The album is impossible to place within one genre — it’s a wild autobiographical exploration with flairs of spirituality, operatic voices and classical roots, tied together with a “Hamilton”-esque bow. In short, it’s a journey.
Composer Blake Allen channels his trauma into 30 songs on his album ‘The Shards of an Honor Code Junkie.’
Once, driving from Provo to San Francisco, they stopped at the Bonneville Salt Flats. The sun was coming out, and the friends had been crying over something traumatic. Allen remembered steam pipes near the flats, and the sun hitting the salt just right. The album’s listing on Apple Music labels it as “classical crossover,” but it’s impossible to place within one genre — it’s a wild autobiographical exploration with flairs of spirituality, operatic voices and classical roots, tied together with a “Hamilton”-esque bow.Allen said the first seeds of the album were planted when he marked the fifth anniversary of a BYU friend’s death by suicide.
Songs — like “The Armoire,” which instructs “if you don’t discuss it, it doesn’t exist. There’s no problem if no one mentions it. You can’t live a life run by blind faith,” and “The Drawer,” from the point of view of his mother — make the album more dynamic both thematically and sonically. He describes being at BYU as “overwhelming” and “shocking.” Part of that came from his struggle of juggling being a closeted college student at a university known for not being accepting of homosexuality.Theof BYU’s Honor Code became haunting brackets for Allen’s life — and eight of the 30 tracks use the rules as their titles.
As much as the album is autobiographical, Allen also notes larger problems LGBTQ students at BYU face. He himself never got in trouble with the Honor Code, though the track “Participate Regularly in Church Services” mentions an instance with a bishop – where the boy shares a personal experience with sexual assault and is then victim-blamed — that Allen confirms is true.
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