A Utah band won the Tiny Desk Contest. Now, it’s back with an emotional album about leaving the LDS Church.

On the closing track of Little Moon’s sophomore album, “Dear Divine,” Emma Hardyman — the Utah band’s lead singer, guitarist, songwriter and guiding spirit — grapples with a weighty question: What does it mean to be a God?

The song is inspired by a quote from Hardyman’s mother, who, the singer said, has a compelling outlook on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“She immigrated from Peru and had a really wild life living in America, as a woman of color. And for her situation, I realized that the church literally saved her,” Hardyman said. “Her dad died when she was 10, which was like a year after her family immigrated, and she became the main person taking care of the family.”

Hardyman said she realized her mother had a different approach to the idea of what God is.

“One day, I just asked her, ‘What does it mean to you to be a god,’ and word for word, that’s what’s in the song right now,” Hardyman said. “She said, ‘I think to be a god is to be always pleasantly surprised at how much more you can love,’ and I just thought that was so profound.”

That line resonated as a deep truth with Hardyman, so she jotted it down, and held onto it for years with the intent of eventually putting it in a song, but she never could find a melody that would work. It wasn’t until she had a dream of a melody without orchestration that she found a place for the quote.

It came together right as the album was being packaged away. “I didn’t even create it on the guitar. Everything about the song was just out of the norm for me,” Hardyman said. “Another thing was the lyrics came so quickly for this song, and that never happened. I always start out with melody, chord progression, and I always end with lyrics last.”

“To Be a God” is different from the rest of “Dear Divine” in two other significant ways: It’s the longest track on the album, and Hardyman recorded it on her phone in the car before going into the studio.

Hardyman described the process as “sacred” when making this particular song because, she said, “at every turn, it just kind of completed itself. The intention kind of spoke for itself.”

The album “Dear Divine” is scheduled for release on Oct. 25 — more than a year after the Springville-based indie rock band won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with the multi-octave journey track “Wonder Eye,” which is featured on the album. (Little Moon will kick off a November West Coast mini-tour with concerts on Nov. 7 at The Urban Lounge in Salt Lake City and Nov. 8 at The Cabin in Park City.)

The 12-track album offers an unparalleled listening experience. No one song is the same as another, and each track transports listeners to different atmospheres. One song provides a trip to a sonic fairy land, while the next suspends its audience in a state of reflection.

“To Be a God,” Hardyman said, gives a nod back to a younger version of herself.

“As a kid, when I got really nervous or was by myself, … I would constantly sing like little Primary songs or Mormon hymns to myself. This song, I realized, kind of became my own version of that — of just seeing a quick little sacred song to like soothe and reassure me. But instead of having the reassurance come from a place of certainty, the reassurance came from a place of acceptance of the unsure and messy things.”

That place of acceptance of unsure and messy things is a theme across “Dear Divine.”

Throughout the 12 tracks, two constants define the album: Thoughtfulness to the craft of production and Hardyman’s vocal range, which acts as a sonic bracket.

The album is almost like Hardyman’s diary, a musical collection that reflects how she has navigated through figuring out her life. It’s a life in and outside organized religion; specifically, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Writing a ‘grief-as-love’ album

Music, Hardyman said, has always been a way for her to communicate the things that she can’t immediately put into words.

Her experience of leaving the church, like that of many others, is a complicated tangle of emotions. It was also a catalyst for a body of cathartic music. “Music became a form of therapy to help me articulate emotion,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune after the band’s Tiny Desk win.

“It’s like the moment I speak words, I instantly feel a little disappointed,” Hardyman said in an interview this August, two months before the album’s release. “It’s just difficult for me to articulate with words alone. Music, it’s a little bit easier — melodies, sounds, those different senses, help in my articulation for very difficult emotions, way more than words alone.”

Hardyman’s original plan, she said, was to create a romantic album in early 2020, reflecting her recent marriage to her husband, Nathan, who also is the band’s bassist.

The COVID-19 pandemic then hit. A year later, Nathan’s mother died — an event chronicled in “Wonder Eye” — and Nathan told her he was planning to leave the Latter-day Saint faith. Emma’s vision for the album pivoted to “grief-as-love” and “love-as-grief.”

“Instead of it being a perfectly packaged neat idea that I thought this album was going to be, it really became just a reflection of my shadows and ego and the messiness of me during these really intense periods of my life,” Hardyman said. “I thought grief was just like being sad, having a fleeting moment. But what grief became through the process of this album … was actually a very deeply human experience that actually kind of carved a deep well in myself, in order to hold things like love.”

Hardyman said that she learned that grief is “integral” to love.

“Grief became an opportunity for me to open my heart,” she said. “Grief is one of the most sacred things to me now, because when I let it run its course and when I let myself be present with my grief, it softens my edges. It brings me back to the humanity that we all share, instead of the stories I tell myself or the narratives that I can create.”

Creating the album

The songs in “Dear Divine,” Hardyman said, “came from all sorts of corners of myself.”

Hardyman said she and Bly Wallentine, the band’s keyboardist and a producer on the album, were intentional with every recording session, starting each off with a meditation moment.

“Our process on the outskirts can seem very chaotic, and the album is chaotic. That is intentional,” Hardyman said, “but there’s kind of method to our madness, where we desire to create as much color for us to then choose from.”

In production, for example, the band members would experiment with different instruments and approaches, creating a “canvas” for them to pull from, as Hardyman put it. That’s apparent in the song “Kind, Kind Home,” which includes a rainstorm moment.

Some songs on “Dear Divine” — such as “For You” — are more than 10 years old, featuring melodies she created when she was in high school but struggled to finish. Others started when she was attending college at church-owned Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg.

“I remember when I wrote the first verse for ‘Now’ in my early college days, when I was still very devout in the church,” Hardyman said. (”Now” is the first single off the album, and was released on Aug. 28, along with its video.)

The opening lines of that track are: “The broken beauty of a broken flower, the beauty of broken people, to see it white or black or gray or green, to say, we love one another. Do we love all the others, too?”

“That was, like, a line that kind of surprised me,” Hardymand said. “I was living in Rexburg at the time, at BYU-Idaho. There were just a lot of experiences I had that I was, like, ‘Man, I feel like I could do a better job at loving people, but I feel really judgmental in my mind.’ … I had this weird elitism of when you’re Mormon, you’re kind of in the club, but when you’re not, I could pity you, you know, but it didn’t feel aligned.”

It was a song, Hardyman said, that she didn’t realize she needed to finish until she was outside of the church, because she “didn’t have all the answers like I thought I did.”

“That goes for a lot of these songs,” she said. “[They] had beginnings and origins in a part of myself that thought she had all the right answers, and they ended and were finished on the side of myself that realized she has no idea what’s going on.”

The tracks on “Dear Divine” have a religious quality to them, steeped in orchestral notes and, at times, are even reminiscent of hymns, like “Now.” The song “Eighteen Parts” has beautiful lyricism and an upbeat twinge, on par with “Blue” as one of the best tracks on the album.

“Holy and Sweet,” a softer track, is a nod back to Hardyman’s upbringing. Both her parents are musicians. Last year, she told The Tribune her Latter-day Saint upbringing is as much a part of her heritage as her being half-Latina and half-white.

She said when she and Nathan decided they were going to leave the church, the process proved difficult, because so much of their family remained devout.

“‘Holy and Sweet’ came about because I realized that I couldn’t just tear out the part of myself that was Mormon. I couldn’t just abandon the part of myself that was Mormon without ultimately just hurting me,” Hardyman said. “I couldn’t just turn the script around [to] ‘Mormonism is all bad.’”

She said her parents did a wonderful job of rearing her, which is what the song tries to capture. “I don’t align with the tools of Mormonism, but I definitely align with the imperfect intention that my parents had,” she said.

“[The song] was an attempt to reconcile all parts of myself, … an attempt to acknowledge that my family members [are] trying to love as best they can,” Hardyman said. The song also acknowledges the older version of herself that was a Latter-day Saint, who was trying her best, too.

It’s apparent that even after four years in the making, Hardyman still grapples with the complexity of emotions that come from dealing with leaving a religion so embedded in the everyday life of its members. Grappling with it through music, though, has helped.

“I had to come to terms, actually, with what death means because … leaving the church is just another aspect of death and of grief,” Hardyman said. “It meant not just seeing the parts of myself that make me feel good, but it meant seeing the parts of myself that make me feel kind of embarrassed.”

She said she went through phases of “death” after leaving the church, such as feeling “embarrassed about the part of myself that was Mormon or feeling kind of ashamed that I felt certain ways or had certain opinions about the world that was through a very Mormon lens.”

Now, after all of that grappling, Hardyman said is a better, more self-aware person, because she went through that process of confronting her emotions.

“I act more lovingly, sincerely, when I let myself feel my grief,” she said. “And that comes in all shapes and sizes. And I feel like leaving the church really just became another extension of that.”

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.