Neon Trees’ Tyler Glenn talks about the festival’s D.C. show, and the event’s mission to support LGBTQ+ youth.
Glenn said the vibe in D.C. was different than in Salt Lake City, where Loveloud has been “really built up,” he said. But the road experiment was still exciting, he said. The show is set to start at 6 p.m. — an evening event, rather than the daylong festival of previous years. “Our event tries to remain nonpartisan in terms of its mission and goal, because honestly we do want conservative families and families of faith to come,” Glenn said. “More often than not, these are people that have never been in a room with a drag artist, trans person, non-binary or a queer person, let alone even just the gay man.”“I meet people continuously waking up or coming to terms with things that maybe they feel aren’t of service anymore to them,” Glenn said.
“Dan and I being Mormon, that was sort of the language we started in, because we knew the oppression within the walls of those churches and we knew the pressure within doctrine,” Glenn said. “We knew what was going on at homes that had queer kids.” Music lends itself to that mission, he said, because “there’s so many people inside or outside of the LGBTQ community grew up going to shows. … I’ve seen music become the common denominator in a lot spaces. It’s a language that can be used when other languages fail. It’s a perfect way to build a bridge.”