Denver-based rock and roll band Jesus Christ Taxi Driver delves into the depths of sacrilege in order to find their own form of divinity. Oscillating between stark sincerity and tongue-in-cheek yet prescient satire, the music feels like dancing while the world burns around you, lighting a cigarette with the flames and finding God in the smoke. It’s laconic but wears its heart on its sleeve, funny, high-flying, versatile rock music that captures the feeling of needing to laugh in the face of desolation. Their second album — Taxi the Rich, released in March — showcases the band at their very best. It’s a pulsating rock record that deals with very real concerns facing our world while never quite taking itself too seriously. Gloriously sacrilegious, technically proficient, lyrically profound, it represents how many in this country and the world as a whole are feeling these days. Plus, it fuckin’ rips.
Ahead of Jesus Christ Taxi Driver’s 6/24 show at Hi-Dive — which serves to kick off their impending tour —, Denver Dive spoke with Jesus Christ Taxi Driver frontman/guitarist Ian Ehrhart, guitarist/vocalist Colin Kelly and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Miles Jenkins about their recently released album Taxi the Rich, the importance of humor in music, reconciling with faith and much more.
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Every member of Jesus Christ Taxi Driver grew up heavily impacted by music. Ian Ehrhart and his brother, Will — who plays bass in the band —, were initially raised on bands Ian described as “the basics,” The Beatles and “all that normal stuff.” However, raised rather deeply Catholic, Ian said that Black Sabbath was the band that truly hit him hard. He remembers his friend’s dad driving them somewhere and putting on “Iron Man.” His friend was shocked Ehrhart had never heard “Black Bloody Sabbath” and that Ehrhart’s reaction was one of being hit by lightning. “I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ Sorry, ‘heck.'” It hit his very soul and Ehrhart said he knew he wanted to make music from that point on, always chasing that feeling of just getting absolutely floored by a piece of music. He said, “I did realize, though, that nothing will ever rock harder than ‘Iron Man’ in the back of your friend’s dad’s Toyota Sienna.” It taught him what early rebellion could look like in the face of Catholicism, something that propels him to this day.
Kelly’s father is a musician. As such, Kelly was surrounded by music since he can remember, his dad filling the house with guitars. After years of growing up surrounded by them, Kelly finally picked one up “in his early teens” and his dad was a huge influence on what he learned and listened to at this point. “My dad pushed a lot of things my way: Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Allman Brothers. All of those are where it truly started for me.”
Ehrhart made an interesting point about the idea of our parents and the desire to rebel at a young age. When we’re kids or teenagers our parents show us “what they think of as cool shit” but because we’re starting to search for our own identities, we rebel and can reject or disregard these things our parents love. Instead, we search for what else is out there. “As a result of us rebelling, we go out looking for our own cool shit,” Ehrhart said. And we find it and hold onto it like treasure because it feels like it’s not supposed to be ours but it is. It’s our first brushes with freedom, the knowledge that there is a world out there beyond what we have been shown thus far, a world your parents might never know. However, as we get older, we understand that it all came from a place of our parents just wanting to share what they loved with those they love and we recognize that a lot of their shit was pretty cool too. Rebellion doesn’t have to be “fuck you, parents” (unless they actually deserve it) but instead is born from the knowledge that all our lives’ interests — whether they came from inside your home or out in the wild — compound and make us into fully formed people able to look at the world around us and realize that some things aren’t right and that we as people with such multitudes of life experience can come together to make change and influence the world as it has influenced us.
The idea of rebellion has fueled Ehrhart long before the band came together. Ehrhart said he never made a conscious decision to pursue music professionally, but that it was “seamless, never a question.” He said, “I guess I’ve never seen the line as much between doing music professionally and for fun.” His first band formed when he was “around 17.” At the time, they “were too young to navigate the politics of getting gigs” so they took to the streets to busk. After doing this for about a year, they were approached by a dude booking for a bar who offered to pay them $300 to play a three-hour show. “That was when I first realized, ‘Whoa, we can get paid for this,'” Ehrhart said. Convention has never been Ehrhart’s friend, instead operating greatly on faith to carry him through, though what this faith looks like has evolved drastically throughout his life.
Kelly also knew without doubt that music would be his life. After growing up and playing in bands throughout high school, he ended up attending a music school in Vermont called Castleton. “They make you take it seriously there,” he said. He was immersed in a more technical education than Ehrhart, learning theory and how to be a professional in the industry. Once he graduated, he moved to Boulder “around 2014” where he considers his actual musical profession began.
The beginnings of Jesus Christ Taxi Driver came during COVID when Ehrhart and Kelly first met. Ehrhart and his brother’s first band, The Beavs, fell apart in the early days of the pandemic. Ehrhart described this as “devastating” as he had “put all [his] eggs in one basket,” referring to getting accepted to Berkley and turning it down to focus full time on the band. “I didn’t know what else I had going on so I was just distraught,” he said. In order to cope, he drove to Manitou Springs to a studio his friend worked at. Kelly was there working on a solo project. Ehrhart listened to what Kelly was doing and “started to feel reinvigorated.” They spoke and hit it off and Ehrhart described feeling “very held by all [his] music friends.” A month later, he returned to the studio, brought along friends and other musicians he’d hired and began recording his solo album. However, he realized in doing so he “never wanted to be a solo artist” so he gathered Kelly, his brother and a rotating cycle of musicians to finish what would become the first Jesus Christ Taxi Driver album, Lick My Soul, released in 2023. The album garnered quite a bit of acclaim and started Jesus Christ Taxi Driver on a journey that would see them grow to one of the most sought after rock bands in the city.
After Lick My Soul‘s release, the band knew they needed a permanent drummer. One year in 2024, the band were to open for The Hold Steady at The Bluebird and didn’t have a set drummer. They invited their friend Miles Jenkins — a multi-instrumentalist who shares a music school background with Kelly — to join them. The band described, laughing, the show as “so confusing but great.” Jenkins had had very little time to learn the songs prior to the show and the band doesn’t use setlists so was flying very blind. Ehrhart said, “Miles [Jenkins] is so good and so is Colin [Kelly] so they locked in but they had to deal with me who’s a lot more sporadic.” They described the show as “waxing and waning,” falling apart at many instances but coming together in ways that just felt right.
In the time since that show, the band has gained a hell of a reputation for their live performances, known for being gloriously chaotic and unpredictable. It has put their name up in the Denver lights, each show they play an occasion that should never be missed. It’s allowed the band to carve a real identity in a city so saturated with talent.
These years of learning and growing together as musicians led to Taxi the Rich, an album that feels much more like a collaboration than Lick My Soul, which was almost solely Ehrhart’s brainchild, the result of “writing seven songs in seven days” and drew from a wide variety of sounds that were largely chosen from whatever Ehrhart was listening to that week. Kelly recounted, “[Ian would] be listening to a lot of punk one day and then African desert blues another and then [he’d] put those together and sprinkle Garageband effects in there. I remember thinking ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re not right in the head. You’re a bad person.’ But I was extremely jealous because it was all awesome.”
While Ehrhart still takes the lead on lyrics and the trajectory of songs, the band had much more input on Taxi the Rich than before. All members say they love working together because, as eclectic and rich as the music is, they focus on simplicity while also taking into account each members background and influences. Speaking of the album’s sound, Kelly said, “I think that Ian (Ehrhart) really understands the history of punk music and his knowledge of punk and power pop and more of the classic era of rock and roll allows him to have his own style on vocally, and then how he plays the guitar. I think it really helps kind of guide the ship as far as like the sound goes. Oftentimes he’ll just, he’ll play something, and you’ll just be like, ‘I don’t want to get in the way of that.’ I want that to be to be noticeable to the listener. Sometimes the danger of being in a four piece rock band is great ideas get diluted by everybody smashing the shit out of like a really good simple idea with themselves, their individual contributions, and I think we’ve gotten really lucky on Taxi the Rich, where we didn’t try and get in the way of the really simple things that we all felt good about.”
Ehrhart’s worldview is fully on display with each song on the record. He said this worldview — as well as his fascination with rebellion and flirting with the blasphemous — was largely shaped by his experiences growing up Catholic. He said, “Most of it comes from growing up Catholic and having my young soft brain distorted and pounded into this one way of thinking, which was fear. It was this idea of ‘If I think about boobies, I’m gonna go to hell, and I can’t stop thinking about boobies.’ I think it just comes out. It’s painted my entire worldview as a human being, I think. I think most people think about life and death a lot and what happens after death and what is life? What’s the meaning of life? Those cliché questions are always rattling around in in a person’s head. I write a lot about those topics, just because I guess I’m still reckoning with it, trying to figure out what I believe and what I think.”
Kelly and Jenkins weren’t raised in the church, but see many parallels to this idea of breaking with a long held way of looking at the world in a lot of the political issues facing people today. About how the album reflects this, Kelly said, “This record is a personal impression, but it expands and it contracts. There are moments where it’s very personal and there are moments where it zooms out and it is this frustrated look at the world. Even not being someone that grew up in the church, we are still somehow inundated with it. I didn’t grow up in a place that’s particularly religious. We just happen to live in a period of religious upheaval. It happens, it happens every 100 years or 200 years, and it’s worked its way into the US government and it just is wreaking havoc every everywhere. So it’s just really hard to ignore and not be affected by it somehow. A lot of the writing of Taxi the Rich was more political than about Catholicism or Christianity, but it’s also interwoven these days those subjects tend to come together. Then comes the satire. Rock and roll for the past couple decades, it’s taken itself too seriously, and I feel that it’s really nice to be in a band that is trying not to do that, make fun of it all.”
Jesus Chris Taxi Driver has made themselves one of the coolest bands in the city. They’ll be continuing to build their name as they kick off their tour on 6/24 at the Hi-Dive. Joined by Family Worship Center and Smoker Dad, the shows going to a celebration off everything the band has done so far while looking ahead into their future that appears to be shining so bright it is akin to looking upon the true face of God. If you haven’t seen them before, check ’em out. They’re only getting bigger from here.
Get tickets to Jesus Christ Taxi Driver’s 6/24 show at the Hi-Dive here!
Stream Taxi the Rich here!
