Back in 2008, I met a bunch of kids from Greensboro who called themselves Holy Ghost Tent Revival, and with whose music shep. and I immediately fell in love with. Over the next two and a half years, we saw HGTR play probably upwards of 50 times, all over the Southeast. We drove to Norfolk to see them play in an Italian restaurant, if that tells you anything.

And in the spring of 2009, they were nice enough to let me hang out while they were working on what wouldn’t become their second album. I never really shared those photos here, as it was at the very beginning of this blog. It seems like a good time to dig them out, though, because HGTR has released those sessions, never before public, on Bandcamp as The Blood Beneath. What a title; these songs are that, really, because they never became that album, but they were recorded and developed here. The first time I heard “Wish It Was Easy” — not in these sessions, and which to my knowledge never made a studio record — it was in the Trekky Records living room, Matt and Stephen, acoustic and a cappella.

It’s a record that marks a very, very particular time to me, and a band that was instrumental to my early photography.

You can buy all of HGTR’s records digitally at their Bandcamp