I first photographed Asheville, North Carolina based River Whyless in 2013. Reflecting on that moment over a decade later brings back a flood of wonderful memories from a performance that, quite literally, changed my life.
Some months before I’d been sitting in a campus orientation for prospective students with dozens of other parents at Appalachian State University (ASU) in Boone, North Carolina. The cookie-cutter presentation was, of course, completely forgettable but I could not get the recruitment film’s music out of my head. Unlike any other music I’d ever heard, unique, compelling, and imaginative, I stuck around for the credits. The soundtrack was credited to a band called Do It To Julia, which, as I soon learned, was a precursor to River Whyless.
The band’s first album, A Stone, a Leaf, an Unfound Door (2012), had just been released and in August 2013, I found myself photographing River Whyless at a Hill Country Live outdoor performance in downtown Washington, DC. After the concert I recall thinking to myself, “Well, that was fun.”
Chatting later with vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Halli Anderson, we joked about having to compete with the Justin Bieber show down the street at the Verizon Center (as Capital One Arena was called back then) and how everyone kept glancing skyward, hoping the impending rain would hold off (luckily, it did). Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that show set me on a path from which there was no return and I’ve found River Whyless in my lens nearly every year since.
What began as a chance encounter in a college auditorium became an enduring obsession with live music and photography as those Asheville musicians (in addition to Halli, Ryan O’Keefe: vocals, guitars; Alex McWalters: drums, percussion; and Daniel Shearin: vocals, bass, keys) invited me into their lives and, in so doing, changed mine.
All photographs copyright Mark Caicedo/PuraVida Photography.
Love this. And your images are fantastic. I feel this way about a Texas group, The Band of Heathens, that I first saw more than 15 years ago and have followed since.