Long before he was standing on stage with The Guardians, Paul Lancaster was a kid parked on his living room carpet, working his way through his mother’s record collection one album and eight track at a time.

“I sat in front of there and just pulling out albums and eight tracks,” Lancaster remembers, half laughing at himself. “I know that dates me a lot.”

That collection was sprawling and unpredictable. You could jump from Elvis to a Sunday morning quartet without warning. Lancaster wore out one particular Elvis eight track, drawn especially to the gospel side of the King’s catalog. “I loved the rhythmic singing of Walk Them Golden Stairs and Josh Fit the Battle,” he says. “Oh, it’s good stuff.”

From there, the collection opened into what Lancaster calls Jesus Music of the Air: Andrae Crouch, Sammy Hall, Don Francisco, names that shaped a generation of Southern gospel and contemporary Christian sound alike. For a kid on a living room floor, it was less a genre than a whole world.

Then there was the album he avoided entirely.

Tucked into his mother’s collection was a record by Jerry and the Goffs, its title alone enough to spook a young Lancaster: “God’s Gonna Get You for That.” He steered clear of it for years. “As a kid, I kind of shied away with it for a while until I listened to it, and it was really good, you know,” he says now, the fear replaced by fondness.

Looking back, Lancaster frames those afternoons as something close to formative, not because any single song set him on a path, but because of the sheer range of what he was hearing. “Those were a lot of good memories of sitting on my living room floor at home and listening to just a lot of different things from the day,” he says.

What actually set the hook came a few years later, when Lancaster was ten years old and saw Gold City Quartet perform live for the first time. “Then I was hooked for sure,” he says simply. No embellishment needed. That was the night the music stopped being something he listened to and became something he wanted to do.

Decades on, Lancaster sings alongside John Darin Rowsey, Pat Barker and Dale Forbes as The Guardians, a quartet built on tight harmony and a shared commitment to the gospel that shaped all of their childhoods in one form or another. The group has picked up three Dove Award nominations and multiple number one songs along the way, occasionally welcoming founding member Dean Hickman back to the stage, a man with more than 60 years in gospel music behind him.

Their newest single, “I Know You,” feels like a natural extension of the records that filled Lancaster’s childhood living room, songs built to be sung loud and mean it. The chorus lands with the plainspoken conviction Lancaster grew up on: “But I know you and who you are is holy. Who you are is mighty. Everything that I could never be. Who you are is faithful, merciful, and able. The righteous one that meets my every need. Who you are is great and worthy of all praise. With an empty grave to prove it all was true.”

It is not hard to hear an eight track kid in that chorus, still sitting on the floor, still pulling one more record off the shelf.