road, getting back home and putting in context how much you love your family.”
As you read this, Forrest may or may not have survived the competition on “The Road.” Regardless, he does his beloved Missouri proud.
I told him he has yet to make me cry. But the balladeer is young. The road is long. I am patient.
Visit ForrestMcCurren.com for more about the artist.