Microwave’s Nathan Hardy Speaks on His Experience as a Mormon Missionary

September 26, 2024

Microwave’s Nathan Hardy Speaks on His Experience Leaving Mormonism

I grew up amongst the same friend groups as the members of the band Microwave but did not know them very well until I directed a music video for them in 2022. Nathan Hardy, vocalist and guitarist, has a history within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as Mormonism although the church discourages that phrasing. I’ve been interviewing people on their positive and negative experiences within Mormonism for a feature project and this exchange stuck out as very informative and inspiring. The format of this one is different. It’s more consistent storytelling rather than asking a ton of questions. We talk about the red flags that led to him leaving Mormonism, mental health and OCD being exacerbated from the experience, psychedelics, being a missionary, starting his band as soon as he got home from being a missionary and a story about an elder burning a bible.

Introduction & First Red Flags

Should we just start from the beginning? Might do a little improv on this.

My parents met at BYU. My mom is from Whittier, outside of Los Angeles. My dad is from Phoenix. My mom taught my dad math in college and that’s how they met. Their families have been Mormon for a long time. My dad’s mom’s great-great-(great?) grandfather, Alexander McRae, was in jail with the first prophet of the church, Joseph Smith. On my mom’s side, they’re Swedish. At the beginning of the Mormon church, they sent a lot of missionaries to the U.K, Holland, Sweden and brought people back to Nauvoo, Illinois. At one point, Nauvoo was the second largest city in Illinois outside of Chicago. The local Illinois people hated them. What the hell is going on? He’s establishing some weird sex cult. My family dates back to original Mormons. My parents didn’t convert. They were raised Mormon.

I feel like my parent’s parents started to set the ball in motion of their grandchildren not being Mormon anymore. From what I’ve gathered, they all had a strong focus on education and careerism. One of my grandfathers was an engineer who worked on nuclear weapons and then died in a plane crash while commuting to work on the Alaskan Pipeline. My other grandfather was a Democrat federal judge elected by Jimmy Carter. I have a few openly gay family members, including an aunt who has been open about it since before I was born. Many of my extended family members on both sides ventured away from Mormonism long ago so my family had already, to some extent, learned to accept people who went a different path before I came along. They were already progressive as far as Mormons go, then my parents went to grad school at UC Berkeley, which has the reputation of being the hippie school with the free love movement and it has historically been the forefront of left-ideology. I think part of the reason they went there was that they enjoyed that, aesthetically at least, or they wanted to open their minds.

I feel like nobody has free will and free will is an illusion, so I think the deterministic machine that set me up to not be Mormon anymore probably started there with my parents and their parents starting to venture away from the more rigid, traditional mindset. My parents are still at church every Sunday and they’re very actively Mormon. Most of my cousins are not Mormon anymore. While I was a missionary, I had sixteen or seventeen people that I was partnered with and I’m not sure that any of them are still Mormon. In general, with my age group, if you grew up online and were able to search things on Google, a lot of people have started to fall away. There’s a lot of things that make up the foundation of the Mormon Church and there are teachings from the Old Testament that, at one point, were official church teachings that didn't age well. It’s ran by men. If you’re a woman, you’re not allowed to hold the priesthood. There’s a lot of things they’ve said historically, like being black is the mark of Cain so they’re cursed. That wasn’t an official church teaching, but official church leaders said it in published texts and one could fairly ascribe that to the church.

BYU & Mental Health

While I was a missionary, I was on antidepressants. I took them on and off since I was twelve. I tried every SSRI drug in the book, pretty much. They didn’t work for me, none of them. While I was a missionary, I was on 150mg of Zoloft for a big chunk of it and I still had really bad OCD. While I drove, if I hit a bump in the road, I’d have to circle back and see if I hit something or someone. It got to the point, if I drove two miles, I’d have to circle back around about four times. I had to go see therapists. While I was a missionary, half the people I was partnered with were prescribed antidepressants while they were missionaries for the first time in their lives. I was thinking, something about this program with the missionaries seems to be bad for people’s mental health. That was the first red flag.

I grew up in Georgia, outside of Atlanta. There were 8-10 Mormons that went to my high school. I went to church every morning at 6:30AM before high school, for all four years. In general, my friends weren’t Mormon. There weren’t any other Mormons that were into music besides one guy that I went to church with who was in my band in high school. Most of my friends weren’t Mormon so I grew up culturally less Mormon. I went to BYU in Utah when I was eighteen. It was my first time being immersed in Mormonism. A lot of people there only hung out with other Mormons growing up. If you’re Mormon, you’re trying to maintain your values and there are pretty strict ones, like you don’t drink coffee and you don’t watch R-rated movies. You don’t do a lot of things so the church encourages you to hang out with people as a youth that have the same values so they don’t try to get you to do things that are against your values. If you grew up in Utah or Arizona as a Mormon, you’re more inside of a bubble. It’s an awful bubble to be inside of. There’s a lot of weird drama and people talking behind other people’s backs. There’s weird dynamics of making sure your Mormon peers keep their values where people will rat on you to the bishop and stuff. I heard they were out late past curfew. At one point, while I was at BYU, I bleached my hair but I didn’t bleach my eyebrows so they knew it wasn’t my natural hair color. They said I wasn’t allowed to go to the library until I dyed my hair back to my natural hair color. There are wild rules at BYU. They might have updated some but when I was there, if you were a girl, you weren’t allowed to wear sandals or shorts to an extent. There was just a lot of strict rules that were off-putting while I was there.

I went and put my papers in to be a missionary, which you do when you’re nineteen. The first time I put my papers in, they said I couldn’t go because I failed the mental health exam. If you took any SSRI drugs, they would make you get an exam with a psychologist at the church. The church has their own psychology counseling center, LDS Family Services. I failed the mental health exam. I had to go visit the psychologist counselor for a few months before they finally said I could go. I can now see why they would try to keep people who are already on SSRI drugs from being a missionary. Everyone is already going crazy and getting prescribed SSRI drugs while they’re a missionary and going home early because they’re having mental health problems even if they didn’t have any issues like that before the mission.

Missionary Work

I got my mission call and it was the Columbia River Temple mission, which was Southern Washington and Northern Oregon, except for Portland. I spent a year in Vancouver, Washington. It’s basically what Marietta is to Atlanta. It’s suburbs of Portland where mostly white, conservative people live. They had “Keep Portland Weird” bumper stickers and “Keep Vancouver Normal” bumper stickers. I was in Tri-Cities and Hermiston, Oregon for the other year. I was in Kennewick, Washington for nine months and then Richland, Washington for three months. I was actually in Irrigon, Oregon outside of Hermiston and I spoke Spanish while I was there. A lot of the local people spoke Spanish there.

While I was a missionary, because I grew up not being immersed in Mormonism, I was able to relate with people who weren’t Mormon a little better. I was actually very successful as a missionary. I baptized three times the amount of people the average missionary baptized on their mission in that area. There’s a little handbook, a white missionary handbook. It has all the rules of things that you’re not allowed to do and things you’re supposed to do. There’s a section called “Television, Radio, Movies, Videos, DVDS, Internet.” The first line is “Do not watch television, go to movies, listen to the radio, or use the Internet (except to communicate with your family or your mission president or as otherwise authorized).” You weren’t allowed to hug girls. You weren't allowed to high five kids because they wanted to avoid any interaction with kids that they possibly could, to ward off any accusations like what they have with the Catholic Church. They’re trying to steer clear. You weren’t allowed to stay in people’s houses for more than 45 minutes at a time. You weren’t allowed to watch, read or listen to anything that didn’t have the Mormon Churches logo stamped on it. So, we were supposed to give people our churches literature and if they offered us their own literature, Jehovah’s Witnesses for example, we couldn’t accept it. We’re not going to read your literature. We’re here for a purpose. Our purpose is to have people read and pray about the Book of Mormon and get baptized. We had to stay focused on our purpose for being there, so that stuff was viewed as a distraction. To me, this is not how conversations work. If you want to have a respectful conversation with other people about faith, you have to be willing to listen to where they’re coming from. Anyways, what I’m getting to is that I did not follow the missionary rules at all. I had Tupac albums and all the music that I listened to back home. I had a huge thing of CDs and I listened to whatever I wanted. We would go into people’s houses and play Call of Duty with their kids for hours and then share a scripture. After that, “you want to come to church on Sunday?” Lo and behold they would come to church on Sunday, where other missionaries wouldn’t be able to get people to come to church. It was common sense to me. Because we were humans, they felt more comfortable. They would actually come to church and they would get baptized. That was the thing I noticed that would make people want to get baptized was if they fit into the social group of the church.

There was a big focus on obedience while you’re a missionary. Exact obedience as they called it. They would have meetings with all the missionaries where they teach you how to be a better missionary. All the missionaries from the local region would get together. The mission president would talk to everyone. One thing they really drove home was, if you’re not exactly obedient to the rules that the Prophet of God who receives inspiration and revelation from Christ Himself has set out for you, The Holy Spirit will not be with you, which is the power of conversion which makes people convert to Christ’s True Church. It was obvious that they were full of shit. I was not being exactly obedient. I was baptizing three times as many people as other missionaries were. Other missionaries started to notice it too. There were a couple of times on my mission where they almost sent me home because they heard stories from people in the local congregations where we were positioned about things that my partner and I had done. Our mission president, President Greer, hit me up on the phone, “Elder Hardy, I can get you on an airplane tomorrow. We can send you home.” They would try to intimidate me and send me home. One thing I almost got sent home for was watching Fight Club with some people. I think the people we watched Fight Club with got baptized and joined the church, which is supposed to be the goal. I have to admit, to the church’s credit, I think 90% of the people I baptized do not go to church anymore. They would probably say, “maybe you baptized people but you didn’t convert them with the power of the Holy Ghost.” In reality, the people that convert to Mormonism that actually stay and have a good retention rate are what we call Part Member Families where the wife or husband is already Mormon and they’re just trying to bring in their spouse. There’s a lot more social pressure to be Mormon if it unites your family and now you can go to church with them.

All of my grandparents died while I was a missionary (aside from my Mom’s dad who died in the plane crash when she was two). I found out in emails. I didn't go to any of their funerals because you’re not allowed to leave your mission. I couldn’t even call and talk about it. One other thing that affects people’s mental health as a missionary is you’re only allowed to email your family once a week on Monday, P-day. You’re not supposed to email anybody but your family. You can’t call anyone from home except your parents on Christmas and Mother’s Day. The whole time as a missionary, if you want to talk to your friends back home, you’re supposed to write letters. I pretty much followed that, but I emailed some of my friends. You’re isolated. You’re there for your purpose, to knock on doors and bring people to Christ. My family endorsed that because that’s the rules and they believe in the prophet that made the rules.

People that I was partnered with were having mental health problems left and right. One of my companions was from Northern Utah and had twelve siblings. His name was Moroni which is the most Mormon name you could possibly have. Moroni is the angel that showed Joseph Smith where the gold plates were buried. This dude was named after that angel, who only exists within Mormonism. He was one of my favorite companions. I’ve talked to him recently and he’s not Mormon anymore. It must have been way harder for him to get out of it because he was so much more indoctrinated. When he was growing up, him and his brothers would dig holes for fun. At one point, their uncle gave them Uno cards for Christmas and his mom made him burn them. She thought that any playing cards were Satanic. They weren’t allowed to play any games. They just did nonsense things like dig holes for fun. When he was going to therapy while we were missionaries, the therapist straight up told him to stop reading his mom’s emails and correspondence because that’s what was causing his mental health problems. A lot of the parents would also try to drive home exact obedience because that was a big theme. It’s almost a testing ground when you’re a missionary. Can you handle the immersion of having even stricter rules or are you going to break? If you passed that, maybe you’ll move up in the church and become a church official. That blew me away, that Moroni needed to stop interacting with his mom for his mental health. I was thinking, there are a lot of things going on here that are big red flags.

End of Missionary Work

One of the main turning points where it really kinda set me off path with being Mormon was while I was with Moroni. We would also teach people that were “less active”, which were people that were Mormon but hadn’t gone to church in a while. There was a less active lady that we taught while I was with Moroni. We told her she should read and pray about the Book of Mormon to receive a confirmation again that the Book of Mormon is the word of God and that Joseph Smith was a prophet. She broke down and told us her story: “At one point I prayed if I should marry my husband who was Mormon. I received a strong spiritual confirmation. My parents also prayed and received a strong spiritual confirmation. We all cried together about what a strong and clear spiritual confirmation it seemed to be. This man went on to molest my kids.” She told us that the church didn't hold him accountable. They still let him be at church where he was among children. They didn’t support her through that and urged her to forgive him. That really messed her up. The part that really struck me is that she prayed if she should marry him and had *felt* that affirmation that this was the right move. She asked me, “how do you expect me to pray about something and have a feeling about it and to trust the feeling?” I just shut my mouth. As a rational person, that’s a really good point. It occurred to me that if you’re willing to make decisions based on a feeling that you have then you’re no different from people who fly airplanes into buildings for their God. They have the same feelings of affirmation that what they’re doing is the thing that God wants them to do. Maybe people shouldn't make decisions based on feelings that they have. People have feelings just because they have certain levels of serotonin/brain chemicals/neurotransmitters in their body at different times. That experience set me off but I kept being a missionary anyways. I just went through the motions. You talk to people and repeat the same things. That was about a year and three months into my mission so I had nine months left. I was just going to finish this thing.

While I was in my last area, in Vancouver, Washington, one of the guys in our congregation was the Stake President. On Sunday, they would pass around a sheet at church where people would sign up to feed the missionaries dinner. Each night of the week we would get fed by a different family from the local congregation. The Stake President’s family signed up to feed us one night. Above his fireplace - and this was 2010 - there was a framed date from 2016. I asked what the date was. He said it was the date that his whole family would be in the Mormon temple together. He had kids so that was assuming that his kids were going to want to be Mormon. In order to go to the temple, you have to be following all of the rules. You can’t be gay. You can’t drink coffee. You have to follow all the rules of Mormonism to go to the temple. I thought that framed date was pretty presumptuous. I started to pay more and more attention to the fact that people were being coerced into being Mormon and they were under an illusion. They would try to drive home all the time that these young missionaries aren’t here because anyone is making them do it. They are here because they want to be here and it’s of their own free will. This is why it’s so special. These nineteen-year-old boys of their own accord want to come out here and do this every day, knock on doors. They would really try to make that a talking point. Another part of the dynamic of that is that every nineteen-year-old boy was “called” to be a Mormon missionary by the prophet. It’s assumed because the prophet is a mouthpiece of God that if you go contrary to what he says, you’re breaking the commandments or the will of God, which is essentially a sin.

This Stake President had a rule in his household before everyone ate dinner. They went around in a circle and had to say something nice that they had done for someone that day - where they had served other people. I couldn’t think of anything in particular so I just said that we had knocked on doors for four hours that day and worked really hard trying to find new people to talk to about Jesus and Mormonism. He said, “that doesn’t count. You have to do that.” He made a stink about it, “you have to think of something else before we go on and eat dinner.” That sat bad with me, I really do have to do this, don’t I? You just said it out loud. This guy with the date on his fireplace, you’re literally forcing your children to go along with this and forcing people to be missionaries. Everyone is out here and they’re miserable, having a terrible time and don’t want to be here. Everyone is lying and acting like it is completely different from how it is. If God is real, the truth has to be important. It’s a red flag if people are saying things are true that aren’t true. This was towards the end of my mission. I was thinking, the second I get home from being a Mormon missionary, I’m not going to church for at least a year. I have to get some distance.

I had a huge guilt complex. That was part of my OCD. I always felt like I was being watched by God. One thing I would do with my OCD was if I went to someone’s bathroom, when I walked out of the bathroom, I would have to admit that I put their toilet seat down kind of hard. If I broke it, just let me know and I’ll buy you a new toilet seat. I would repeat that phrase five times a day. It was things like that where I would admit guilt. I would admit to something and I know that stemmed from this sense of feeling like God was watching me and then feeling like, you know you hit that thing in the road and you just drove away, or you know you broke that thing and you walked away. I wanted to have my slate be clean or whatever.

Some of the people I was a missionary with will hit me up on Facebook messenger when they leave the church and they’ll talk to me about it. I’ve had a few different people say I was an influence in them leaving the church, for better or worse. While I was a missionary, I always was matter of fact with people. My upbringing wasn’t the same as most of the missionaries I was with so I had a different vibe. This guy doesn't even seem like he's Mormon. I knew every word to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony songs. I grew up with A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang Clan. That was a different dynamic than the kids who listened to Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Christian music.

Do you think your OCD was heightened during this experience?

A big part of my OCD was hypochondria. Even to this day, I’m worried about my heart right now because my heart rate is really low and I’m getting alerts on my Apple Watch, 38BPM when I’m sleeping, and it freaks me out. I’ve always had that. A big chunk of my OCD was centered around feeling like I needed to confess things. There was one time I was driving and I was really concerned because I hit a bump, looked back, and there was a kid playing on the shoulder of the road right about where I had felt the bump. I drove away because I was trying to be sane and I knew that if I had actually hit something or someone, Moroni would have noticed. I compulsively asked him if I had just hit something and he said something like, “you’re crazy, man.” It stuck with me so hard though that a week later, I dragged Moroni back and knocked on a few doors to ask if a child had been hit in the street like I’d heard a rumor or something. I really felt like I knew deep down inside that I had done something wrong and that I was purposefully evading the penalty or punishment for what I had done. I was preoccupied with that chronically.

If you do a sexual sin, you’re supposed to confess that to your bishop. lf you’re fourteen, looked at porn or masturbated, you’re supposed to talk to a fifty-year-old man who a lot of times is your friend’s dad. At one point, I was going to the bishop a bunch and confessing things like that I made out with a girl and her hand brushed up against my dick. Technically, is that heavy petting? Did I sin? I went to the bishop probably eight times when I was a teenager and what I confessed got progressively more minor and vague to the point where he said I was always welcome to come and talk to him but these things weren’t so serious that it was absolutely necessary. It continued while I was a missionary. One of the guys I was a missionary with who developed mental health issues while on the mission was also preoccupied about needing to confess to the Mission President. He had already confessed before that he had looked at porn and masturbated but he hadn't specified that he had looked at porn with two girls. He said he should have mentioned it was a lesbian thing because he thought that was more serious. I think a lot of Mormons were preoccupied with things like that. I still have an underlying feeling of guilt and I must have that because the Holy Spirit is telling me that there’s something I need to resolve. I had that underlying feeling all the time that there was something unresolved that must be making me feel this way. I think that people who aren’t Mormon can also connect with that feeling, that you need to solve whatever it is that's wrong. The Holy Spirit urges you to repent of your sins and to do things that bring you closer to God, so this guilt must be for a reason. Guilt is a good thing. It’s what drives people to repent of their sins.

Post-missionary, Microwave, Psychedelics

Missionary work is two years right? From age 19-21?

Yeah, so 2010 to 2012, I was a missionary. So, I came home from being a missionary in June 2012. I wrote my band Microwave’s lyrics and the instrumentation for the first EP while I was a missionary. It was just a fictional storyline.

The missionary work bled into you starting the band?

I played in bands starting when I was twelve years old and I was always really into music. I wasn't going to go back to BYU after my mission. I wanted to be back in Georgia just because I never met anyone in Utah I really wanted to be in a band with. I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t at least try to follow my dreams of being in a band. I did really well in high school and on the SATS and ACTS. I could have had a good scholastic career. That sounds boring as hell though and all the info is on the internet. I knew Tito from high school and from hanging out at Swayze's (a local venue). I was a Swayze's kid in high school. Tito was the only person I knew that played drums when I came back to Georgia after my mission so I was like let’s ride. I love him, he’s a great guy. We started doing Microwave and within five months we had written and recorded our first EP. We started doing little DIY tours. I went to two semesters at GSU and stopped because I didn’t want to get student debt. Tuition wasn’t even that much. It was like $1400 a semester because of the Zell Miller scholarship but even with that, I just wanted to do music.

I came home and immediately stopped going to church. When you’re a young single adult, you go to the Young Single Adult ward where everyone else is also a young single adult. Every Sunday, they have talks about how you need to get married and multiply and replenish the earth. That’s also a commandment, to have children. They sugar coat it. Yes, you have to do this but you’re not going to to Hell per se if you don’t. It’s a soft violation. I didn't really meet anyone at YSA and I didn’t really have friends within Mormonism still that I connected with very hard. Again, most of my close friends are not Mormon.

I still had the OCD and was still taking Zoloft. I stopped taking the Zoloft and started taking Adderall again because Adderall also helped me with OCD and depression. I always intuitively knew if I smoked weed that it would probably be something that was good for me. I’ve known for a long time that having escapes is healthy. Sometimes when you’re trying to work through a problem, especially if it’s something that you’re having OCD about, sometimes you need to pause and revisit the problem later and let your subconscious solve the problem. I started smoking weed six months after I came home from my mission. That was a pretty big life changing moment, just being able to have two different versions of myself and being able to escape and evaluate the sober version of myself. That was a beneficial escape, but I discovered that mushrooms and LSD are even more beneficial about a year after I came home from being a missionary. The first two or three times I experimented with psychedelics were pivotal life-changing experiences. At that point, I had the anxiety of not going to church and deep down inside I still felt that I should be going to church because I had that instilled in me. When I did LSD, I really was able to just shake it off my back and reimagine my life. I knew intuitively from all the red flags I had experienced that something was not right with Mormonism. Mormonism also says you’re not supposed to do mushrooms or LSD and I had these really positive life changing experiences with LSD and mushrooms. There’s no way, if there is a God, that he wants me to avoid this. This is something that is therapeutic and helps me. After the first time I took mushrooms, I never turned around to see if I hit stuff in the road again. I dropped most of my OCD tics overnight. I was able to reimagine a version of myself that did not have to do those things and choose to adopt that as my new identity. I realized how you create your identity through the stories that you tell yourself.

A lot of people who leave Mormonism are plagued with it for their whole lives. I went out with one of my close Mormon friends who’s gay recently after a show on tour with Microwave. He had a horrible experience being gay and growing up in Mormonism, but he said to me that if he had children, he would still want to bring them to church and raise them Mormon and that blew my mind. He still had that idea that the values you learn in Mormonism are integral. A lot of people that step away are still caught in the muck of it, where part of them still has a reservation that God is watching them and they still have guilt complexes and the same mental health issues they had when they were Mormon. When I used mushrooms the first couple of times, I was able to drop it to where I knew that the course I was taking was more in harmony with the truth and would make me happier. It definitely played out that way. I’m grateful for that. I would recommend to anyone who is Mormon or who has any sort of orthodox religious upbringing, you should try LSD or mushrooms. Unfortunately, people will also have experiences with psychedelics where they have underlying intentions of validating their religious experience. There is definitely a thing with psychedelics where whatever you think will happen happens, so if you think you’re going to have an experience that affirms your religious experience or faith, that can also happen. I was mentioning earlier, I already had some values and experiences instilled in me that helped me be able to shed the Mormonism. I’ve never really looked back. I was looking back until that time (when I started to take psychedelics). That was a year or so from when I came home from being a missionary. When I saw my parents, you should really come back to church. There was around three years after I left where I didn't really interact with my parents or my extended family much at all. It was really painful to sit through it. They think I’m going to Hell now, so they feel like they need to save me. They’re emotionally invested in wanting me to come back to church. When it was fresh, they still hadn't let go of that.

When they would say or imply that, I would think, I know without a shadow of a doubt you're going to watch people that were my age and Mormon grow up and you’re going to see how the Mormon church makes you stressed out and hurts your mental health. You’re going to watch me having stepped away from Mormonism and you’re going to see how it enhances my mental health and my life. That’s exactly what happened. Within a few years, my parents started to pay more attention to the fact that I used to have problems where I would have to take 150mg of Zoloft every day and now I seemed to be fine. They asked, “why do you think that is?” Well, I think it was the Mormonism in part. The fact that I felt at odds with what I felt inside was the truth. I saw all these red flags but I kept going along with it. I think that was part of the foundation that was making me so unhappy before. I now understood how I can forge my own reality and identity and how I can be whatever story I tell myself. It’s very liberating to have that foundational viewpoint. I’m a humanist now and I think humans are born good and they want to be kind to each other. I have faith in that now. I think that’s a lot more powerful than having faith that humans are born evil and need to be saved by God.

I think that’s it, as far as the story of me leaving Mormonism. Once I did the shrooms and the acid, I pretty much never looked back.

Do you think Microwave would have gotten to where it’s at if you continued with Mormonism?

Our first EP was a fictional story line. A big part of that was because I couldn’t really tell autobiographical stories. I didn't have any autobiographical stories worth telling. I think if I had not left Mormonism, I probably would have just kept making fictionalized stories. I would probably have just stopped doing it ultimately because I would have gone down a more *normal* life path. If I stayed, I wouldn’t have sex outside of marriage, which would mean I’d be pressured into getting married so I could have sex. I probably wouldn’t have been open to new experiences that facilitated good songwriting or songwriting in general. Even on our first record Stovall, after our first EP, there was an element of vagueness where I was telling some stories in first person that weren’t necessarily auto-biographical. I tried on Stovall to tell real stories that were adapted from real life experiences, but there was a vagueness where I wanted to have a degree of separation because I knew that if I stayed Mormon, my parents and church peers would always ask what the songs were about and I’d have to own up to it and explain. I wanted to have songs where I could say, “the stories I tell in the songs aren’t necessarily autobiographical.” I always felt really lame about that.

I definitely think that not having to justify everything within Mormonism and not having to try to adapt things to my Mormon faith opened me up to pursuing a wider array of experiences that would become art and songwriting.