Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Matt Martin, vocalist, guitarist and banjo player with the North Carolina-based genre-spanning band Holy Ghost Tent Revival, about how work is progressing on their next album, defying classification and why he eats his vegetables.
CP: When I spoke to you guys two years ago, Patrick Leslie told me you were going for a darker tone on your next album. That album still hasn’t released. What happened?
MM: We got halfway through it. We recorded all the tracks, but it was coming across as lackluster. A few guys in the band felt like it wasn’t something we could release and have everyone be really proud of.
It had to do with the process. We kind of rushed into some things and didn’t make the best decisions on some tunes, writing wise or whatever. When we listened back to it, we decided, “Let’s wait on this and release a live album.”
We released the EP “Family,” and then we were going to have the second album, but when that didn’t work, we realized we had all these tracks from when we played one time in New York, so we were like, “Let’s release this live album to at least tide fans over.”