The Kinky Fingers’ Tayler Doyle Tried Seattle, Then Came Back to Denver

Kinky Fingers guitarist and vocalist Tayler Doyle believes that Tomorrow Was Awesome, the band’s fourth full-length album, reflects a feeling of self-realization and a hope of bettering oneself and letting go of past regrets and misgivings in order to move forward.

The Denver outfit’s surfy, reverb-laden sound pulls in influences that range from psychedelic to blues rock and, occasionally, country. The Kinky Fingers will headline a vinyl release party for the new record on Saturday, June 4, at the hi-dive.

The track “Goodbye Frankenstein,” a twangy number reminiscent of a Supersuckers country song replete with a talking blues passage, echoes Doyle’s sentiment about the album. The song, a wide departure from the sonic sensibilities on the rest of Tomorrow Was Awesome and one of the most personal, is a eulogy to the end of a certain era in Doyle’s life. It’s also an homage to his 1988 Chevrolet g20 van, a vehicle that ferried the band from New York to California and all points in between.

He remembers a trip with “Frankenstein,” as he lovingly calls the van, that he took with his now wife. They were going to drive to Seattle and test the waters for possible relocation. The trip didn’t go according to plan, however.

“We had planned to jet straight out to California and then take a casual cruise up Highway 1 to Portland and then to Seattle to test out living there,” Doyle recalls. “The trip went in a different direction fast, and by the first night, we were stranded in the Utah desert for two days while I replaced the power steering pump that had basically fallen off.”

After the mechanical mishap, they opted to take things much slower and spent more than a week exploring Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks in Utah. By the time the couple made it to San Francisco, they were broke, and they had to make a rush up to Seattle to sleep on the floor at Doyle’s brother’s place.

“On our first day in Seattle, I ended up taking a job shucking corn at the Pike Place market to earn some money, because we had none,” Doyle says. “My wife ended up leaving a few days after arriving and heading home. It was a mutual decision, and I decided to stay for a month or so to test the waters.”

Although he ended up writing some music and landing a full-time job, he was basically living in Frankenstein or sleeping on his brother’s floor. He began to feel as though he was on the brink of homelessness, even with his job. Seattle is a pricey town, even for someone coming from Denver.

“I was driving this gas-guzzling van to work every day,” he says. “The song is kind of about that, like rain dripping down. It was rainy; it was like the fall in Seattle. It’s kind of a sad song about that time. But I came out of it.”

He decided Seattle wasn’t the place for him.

“My wife wasn’t there,” he says. “I just thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ I think it was at that moment that I wrote that song in my van alone. It was raining – that was the bottom. I knew I had to change my life.”

Doyle decided to return to Colorado. He saved up enough to pay for gas – not a cheap proposition when a 1988 Chevrolet van is involved – and trekked home. His brother came along for the ride. Later, he sold the van to a woman from Texas who already had a name picked out: Frankie.

The record has been a long time coming.

“Some of those songs were on the back burner forever and ever. I might have written some of them like eight-plus years ago,” Doyle says. “They’re just kind of finally hitting the surface. … I think the album title is kind of fitting – Tomorrow Was Awesome – because we kind of anticipated it being released quite a while ago.”

He and his bandmates – drummer Dustin Peterson, guitarist Earl Snyder and bassist Jairo Barsallo – recorded the album at Peterson’s Globeville studio. Doyle thinks it’s their best-produced record to date, and notes that the band took its time making it.

“We definitely spent a long time in the studio working on it, probably a year or so,” he says. “Probably more than a year. With COVID, it was delayed for another two or three years with the production and no one doing shows.”

The band has been lying low over the past year because of some personal issues, but prior to COVID, the Kinky Fingers had been playing constantly. The band also has plans to tour along the West Coast in the fall, probably with fellow artists from its Oregon-based Get Loud Recordings label.

“So much has happened with the group,” Doyle says. “Now we’re kind of weeding out a way forward, I guess. It’s probably not going to be the same as we were doing it before.”

The Kinky Fingers play the hi-dive, 7 South Broadway, Saturday, June 4, at 9 p.m.; tickets are $12-$15. Tomorrow Was Awesome will be available through Get Loud Recordings. The album will be released digitally on June 3. Check out the Kinky Fingers Spotify page.