Kelly Doyle has played guitar in many different contexts and with many different artists, from aughts indie-rockers What Made Milwaukee Famous, to coffeeshop eclectics Khruangbin, to wild-at-heartland troubadour Craig Finn. As a full-time working musician, he’s also had to take some less conventional jobs to keep the lights on. “I had a regular megachurch gig,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home studio in Houston. “It was full-on The Righteous Gemstones before that was a thing—they would literally jump dirt bikes over the stage. They’d have nativity scenes going through the venue, an elephant walking through the crowd…”

Trying to compete with such a spiritual circus had its challenges, to say the least. “It was a really hellish, nightmare experience,” Doyle recalls. But his brush with extreme evangelism did have its good points: “I learned what not to do … like bandleader stuff.” One lesson: Don’t scare someone right before they go onstage. “They’d literally tell a singer, ‘Okay, there’s gonna be a lot of people out there, you’re going to need to bring it,’” Doyle recalls. “The music director would get in their head, and we’d walk onstage and they’d fold, because you just shook their confidence.”