Little Moon: The Best of What’s Next

There’s a quote from Kahlil Gibran that reads, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” For singer-songwriter Emma Hardyman, who makes music with her project Little Moon, approaching her newest album Dear Divine was an exercise in wading through the grief far enough to see what love exists beyond it. When she found this passage from the philosopher, she paused—reflecting on how grief, so suddenly and so scarily, became one of the most important and game-changing aspects to not only her songwriting, but her broader life as well.

Hardyman knows that she can’t run away from grief—she has to embrace the part of her that feels so strongly. When she left the Mormon church in her home city of Springville, Utah in early 2021, she found that it was hard to push it all behind her. This was something that she had identified with for most of her life, a practice passed down from her father, and pretending that that part of her never existed in the first place just allowed for more pain to come into view. “It definitely is an honored part of my heritage, but it isn’t beautiful because it was perfect like it claims to be,” she says. “It’s beautiful to me because it is another flawed human attempt to reckon with our humanity.”

Dear Divine is, in Hardyman’s own words, about preaching chaos and flaws instead of certainty and clarity. It shines through on aptly named tracks like “messy love,” a glittery and playful pop song that details the waging, internal war between insecurity and romance. “But can you see all of me? / Can we forgive and be free?” Hardyman asks warmly, as she starts to drop the curtain between a perceived, curated identity and one that is raw and authentic. Every song off Dear Divine sounds like a comforting lullaby in its own way through synthy, nostalgic jingles, breathy murmurs and passionate wails, as Hardyman not only tries to comfort us—the listener—but also reckons with the disruption of her own life.

Hardyman originally wanted Dear Divine to be a romantic album dedicated to her newlywed husband Nathan, but her plans were thwarted when his mother passed away in 2021. Dealing with the tremendous loss in the wake of their departure from the Mormon Church, Hardyman found herself thinking multidimensionally about grief—the concept of it physically, or an abstract departure from ideals, or losing pieces of identity. Mormonism was something that was held in high reverence in her family’s tree, as Hardyman’s mother and grandmother converted to the religion to align with her father’s background. Her mother’s Peruvian and Bolivian roots, she feels, were forgotten at times. “I harbor a lot of grief towards that scenario as well, because there’s this whole rich history of my mother’s ancestry that is just thrown under the paradigm of Mormonism,” she says. “In departing from the Mormon church, there is more alignment and excitement in delving more into this heritage, this part of myself that I grappled with at a young age. It’s a very confusing thing for a young child, at least in my experience. And now, I’m in a place where I’m just embracing that part of my identity.”

Using a Bolivian folk album her mother would play when she was young as a reference, Hardyman broke through this identity haze. When she came home from church every Sunday, she would strip off her dress and dance like wild with her sisters to the music. These tiny blips of culture, along with the soundtrack from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, created a rich blend of influences for the artist among the more traditional, Tabernacle Choirs hymns she had to listen to at church. “I was a strange, homeschooler child that didn’t listen to much modern music of the day,” she laughs. “So, the main thing outside of classical music was these videogame soundtracks.”

In 2023, Little Moon won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest by submitting the track “wonder eye,” the third song on Dear Divine and one that was directly inspired by Nathan’s mother’s passing. The submission is a beautiful, live culmination of everything that thrives within the track—the escalating, driven guitars, the sweeping harp and, of course, Hardyman’s impeccable fluttering range. As she closes out the performance with a swirling repetition of “like a circle eye,” her voice floats down softly and melodically in tune with the harp—a harmony that sounds fit for the Ocarina of Time score. The contest was over a year ago, but Hardyman still feels a deeply vivid connection, similar to the one she had when first recording. “Music changes meaning over time, and sometimes the way it changes and evolves can create a bit of a longing,” she says. “Like, ‘Now I’m at this level of understanding, and I’m out of this place.’ But all music is a pretty honest experience, no matter who’s writing it. My experience with “wonder eye” specifically is one of those exciting moments where I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, this is still actually quite applicable.’”

Through her departure from Mormonism, Hardyman learned to be gentle with this past version of herself as she evolved into her current era. The church was once her whole life, and she embodied the constant stream of religious lessons she was receiving “to love as Jesus taught,” as she states in “now.” “Mormonism taught me really important foundations of this idea of loving people,” she explains. “But I would be so confused, because I was so judgmental to people not in the church. I would get angry and frustrated. I would reduce people’s humanity. I couldn’t understand why people left, but it didn’t help the situation to say ‘Well, that’s all bad.’ It was feeding the very thing that I realized was hurting me.”

Dear Divine is about giving yourself the permission to let life be chaotic. As Emma Hardyman larks and plays between hushed synths, dynamic instrumental buildups and extensive, gratifying sopranos, the more she crafts her grief into a malleable, weightless joy as Little Moon, the more she builds a world of love for all forms of herself—past, present and future. “Taking a step back, I see everything that she was going through, and I’m like, ‘You did great, I’m proud of you,’” Hardyman affirms. “She planted seeds for this version of myself to look back and see parts of myself that I was really afraid to see. I asked, is there knowledge in not knowing? That’s a scary question for someone leaving the church, coming out of a place that prides itself on having answers. It’s a difficult flip, and a messy one. I’m just glad I let myself be messy.”