Who is TENTS?
Hello! We are TENTS. We are a family band that makes songs about family. While our audience ranges, our music tends to most resonate with broken hearted adults that are trying to find hope in the middle years.
A lot of our work centers around the notion that our kids are inviting us into a more hopeful, enchanted world than the one we would otherwise live in.
Like most everyone, we've faced a lot of grief, sickness, death, and all kinds of really hard stuff. These songs are little bits of Hall family liturgy that help us to remember who we are, where we come from, and to find gratitude. They are here for you to partake of. We hope they do for you what they have done for us
Christopher Hall, Joe Greenetz, Emma Mansanti, Adam Souza and Sebastian Rogers are all regular contributors to what we do.
My background is in making music for motion picture. I still love making soundtracks. Many of the song ideas that make it on TENTS records find their seed form on our YouTube channel, where I get my jollies sketching out song ideas as theme music for our Vlogs. My vlogs are patient, reflective memoirs about family, heartbreak, God, and Joy.
Here’s an example of one I made about my relationship with my father:
Sometimes when you write a song, or have a child, or move to a new city, you don’t fully understand what it will become, what it will mean to you, and how it will shape your life. This was the case when we named our band. We thought it was a kind of random name, and didn’t really understand what type of meaning or significance it might have.
As the years passed, and we logged more and more songs, we began to see shape in our music. We are parents, we are christians that have spent many a night in the proverbial wilderness. We write from this place. Tents, whether they symbolize holy places or homes for vagrants (or both), we feel they are a useful allegory for our music.
The practice of making music for me is a practice of solitude and prayer. While it does not always resemble this exact structure, let me give you a picture of my favorite way to write music. I go on frustratingly long walks and wait in stillness. I look for empty space and I burrow down into it. I wait and wait and wait until my ambition is gone, and God can move freely through the recesses of my broken heart. Slowly ambition and anxiety dissipate. This frustratingly patient practice thoroughly obliterates my impatience. In this practice I hear and see the world differently. Once the quietness is full, and the canvas is blank, I begin to make songs.
In their origins, these songs are the byproducts of prayer, but they become monuments. Singing our songs, for us, is an opportunity to re-encounter these old stories, old truths, and old joys.
When I was a kid, my mother used to fumble her way through old hymns on the digital piano on the living room. I remember so vividly begging her to keep playing. It felt like magic when she played. The whole room would glow, and I would feel peace. At some point I think my heart grabbed on to the idea that through music, I could hope to “re-enchant” the lived experience of my community through these notes and melodies. This really is our mission statement. We are here to re-enchant your world.
You can stream our music on Apple Music, Spotify, and Bandcamp. You can also find our content on YouTube channel, on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
WITH ALL THAT SAID, we should tell you, we do have an arms length relationship with all of those platforms. Our mailing list is our inner sanctum, and we make quite a bit of content that is exclusively for that space. We regularly reach out to our mailing list with early releases, early merch drops, exclusive video content, and who knows what other schemes we will hatch.
If you really resonate with what we do, there’s a form to fill out below that will get you opted in. If you think it sucks, you can opt out any time :)
Big love,
Brian, Amy, and the TENTS fam.
