Joshua Taylor makes the (Un)scene

Joshua Taylor picked up guitar when he was 12 years old. However, by high school, music had been relegated to hobby status, as AP classes and the track team became a priority. After he graduated, it was off to the Naval Academy, followed by a stint of service. He bounced around the east coast a bit, and even did a tour of duty in Afghanistan before ending up in San Diego in 2010. “I was always one of those guys who was the ‘friend that had a guitar,’” he says, “but I didn’t perform publicly until I was done with the Navy. I was 27 at my first performance.”

He began by testing the waters at local open mic nights, where he would perform a mix of covers and originals. Even though he’d never gigged out, he dabbled in songwriting. “I was taking some swings. I wrote I guess what you could call a song or two in high school. I even had a few songs on my Myspace, maybe in my mid-20s. Thankfully, they have disappeared from the ether. Between 2011 and 2014, I had about seven or eight songs that I was playing pretty regularly that were mine, and then I had a rotating list of covers that I would throw in.”

By 2012, Taylor was performing full-band shows, but he took another break from music in 2014 while attending graduate school. The following year would prove pivotal, as he dove headfirst into what for years had been a hobby. “I had gone through a divorce, and met my new wife, Sandi [King,] in 2015. That’s when I went full-time. I had finished grad school, I went for counseling psychology, and I was doing therapy with people, but I didn’t want to chase that down. I actually figured out that you can gig full-time in San Diego and make a living.”

That same year, Taylor would also release his first solo full-length, About Time. The musicians who play on the album include wife Sandi King, who excels as a blues vocalist, and Josh Weinstein, a seasoned local musician who handled the keys. The touring that followed would be both intense and minimal, as Taylor, King, and a bassist known as davyrockett knocked out four different road treks in a Toyota Prius. “It was an electric guitar rig, a bass guitar rig, and a full PA. We had a sky box on, and everything was Tetrised in there. That car was loaded. We did everything from three-week to three-month tours. We did a national three-month tour where we played, I think, 51 or 52 gigs in 40 cities in 12 weeks. And it was all couch surfing. You can’t make money if you get hotels. So, we would sleep on floors and sometimes in a car. Some of the stops were people we knew. We got all the way to New Hampshire and back in that car.”

They played those dates as the King Taylor Project (KTP), performing a mix of songs from Taylor’s album, a few originals written for KTP, and a handful of covers. KTP remains active but is now more of a separate, R&B/soul vehicle that focuses on King’s vocals, while Taylor’s solo gigs (with his backing band The Unscene) showcase his original songs. In addition, this past September, Taylor joined Ponderosa Grove, a Prescott, Arizona-based Americana band rooted in vocal harmonies. The group has a booking agent and recently played a string of dates opening for the Tedeschi Trucks Band. It may become Taylor’s priority gig, but he’s confident that all of his various musical projects can be juggled successfully.

That includes his new solo album, Unscene, which he’s planning to release in June, preceded by a couple of singles. “I just think they are much stronger songs,” he says. “About Time was my first record: ‘Here’s all the songs that I feel good enough to put on a record at this stage in my life.’ But, to me, this is almost the first album proper, where you’ve got a batch of material and you go, ‘What are the strongest songs and what’s thematically tying them together? Is it really long-form art, or is it just a batch of tunes?’ For me, I think this one feels a little bit more like the songs are related to each other.”