Neon Trees 

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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.”