Neon Trees 

At Neon Trees’ sold-out June 16 show at The Complex in downtown Salt Lake City, frontman Tyler Glenn drew every eye to him, and not just because of his multiple costumes—although the ensemble of yellow suit, yellow-rimmed shades and tank top printed with Andy Warhol’s famous banana definitely helped. A veritable magnetic force, when he wasn’t displaying his Michael Jackson-influenced dance moves, conducting the audience as if they were a church choir or flashing a brilliant smile as he sang into the mic, he was disregarding the barrier separating the audience from the stage—jumping down to shake hands and, at one point, crowd surfing.

The show started with the crowd’s excitement level already at 10, and when the band launched into “Everybody Talks,” nearly every member of the audience began jumping up and down, cheering and screaming.

The most emotionally resonant moment of the night was much quieter, however, with the stage’s numerous multicolored lights turned off, and Tyler standing at the front of the stage under a white light, his back to complete darkness.

Then, to the enormous crowd, Glenn said, his voice shaking, “I’ve known since I was 3 years old. I love God. I’m 30 years old right now. I’m gay. I’m in Neon Trees. I’m so happy to be in Salt Lake City.”

It seemed as personal for Glenn as if he’d come out to a group of friends, a moment during which he was affirming his identify with himself as much as he was with the crowd.

It was Neon Trees’ first show in Utah since 2012, well before Glenn publicly came out in March of this year. In the band’s dressing room before the show, Glenn said that just after he came out, he had “a little anxiety” about how his news would be received by Utah crowds. “Not that I cared; it wasn’t going to change whether I decided to announce it or not, but … I had that curiosity like, ‘Will there be people who decide not to come to the show?’ ” he said.

But Glenn had nothing to worry about. The applause that ensued was deafening, and continued as he wiped tears away.

“I had so many people say, ‘What’s it going to be like when you tell that Utah crowd, those Mormons, what’s it going to be like when you tell them?’ ” he told the crowd. “I said, ‘They’re going to show up, they’re going to sell out the show, they’re going to sing those songs, it’s not going to matter. Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, Salt Lake City.’ ”

Glenn and the rest of Neon Trees received nothing but support from their home crowd, and that affection was reciprocated by the Provo-based band. “There’s something you gotta do when you’re in a band,” Glenn said onstage. “You gotta stay true to your roots, ladies and gentlemen. … I love Utah.”

Neon Trees’ ongoing connection with Utah might be surprising to some, considering all four members are Utah transplants. But the Provo band is still intimately tied to its home scene and the artists in it. On their Facebook page under “hometown” and “current” location, it reads “PROVO UTAH,” in capital letters.

“I know Provo’s not the coolest town in the world, but … I’m stoked that we’ve continued to claim Provo, Utah, as the place,” Glenn said in an earlier phone conversation with City Weekly. “We could’ve easily said we were from California or Vegas or Chicago because we have members from those towns. But that’s just not the real deal.”

“Electric Energy”
Tyler Glenn grew up LDS in Murrieta, Calif., a town at the halfway point between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eventual Neon Trees guitarist Chris Allen lived next door; the two became close friends and began playing music together in high school.

Until middle school, Glenn’s main musical inspiration was Michael Jackson. But in eighth grade, Glenn discovered the artist who would become his true idol: Morrissey, the influential vocalist of ’80s English rock band The Smiths. Through Morrissey’s love for the New York Dolls, Glenn became interested in them, too, as well as another early American punk band, The Dead Boys.

“Those are my two favorite bands,” he says. “Looking back at it now, I think it was because there was a lot of blurred androgyny that I thought was really interesting. Of course, I didn’t know at the time what that meant in my life.”

Once in high school, Glenn was invited to join his friends’ punk band, where he immediately found a much-needed cathartic outlet. “I had just gotten into some really old classic punk music, and so there was this really electric energy that I felt I could express in the music that I didn’t find in anything else,” he says.

In the April 2013 Neon Trees episode of the locally made BYUtv documentary-style show Audio-Files, Allen says that from the time they met, he knew Glenn’s musical abilities were extraordinary. “I gave him a tape of some songs I’d done on acoustic, and he took them home, and a couple hours later came back with four songs, completely done melodies, all the lyrics and everything, and I just knew he had something,” Allen says. “You just listen to him sing and you just want to pay attention. I knew something was there, and I knew we had to keep working together because we were both so passionate about it. I knew we would eventually make something happen.”

By his senior year, Glenn knew music was “what I’m doing with my life.” But Glenn and Allen had to put their plans to start a band together on hold when they served separate LDS missions, with Allen heading to Guatemala and Glenn going to Omaha, Neb. When Glenn returned to California, Allen was preparing to move to Utah to attend school at the Utah College of Massage Therapy. After Allen moved, he convinced Glenn to come to Utah as well, so Glenn abandoned his unsuccessful attempts at playing music solo since returning from his mission and followed him to Provo.

Setting the Scene
It’s not news that the Provo music scene is uniquely vibrant and connected to well-known area acts including Imagine Dragons, Fictionist, Brandon Flowers, The Used, Joshua James and, now, Neon Trees. And it’s impossible to tell the story of the origin of Neon Trees without also telling the story of Velour Live Music Gallery and its owner, Corey Fox. Formed nearly simultaneously, Velour and Neon Trees essentially grew up together, forging a longstanding relationship.

Originally from Highland, Fox was in high school at a time when “there wasn’t really a local scene” to speak of, he says. He’d make trips north to Salt Lake City music venues such as the now-defunct Club DV8 and The Zephyr Club to see concerts, but never experienced a local show while in high school.

But in the early ’90s, when Fox was in college, Utah County experienced a ska craze with homegrown bands such as Swim Herschel Swim and Stretch Armstrong, which were influential not just in the ska community but in the larger music scene.

“The scene exploded,” Fox says. He started managing a couple of smaller local bands and began to be involved in concert promotion. “I got caught up in what was truly a movement.”

Fox’s work as a promoter as well as a manager of bands such as ’90s Salt Lake City rock act Clover eventually led him to managing music venues in the Provo area. From 1996 to 2005, he managed Wrapsody, Johnny B’s and the original location of Muse Music.

But as Fox’s role in the scene grew, the surge of music coming out of Provo was receding. By the early 2000s, Fox says, “a lot of the bigger bands had moved on. That’s the one thing about Provo: There’s always been a ton of talent, but it’s a transient town. So people come and go as they graduate college or whatever.”

In 2005, while managing other people’s venues, Fox started thinking about moving on, too, forming “bigger ideas of what I wanted to do,” he says. “I really couldn’t do it in the space with someone else that had vastly different ideas than me.”

Fox found himself at a “crossroads,” he says, and considered moving to Salt Lake City or Los Angeles. But in the end, he realized, “If I was going to open my venue, I should probably do it in the town that I grew up in.”

He had a vision for a venue that would help “bring things back to how they were in the ’90s,” he says. “I found the scene thrived depending on the quality of the venues there were.” Muse Music was slowly building a renaissance, but Fox says he thought there was a need for a venue with a larger capacity that would inspire bands to climb higher and reach further.

“I felt that creating a legitimate venue and adding a structure that stressed work ethic and growth would inspire the creation of better bands and, ideally, change the musical culture,” he says. “The original idea with Velour was to create a legitimate venue that would force bands to take things more seriously,” as well as “push bands to grow past Provo.”

Provo: Where Dreams Come True
Glenn and Allen arrived in Provo and officially formed Neon Trees in late 2005, a few months before Velour opened Jan. 13, 2006—Friday the 13th, as it happens.

In the Neon Trees Audio-Files episode—which Fox co-produced—Glenn says, “Of course, in my mind, I’m thinking, ‘This is like a big step in my adulthood. Provo gonna’s be where dreams come true.’ And I felt very Jack Kerouac about it, and I was really, really excited to take on this new adventure.”

But when the band began regularly playing shows in Provo, they found that the venue selection was sparse. “There was this coffee shop called Steamers that was sort of more for punk bands, and then there was Muse Music, which was kind of the only other venue at the time,” Glenn says in an interview with City Weekly. “So when Velour came, it was like, ‘Oh, this is legit, this feels like an actual stage with lights and sound.’ That was our goal: ‘Let’s play at Velour.’ ”

Fox had already heard enough buzz about Neon Trees that he made the decision to grant them a headlining show at Velour before hearing any of their music. On Feb. 11, 2006, Neon Trees made their first appearance at the venue—a month after its opening—with their original lineup of Glenn, Allen, Mike Liechty, Jason Gibbons and Nathan Evans. That night, Neon Trees performed with Pariah Poetic and a screamo band called The New Nervous, fronted by Book on Tape Worm songwriter/frontman Scott Shepard; Neon Trees and The New Nervous often shared stages during Neon Trees’ first year as a band.

Fox, who tends to have a tough-love approach with bands, says his choice to give Neon Trees the gig “went against my total protocol. My whole thing is making people earn what they get [and] not just give bands opportunities necessarily. But yeah, I just trusted some of the people that I’d known that had seen them.”

And Neon Trees—particularly Glenn’s captivating stage presence—delivered. “The thing that stood out for sure was Tyler,” Fox says. “Tyler has been a natural frontman [since] the second I saw him for the first time, so I expected big things out of them just from seeing Tyler at that first show.”

Born for the Stage
Fox says Glenn was “a showman from the second [Neon Trees] started.” But he’d formed that charismatic persona long before he ever took the stage at Velour.

Being raised in the LDS culture gave Glenn early exposure to music, something he has in common with many Provo musicians. “A lot of band members, active [Mormon] or non-active, grew up in homes where learning an instrument, singing or dancing were very prevalent,” Fox says. “Once they get into their teens, they take that talent and put their own spin on it.”

Glenn didn’t learn an instrument as a child, but he did begin writing music as young as 4—songs that, even then, were “about freedom,” Glenn says—and frequently sang in church. “The minute they find out you’re a kid who knows how to sing, they always give you the song in Primary or in Sacrament Meeting,” he says.

The public-speaking aspect of church, as well as his LDS mission, also helped him find his inner showman.

“When I’m speaking onstage … it just comes from the heart,” Glenn says. “You do that when you’re in testimony meeting and you’re talking. And when I’m [speaking onstage], I kind of feel the same way I do when I’m up at the pulpit giving a talk.”

When he started playing music as a teenager, he knew he’d found his calling in being onstage.

“I didn’t know how to go about really making a band take off, but I knew that I wanted to be a performer and that was something I enjoyed—being in plays and singing at church and stuff like that,” he says. “I loved getting that out there.”

And Glenn wanted to do more than sing in Sacrament Meeting. He soon “ended up secretly wanting to be in a band for the rest of my life,” he says.

But instead of sharing his dreams with his parents, he told them he wanted to be a journalist. It was at least partially true, since he was interested in writing about music.

Using fashion as a mode of expression gave Glenn the freedom to walk the line between being the quiet California kid who wouldn’t admit to dreaming of a career in music, and the flashy, outgoing rock star he knew he could be.

“I think anyone that ever got into rock & roll was all about pretending to be someone else,” he says in the Audio-Files episode. “That’s how I got into fashion since I was 12, just not wanting to be Tyler Glenn because I was anxious and nervous as him, but I was this different character when I put on something else.”

And he continued exploring different characters even in the early days of Neon Trees. “It was me hiding behind the ambiguity of rock music,” Glenn said backstage at The Complex—wearing tight yellow pants, a button-down shirt featuring a splashy comic-book print, and sparkly gold shoes with worn-out toes due to Glenn’s onstage move of standing on his tiptoes.

“I think a lot of people probably assume that [Neon Trees] started off and they were just kind of a generic local band,” Fox says. “A lot of bands that start off, they don’t have any style; they don’t have any image. … But funny thing with Tyler, early on, I think on a local level, he was even more out there than he is currently. ... He’s always had elaborate costuming, costume changes during shows.”

“I was always very sexually ambiguous onstage with what I chose to wear,” Glenn says. “I think I was more feminine in the early days, like wearing tights and women’s blouses and things.”

But “it wasn’t shock value,” he says; he was simply influenced stylistically by glam rock, the New York Dolls and David Bowie. “That’s what felt right, that’s who I wanted to be onstage.”

Who’ll Be the First to Make It Big?
After Neon Trees’ debut at Velour, they continued to pound the Provo pavement and grow their fanbase. Glenn and Allen soon split from the other three members of the original lineup, and found current Neon Trees bassist Branden Campbell, who’s originally from Las Vegas, and drummer Elaine Bradley—who was also playing in a second Provo-based band, Another Statistic, at the time—to, at first, just fill in.

Bradley—who grew up in the Midwest and ended up staying in Utah after attending BYU—had had her sights set on Neon Trees for a while. “I snuck in and I stayed,” she says with a laugh.

The addition of Bradley and her drum set helped the band’s sound evolve from synth-heavy, almost new-wave pop to the energetic rock that eventually launched them onto the national scene.

Neon Trees continued to play shows at Velour, their unofficial home base. “Velour is the perfect place to practice songs on an audience because it was a sober audience, and you could actually build a fanbase and have sold-out shows,” Glenn says.

Neon Trees eventually found themselves in friendly competition with other Provo bands making names for themselves, like Another Statistic, The New Nervous and Victim Effect.

“We were all kind of wondering who was gonna be the first band to break nationally. I think we just stuck it out the longest … a lot of those bands sort of broke up,” Glenn says. “We kind of just kept going, almost to an excruciating degree.”

In 2007, in order to be closer to necessary connections, focus on their music and try their hand at playing shows outside of Utah, the band uprooted to Glenn and Allen’s hometown in Southern California—probably the exact opposite of the fast-paced intensity of Los Angeles, where musicians typically move to “make it.”

Moving to Murrieta was “kind of a step down,” Bradley says. “But we had to do it to be close to the things that we wanted to be doing to really hone our craft and give us the opportunity to … not have a lot of distractions, because we were kind of in the middle of nowhere.”

The band holed up in Glenn and Allen’s home neighborhood, with Glenn moving back in with his parents, and Allen, Bradley and Campbell renting Allen’s parents’ former home to immerse themselves in writing music. For “pretty much six days a week for like eight hours a day,” Bradley says, the agenda was “just write, write, write, and play any show we could.”

Out of the Dark
The hard work and single-mindedness of the band paid off, and Neon Trees found success at a whirlwind pace: They caught the attention of Killers bassist Ronnie Vannucci Jr., and opened for that band on their 2008 North American tour. Not long after the tour, Neon Trees signed with Mercury Records. In 2009, Neon Trees won the City Weekly Music Awards, earning the title of Band of the Year. Their major-label debut, 2010’s Habits, received widespread attention, as their single “Animal”—an urgent pop-rock number about sexual longing—reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart and was covered on Glee. The success of Habits led to tours with big names including Duran Duran, My Chemical Romance, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and Panic! At the Disco.

In 2012, the band released their sophomore album, Picture Show, and its successful lead single “Everybody Talks.” But a disastrous tour threatened to stop their upward trajectory. Neon Trees were an opening act on a tour with ’90s-era California punk band The Offspring, an unfortunate mismatch. “Their audience just didn’t get us,” Glenn says.

Facing hostile audiences at shows night after night affected the band as a whole, and caused emotional turmoil for Glenn especially. The tour “just kind of brought a lot of my demons that I had to figure out to a head,” he says.

After the tour, Glenn canceled Neon Trees’ activities for the rest of the year. Facing creative burnout as well as his own personal struggles, Glenn entered therapy to get back on track. “I was sort of in a place in my life where I was really uninterested in writing new music,” he says.

When Glenn began writing the music that would later become Neon Trees’ third full-length album, Pop Psychology, he was still in therapy, a fact that’s reflected in the record’s title.

Glenn says talking to a therapist “helped me talk about things maybe I didn’t always talk about,” he says. “It helped me be really frank and think, ‘Oh, I can accept these things about myself, I can accept this anxiety that I have sometimes.’ ”

Glenn started writing music again in January 2013, and Neon Trees resumed touring—this time a successful set of dates supporting Maroon 5. Pop Psychology, released in April, chronicles the banishment of Glenn’s personal darkness.

“I think in my mind, I thought the record was going to be a dark, more introspective album, but [it was the] more energetic, celebratory stuff that I wanted to really explore,” Glenn says. He adds that he’s pleased with the optimistic feel of the album, which reflects his current state of being. “I’m not in a dark place anymore,” he says.

The catchy, guitar-laced songs on Pop Psychology deal with themes found in a lot of Neon Trees’ work, such as being young, complicated relationships, love and social interaction, as well as the ways technology has changed how people interact with one another. And in their emotion-filled lyrics, something the songs all have in common is “a degree of honesty,” Glenn says.

“It’s OK to Be One Person”
Honesty has played a significant role in Glenn’s life recently. In March, Glenn came out as gay in a Rolling Stone feature titled “Neon Trees’ Tyler Glenn: Gay, Mormon and Finally Out.”

Coming out, Glenn says, has allowed him to unite two parts of his life that he thought would only repel each other: his Mormon faith and his sexual orientation. Before coming out, he says, he got “really good at compartmentalizing, and I think you do to an extent as a closeted gay man. … You get really good at being different versions of yourself.”

But now, Glenn—who still identifies as Mormon—has begun to mend the fractures in his life that he once felt so sharply. “I wasn’t the last person to find out I was gay; it wasn’t like this revelation that came to me recently,” he says. “But it was sort of the idea of you don’t have to lead the double life. It’s OK to be one person. And that created this lightness in my step, and being able to be the performer that I wanted to be my whole life.”

And as he commanded the stage at The Complex, he seemed to glow from within with some unidentifiable luminance—or maybe the Utah audience was just seeing Tyler Glenn as he truly was for the first time.

“I’m not telling you to be gay; I’m telling you to be yourself,” he told the crowd. “Come out as you. Come out as you. Be whoever you are, but come out. Because when you’re 30, half your life is already gone. You need to live it, you gotta do it, you gotta do it, so be yourself.”

Glenn says coming out was more about accepting himself than just announcing his sexual orientation. “I had to accept a lot about myself that I didn’t always want to,” he said backstage. “I’ve always told people from the microphone, for years: ‘Be yourself.’ Now I can say it fully.”