Rob Taxpayer is a teacher based out of Minnesota, where he lives with his partner, Elise. He has been teaching since 2008 and found his passion in adult education. “I love it. It’s so great because people who are coming back to school as adults … they’re really dedicated, they really want to be there and they’re just really fun.” His job, which is entirely online, may not pay well, but the work is fulfilling. When not teaching, Taxpayer is a songwriter, singer and instrumentalist for multiple bands—most notably, his namesake, the Taxpayers.
The Taxpayers are a do-it-yourself (DIY) punk band. DIY isn’t necessarily a genre of music, but as Taxpayer explains it, for him DIY holds a similar usage to punk. “… Punk has been kind of a catch-all term that is flexible. It’s a good umbrella term.” The band is completely independent; they book tours and write and record music without the assistance of a label. Since publicly releasing their first of eight albums in 2007, they have garnered over 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners. Many readers may have already heard their best-known song, “I Love You Like an Alcoholic,” as it experienced some TikTok fame last year. The Taxpayers’ music releases and tour schedule have all but ceased since 2016, but Rob has two other bands, The Trusty Snakes and Anxiety Cat, that are more active.
Taxpayer’s philosophy around touring has changed a lot since he first started playing music: “I don’t want to be too hard on touring. It’s sometimes really magical and wonderful … you and your friends are in a shitty van that breaks down constantly, against the world. It’s like something out of a Tolkien novel … when I was younger, I had more energy for that…” In recent years, he embraced touring on a less rigorous schedule, “breaking it up is good for your psyche…” Because either way, touring is a losing game if you’re trying to turn a profit.
The same can be said about advertising and social media, according to Taxpayer. It’s necessary because he wants people who will enjoy his music to hear about it, “but you don’t want to stress out about [advertising] because … it’ll disappoint you constantly … you’ll never be good enough for yourself and you’ll never be as big as you think Rolling Stone wants you to be…” Taxpayer repeatedly emphasized that he writes his music for his soul, and he thinks listeners can pick up on that. “When I’m concentrating on [the art], it tends to not only feel better for myself but also people respond to it better … a listener can tell if you’re thinking … ‘what is this going to do for my pocket, for my dollar…’”
Taxpayer plans to write music until he dies. He does not spend most of his time playing or writing music and when he does write it, it is not necessarily with the intention of releasing it. Songwriting is a necessity to him: “It’s something you are compelled to do in the same way that you’re compelled to go on a walk or eat some food.” It is how he understands the world. “Music and songwriting have been a lens through which to understand life … to try to shake out the magic of the world … it’s the only [way] that I know how to make sense of things.” He described the songwriting process like this, “… you start throwing ideas at the wall like it’s spaghetti. And when the spaghetti starts sticking, you’re like, ‘okay, I’m going to concentrate on that.’ And you chase that rabbit … And once you figure out what it is, you edit it and you shift it … And then hopefully by the end, you know what it’s about, but sometimes songs are really mysterious…” Taxpayer shared his idea about a collective consciousness, where one’s brain works like an antenna. It takes in everything you encounter like signals, from the news to something your neighbor said to what you ate for breakfast, and interprets it in your unique way. For Taxpayer that unique way is songwriting, “… it’s almost like you’re reading through your subconscious and you’re like, ‘what are you trying to tell me, subconscious?’”
A lot of the music Taxpayer writes, especially in the last few years, is political. “I have strong opinions and values that I hold dearly that sometimes I like to express through music … politics comes out because that is part of life. If I’m feeling upset about the injustice of the striking garbage workers in my town … Sometimes I feel like it would be good to write a song about them and bring more attention to them. But it’s told in the form of a story because that’s how … my mind works…” Taxpayer does not consider himself to be a political songwriter, like many others in his genre of music. He is a musician and a storyteller first and foremost.
The Taxpayers are Rob Taxpayer’s first band. After flipping a coin in 2007 that instructed him to move to Portland, Oregon, he posted an ad on Craigslist looking for musicians in the area interested in a Minutemen-type punk band. Through the ad, he met Noah Taxpayer, the band’s drummer. The two started playing house shows and slowly found the rest of the band, some of whom did not know how to play an instrument before joining. Rob still collaborates with the members of the Taxpayers in his more recent musical endeavors. He also performs music with his partner Elise.
Rob sees his music as “… a way of communing with that which is beyond our daily realities…” To write and share his music is to do something magical, “… you make something out of nothing, out of thin air and it can move you, and it can move other people.” Rob’s music has been moving people for years. Through its complex instrumentals that completely differ on every album he has released, and its poetic, tragic, witty and compelling lyrics, every Rob Taxpayer project is worth listening to. His music may not be for everyone, but if you do enjoy it there is nothing else like it. I recommend the album “God Forgive These Bastards: Songs From the Forgotten Life of Henry Turner,” and its accompanying book of almost the same name (just swap “songs” out for “stories”).
