If you haven’t had a chance to watch ‘Trash’, Tyler Glenn’s new solo single debut, take a minute and watch/listen….I’ll wait….
Okay, you’re back…first impressions? Frustration, betrayal, defiance, this is one angry song. I have not been able to stop thinking about it. First, a little background info. Tyler is the lead singer for the Neon Trees and he was raised in a faithful Mormon family, and he also happens to be gay. He served a mission for the church, (two years for young men, paid by their family) to further spread the gospel. There are better articles that explain all the intricacies of this video. I just wanted to applaud Tyler Glenn for writing such a personal song about his struggle with the religion of his birth.
I was born a Latter-Day Saint, or what is commonly called, Mormon. And after years of struggle, I left the Mormon church. It was the most painful discovery of my life to realize that it was all a lie and I had been banging my head on a brick wall that wasn’t even there. To give you some perspective, think of Jim Carrey in ‘The Truman Show’.
‘What the ____????’
You may laugh, but that is honestly what it is like. If you have any doubts at all and express them freely, EVERYONE, everyone you know, tells you you are wrong. All the people you trust, the people closest to you; your parents, youth leaders, grandparents, your bishop. It’s like searching for fruit in a vegetable factory (a ‘fruitless search’, get it?). I can’t even imagine how much worse it must be for the LDS young men and women who find themselves searching for their sexual identity and being told that there is no place in heaven, or Sunday School, for them.
As a teenager, very confused and defiant, I had a conversation in a car once that lasted for hours. I implored, ‘How can the Hindus and the Muslims and the Catholics and the Methodists all believe different things and the Mormons are the only ones who are right?’ The woman I was speaking with, who happened to be a professor at BYU, wouldn’t let me leave the car until I saw things her way, the Mormon way. This happened over and over and over again as I continued to search for answers. But when you are surrounded completely, taught from birth that the world is in a gray fog of confusion and that the LDS church has the only true gospel, you are in a hamster wheel and you don’t even know it.
There were many ‘aha!’ moments along the way, but a major pivot point for me was during a voice lesson in college. My teacher casually remarked I was ‘too smart to be a Mormon’. I was insulted at the time, but her statement helped me explore what was already unraveling. I didn’t ever get to thank her for saying that. She died before I got the chance.
More than a decade later, I officially resigned from the Mormon church. And I still have waves of anger that hit outta nowhere. All the years wasted on religious questions, the sexism that forged my decision to start a family and forego a career, the continued bigotry toward the LGBT community…
Tyler Glenn has his own journey of discovery to go through. He may or may not come to the conclusions I did about the Mormon church. But he had the guts to document the most painful chapter so far in this song. Trash, the thing you get rid of because you have no place for it. That is really…well that just says it all doesn’t it? I wish I could thank him in person for releasing this song. He didn’t filtering anything.
write and warble 