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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.”