But we smile and we give it our Sunday best
If we’re lost couldn’t tell by the way we dressed.
—KELLEIGH BANNEN, “Church Clothes”
Deep in the heart of Texas, I had everything a man could ask for in life: a great career full of professional accolades, two gorgeous children of my own, an incredible stepdaughter, and a beautiful Texas bride. The birth of Makayla, my pretty little angel, and soon after, Landon, the Mini-Me I’d dreamed of, tied everything up into a perfect bow. I loved my job at The Wolf. It didn’t even feel like a job, because I got to wake up every day and walk into a place where I was surrounded by dear friends who shared my passion and loved radio as much as I did. And Terresa’s family, salt-of-the-earth oil-catters and ranchers, embraced me as one of their own. I’d put down solid Texas roots, to the point where my Wolf teammates would tease me that I was more Texan than most Texans in my boots and cowboy hat (any chance I could get to cover up my balding head). I felt like the Lone Star State’s beloved adopted son.
But something was always missing. The comfort of my situation almost grated on me. I was never completely happy and felt guilty for it. How dare I reject these gifts. How could I not be content with all the blessings I had? Of course, I was faithful to my wife, provided for my family, did everything a good man is supposed to do, but I was filled with self-loathing because I knew that, deep down, I was faking it. It felt like slow suffocation. That attraction to men just wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried to stamp it down.
It all stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t listening to myself. I’d spent a lifetime tuning out the voice within. Actually, it was worse than that. I didn’t want to hear a peep, so I cut it off with external concerns like my career, fear for my reputation, and the desire to create a picture-perfect family life. After living this way for a while, you become resentful and angry, but you’re never quite sure why. The simple joys don’t exist for you because you are never really in the moment, and everything starts to feel like an obligation or a burden.
As a result, I was never fully present for the people I loved, using work as my escape route as I focused on one goal, and the next, until I’d finally hit a ceiling at The Wolf and all the goal posts were behind me. Some people are okay with staying in a groove, especially when they can enjoy all of life’s other riches. Not me. I could never be at peace with myself, not just because the disconnect I felt between who I was and the life I was living, but because I was constantly dreaming up the next big thing. I was wired to seek out a challenge. There was nothing worse for me than sitting still. It put me into a panic. What next?
Yank my family away from the people and places they knew and loved and move to Salt Lake City, Utah, that’s what.
Not that seeking that distraction over the next horizon was my only motivation for leaving behind the life we’d built in Dallas. I’d always wanted to run my own station. I could see myself moving into the executive corner office. By the end of a decade at The Wolf, I’d tried out just about every position, giving me a good thirty-thousand-foot view of how all the pieces fit together. Just like when I was a kid, I played that movie in my head of how I would run a station and coach a morning show. So, when I heard that Simmons Media, a privately owned radio group based in Salt Lake City, Utah, had an opening at their station, The Eagle, I was determined to make it mine. At first, the guy who ran the operation told me I was overqualified for the job.
“Cody, why would you want to come to a smaller market like ours?”
I told him where my ambitions lay, and he could hear me brimming with confidence about all the things I believed I could do to kick some life into his station. I also explained I was a Mormon. I knew their audience because I was one of them. I was uniquely able to speak to listeners who shared my faith and love of country music. I was perfect for their market.
So I somehow managed to talk my way into the job. Of course, there was the challenge of convincing them to pay me a decent amount of money so that it would be a move up in the world, not a sacrifice, for my wife and children. Luckily for me, my old pal Paul Williams had been doing some consulting for Simmons on the side and whispered in the ear of the owners. It did the trick. He’d already smoothed the way for me, putting in a good word with Brian when he first came to Dallas, and now with the folks in Salt Lake. It was another key moment in my career where that man was my “Fairy Godfather.”
The next hurdle was convincing Terresa. Even though I’d already mentioned I’d been chatting with folks in Salt Lake, I’d never said I was seriously interested in taking a job there. Better to wait until I had a solid offer than risk upsetting her for no reason, I figured. I broke the news when we were sitting in our car together, in a mall parking lot. She burst into tears. It was almost as if I’d told her I was having an affair and leaving her. At first, she couldn’t understand why I’d want to tear our family away from the good life we’d built in Texas.
“But we have everything we could possibly want here!” she said. “Our beautiful house that we built together, our kids who love their school and their friends, our friends, my folks . . .”
She had a point. From the outside looking in, our life in Texas seemed ideal. I loved my colleagues like family and my in-laws like they were my own blood. We had scores of church friends, work friends, and friends we’d made through our kids’ schools. And here I was ready to tear us away from this loving network of people and build a new one from scratch. Again, I felt I needed to choose the hard road. Starting over in a strange city with a young family is never easy. It was a risky move both on a personal and professional level.
The prospect was especially hard for Terresa because, aside from a brief spell living in Houston with her first husband, which was only forty-five minutes away by plane, she’d never lived far from her parents, friends, and extended family. I’d moved around the country from the time when I was a teenager, but here I was asking a home girl to move more than 1,200 miles away from everyone and everything she’d known her entire life.
“I’m so, so sorry!” I said as I put my arm around her and kissed her on her head, her face buried in my shoulder. “It’s just that this is such a great career move for me. It’s a chance for me to branch out on my own and be a kind of mini–Brian Philips, turning around a third-place station, leading a team, being a jack of all trades using all the skills I’ve learned here. It’s something I’ve always wanted to try. I just need to do this.”
Terresa finally stopped crying. Ever the supportive wife, she understood. She was always all about my career and happiness. Whatever it took to have that success, she accepted. She knew I was feeling stuck where I was, and that I had accomplished all I ever could at The Wolf.
“It’ll be good for us, you’ll see,” I told her. “We’ll be at the epicenter of our faith. We’ll be able to attend church, go to the Salt Lake Temple, listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and really immerse ourselves in that life. We’ll be surrounded by gorgeous mountains. We’ll play in the snow. Maybe we’ll even learn to ski. You’ve never experienced the place, and it is inspiring.”
Breaking the news to her mom and dad was the worst part. There were more tears. They thought it was because of the Mormon Church somehow making us go. I would not have put my wife and family through the move if I didn’t believe it was the right step for my career and ability to provide for them. But by the way they reacted, it was as if they’d lost their little girl forever.
“I just know it’s always going to be me who gets on the plane to visit them, and not the other way around,” Terresa told me. “No one is going to come all that way to see us.”
When we got there, I was euphoric. The bracing new air and scenery, my fascination with building a brand at my very own station, along with the thrill of our total immersion experience in a Mormon town, were the perfect distractions. By then I’d taken enough career risks, following my instincts in ways that led to all kinds of success, that I tackled the new challenge with confidence. I knew I could be the badass with the killer resume who could swoop in and save the station. I was the king of my domain.
The kids were still young enough that they could adapt quickly to the transition. But for the first couple weeks, Terresa was miserable. Not that she complained. She always tried to make the best of things. But then one day I came home to a brunette.
It was Terresa’s way of grieving for her old life. She was a natural blonde, with highlights from the sun that were almost platinum. That was her brand. Finding the darkest brown hair color on the drugstore shelf was her attempt at finding a new identity in a new town. I was a little surprised, because she didn’t think to warn me, but she still looked stunning.
“Wow, it really makes the blue of your eyes pop!” I told her, doing my best to help her feel good about her decision.
We’d been invited to a school event that night. When some of the other parents saw the raven-haired beauty on my arm, a few of them feared I was stepping out on my wife. Or maybe I’d taken on a sister wife. Like I could handle more than one wife, in my situation!!
Terresa soon went back to being blonde. Not only had she made peace with her new situation, she had discovered a whole crew of old friends from the Mormon church in Dallas who’d moved to Salt Lake City. Suddenly she had a social circle and a purpose, involving herself in church and school activities while making our new house feel like home. Terresa started family traditions of our own, like Easter egg hunts and sledding parties. The neighboring dads would go out and build moguls on the hill by our kids’ elementary school, to make it more interesting. When we’d had enough of crashing into the snow, we’d go to a neighbor’s house for cider and hot chocolate, or the neighbors would come to ours (we took turns).
We went hiking in the mountains around Sundance Resort, and the kids took advantage of the free lift passes to learn how to ski. We visited haunted houses during Halloween. Oddly enough, Mormons are obsessed with Halloween. Gardner’s Village, which was built in 1877, with its resident witches and corn mazes, is almost as popular as the temple, or at least as far as the kids were concerned. That first year in Salt Lake City was also the first time Terresa cooked the entire Thanksgiving dinner totally from scratch. She gathered up all her family recipes and made Texan cornbread in a Texas-shaped cast-iron skillet. It was delicious.
Terresa was happy and my kids were overjoyed. But that vision for myself of becoming a radio executive with a corner office at a successful station wasn’t quite squaring with reality. My big ideas coming into a station and becoming a turnaround king like Brian soon got checked as I started navigating the personalities on the morning show I was coaching. Maybe I did have the winning formula, but I came on a little too strong. I was admittedly a bit cocky and brash back then, forcing my branding concepts down the throats of the old guard in a way that was causing indigestion. This fact was gently pointed out to me by one of the older executives at Simmons.
“Cody, there’s only one way to boil a frog: slow. You’ve got to start with a low simmer before you gradually turn up the heat.”
I never forgot those words, or the unfortunate image of a boiling frog. Eek! Listening to my “elder” helped me to correct course. I needed to start with a softer approach. I was so caught up in my own ideas that I wasn’t fully listening to the people I was trying to help, learning their strengths, or finding ways to build the show around them. In my eagerness, I was tone deaf, and failed to read or, I should say, hear the room.
That’s why Keith Stubbs, a local comedian who was the superstar of the morning show, was so resistant. Here I was, a young buck in my early thirties, trying to tell a man, who’d already built up a successful local following over the years, to suddenly change. It’s not that he outright refused, but I could tell he didn’t share my enthusiasm.
One of the issues was my carefully crafted branding strategy, to call our programming “Fresh Country.” When I first came to Salt Lake City, what struck me was the fresh mountain air. Everything about the place was sparkling and crisp, from the snow-topped mountains to the gleaming faces of my fellow Mormons at the temple. There was a wholesome hopefulness about the community and Utah’s big, wide-open landscape that I wanted to inject in all our music and imagery, to differentiate us from the old-school heritage stations we were competing against.
But Keith, as comics do, poked a little fun at the new approach.
“Here’s your fresh flight of fresh country!” became, “Here’s your FEEEERRRRRRRRREEEESSHH flight of fresh countreee!!!!!!!!”
He threw his hands up at the line “Fresh Country Forecast” from the weather report.
“Do I really have to say that?”
He obliged, but I kept hearing that sarcastic comedian’s inflection in his voice. It stung a little, but honestly, it was hilarious. Ultimately, he was right. Interestingly, we were both from South Carolina, we shared similar humble beginnings, and we were both Mormons. We also happened to be Type A and ambitious. Maybe that was why we clashed.
My gut told me Keith was thinking along the same lines I was. That perhaps I’d overstepped and needed to show appreciation for his talent, while encouraging us to work together as leaders on the station. One night, as I was driving home from the station’s studios downtown, I took a chance and called him in hopes of a “come-to-Jesus” conversation.
“Keith, we have way too much in common not to enjoy this experience and work together to make the station the best it can be,” I told him, as I was making my way down the steep hill in the snow toward our home in the Daybreak neighborhood.
“Yes, I can do that,” he told me. “From now on, let’s listen to each other and work together. I’m with you!”
I teared up as he said this. I was thrilled he felt this way, and relieved that the chat went so well.
Talk about a turnaround. From that point on, we got over our petty, stupid differences and have been the best of friends ever since. We started hanging out more, going to Brigham Young University football games together. Keith, who owned the Wise Guy comedy clubs in Salt Lake City, invited me to stand-up shows. Turns out we also shared a similar sense of humor. Maybe it’s why I admit to laughing at his “Fresh Country” jokes.
Professionally, Keith began to understand that I wasn’t trying to make him into something he wasn’t. I had such high esteem for the man and his professional chops that, years later, I had him fill in for me at CMT. Even though I’d been the voice on the radio in Dallas, in this role I was happy to be the guy behind the scenes, helping his star to shine brighter and reach a broader audience. To that end, I hatched a scheme.
During the 2008 season of American Idol, a Salt Lake City home boy, David Archuleta, was one of the contestants. I decided that The Eagle would become the David Archuleta station. We would wrap ourselves around this fresh-faced kid, who looked like he actually had a shot at winning on what was then the hottest show on television. I called myself Cody Archuleta. When David sang a country song, we aired it. Every opportunity we could, we promoted him.
Of course, I was operating on a shoestring budget. I used to joke about how we ran the whole place with duct tape and barbed wire. But I figured there was nothing a bit of creativity and a lot of enthusiasm couldn’t overcome. At that time, the movie Napoleon Dynamite was a favorite in the Mormon community, in part because there was an innocence to its stupid humor, and it was produced by and starred Mormons. Our friends were constantly quoting silly lines like, “Stay home and eat all the freakin’ chips, Kip!” In one of the movie’s scenes, a kid named Pedro runs for student council and has these T-shirts made up that say, “I Voted for Pedro.”
I had hundreds of T-shirts made up in the same ’70s font, with cheap-looking iron-on decal lettering that said, “I Voted for David Archuleta.” We took our station truck to all the mall parking lots we could, giving these T-shirts away, and they became cool in a geeky kind of way. People latched on.
So, when David became a finalist on the show and came back home for a parade and concert, ours was the little radio station that Fox Television decided to film. They picked us over the much larger stations in the area, and we got our big prime-time TV moment. Our building was surrounded by hundreds of screaming tween girls as if David were one of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
There was so much buzz about David, even among the Mormon church elders. They loved the fact that this wholesome-looking Mormon kid, one of their own, was getting millions of fans. One of these elders, who became another father figure of mine, asked me to bring David along to his box at a Utah Jazz basketball game to meet Thomas S. Monson, then president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a huge deal for anyone of the Mormon faith.
Little did I know back then that David was facing similar struggles between his faith and his sexuality. In June 2021, he came out on Instagram as LGBTQIA+, describing himself as on the spectrum of bisexual, asexual, and “still in the process of trying to figure out what that means.”
Since moving to Salt Lake, I’d met several senior clergy members of the church, but not the man who was considered to be the prophet. Accompanying David was my chance. We spent a good hour in conversation with President Monson, who asked me about my mission in Seattle and urged David to consider going on one himself. We talked about our faith, and what the church meant to us. It was an incredible moment. In a single day I felt I’d reached a professional and spiritual pinnacle. I can’t even remember who won the game that night.
The American Idol moment served to raise Keith’s profile, since he was the DJ who got to interview David, and his face aired all over the country. That was a good thing for The Eagle. But none of this effort translated into ratings for the station because our signal was too damn weak. I was working all hours and on weekends to make my mark, struggling to bring new voices and ideas to a station that simply did not have the tools or money to be heard. It was only reaching pockets of the Salt Lake City market. It doesn’t matter how much you strive to make an impact when you don’t have the frequency. You can have mediocre programming and still have success if you’re operating on one hundred thousand watts versus just a few thousand. It was like serving up five-star food at a deserted roadside café. No one was there to taste it. As someone who was bursting with ambition, it was beyond frustrating.
Then Brian Philips, my former program director and mentor at The Wolf, called. He had since moved on to MTV and landed as their head of Country Music Television (CMT), which was launching a new show, CMT Radio Live. It would be a nationally syndicated show, and Brian wanted me to host it. I’d get to interview all the hitmakers of country. Was I still open to moving to Nashville, working for my old friend? Well, hell yeah! Or as they say in Utah, Heck yeah!
But I felt I’d barely begun in Salt Lake City. I’d only been at the job for a year and a half. My plan was to make it to the executive floor. Going back to being an on-air personality would be like taking a U-turn on the career path I’d mapped out for myself. I asked Terresa what she thought and, although she and the kids were finally loving their lives in Utah, she knew it was a dream job.
“We’ll figure it out,” she assured me. “We will go wherever you want to go and need to be.”
It was a heartfelt struggle. The situation reminded me of the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both . . .
The new job would require working nights, missing the family dinners, ball games, and ballet recitals. I would be building the program from scratch, with no infrastructure to speak of. There would be no time to even breathe; work would suck up all the oxygen. I canvassed the opinions of a few of my old friends and mentors in the industry, including Paul Williams.
“Yeah, you should probably take that job,” he told me.
My agent, Paul Anderson, put it more bluntly.
“You’d be crazy not to take this job! This is a game changer. It’s your chance to be the Ryan Seacrest of country radio.”
It so happened he also represented Ryan Seacrest, so who was I to argue?
Of course, I’d always dreamt of hosting a country show in the town where most of the music was made. But the timing was never quite right. Maybe this time it was meant to be. Maybe there were certain things I had to go through first, risks I had to take, professional and personal growth I had to experience, to be ready for this town that seemed more like the final destination than one of the many stops along the way. But was I truly ready to make that leap to Nashville? At the very least, I had to find out.
It was already becoming clear to me that I was never going to be the perfect Mormon. Or the perfect anything except maybe a country music host. My next road had to lead me to the capital city of country music, where work and career would become my religion. Again, it wasn’t the easy path. For the first year, while I tested the waters at CMT, I left my wife and children behind. I told myself I didn’t want to risk once again pulling them away from their life at school and with friends, the life they knew and loved, until I was sure.
As brief as it was, I’m glad we had that time as a family in Utah. It gave all of us a chance to immerse ourselves in the Mormon faith and take it as far as it could go. It gave my kids an opportunity to fully understand the religion they were being raised in and take them to their spiritual roots. In some ways the experience helped us all to grow. No, the move didn’t “fix” me, but sometimes you have to take a road all the way to the end before you can redraw the map of your life.
Once again, I found myself leaving behind a life that, from the outside in, seemed ideal. In Salt Lake City I had faith, family, and career all tied up in a bow. It was my last-ditch effort to get it right. Instead of dialing into my inner, authentic self, I drowned out that voice with the heavenly noise of church life. In the heart of Mormonism, surrounded by a community that shared my faith, I had hoped I could finally put an end to those urges.
I took listening to everything but my own voice as far as it could go. I tried tuning into God. Maybe He would speak to me and tell me what to do. Some religions have a Third Eye, but I think of hearing messages from your maker as more like having a Third Ear. When I allowed myself to be still enough, I would occasionally pick up on a few of those signs. But mostly the path I’d been on was a long, circuitous detour that only brought me back to myself, and at that point I wasn’t ready to hear what “he” had to say. I’d reached the end of the line.
You can never drown out that inner voice, no matter how much you try. The harder and longer you try to shift the focus away from your true desires and your authentic self, the louder that voice in your head will eventually scream. Meanwhile, you’ll live in denial and make all kinds of decisions that cut you off from the road to happiness. You may think you’ve got everyone fooled. But deep down they know something is missing and there’s a breakdown in communication with the people you hold most dear. You’re too busy just reacting to situations, listening to outside sources, and following your fears. You may not even know why you’re unhappy. But there’s always a reason.
I don’t regret embracing my religion and doing whatever I could to hear God and do what I thought He was calling me to do. But that call from Brian was some other kind of divine intervention that pulled me off a path that, ultimately, was the wrong one for me.
For months, I bounced between Nashville and Salt Lake City, a four-hour flight and a time zone away, two weekends a month and on holidays, when I did the broadcast from the basement of our family home. I worked in between two worlds and two states of mind, reasoning I needed to “settle in” to my new position and avoid disrupting the kids’ school year.
I took full advantage of being miles away in a brand-new town to explore how it might feel to be single. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with Nashville. I found plenty of entertainment and professional challenges to quiet the internal struggles I was facing. Nashville’s story, and the characters who lived here, were the perfect distraction for a man who wanted nothing more than to escape himself. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It gave me the time and space I needed until I was completely ready to hear my own truth. Meanwhile, my external listening skills helped me to form fast friendships in a place where newbies had to work hard to earn trust.
I guess I always knew Nashville would be my forever home. I loved the concert halls, dive bars, and barbecue joints—places where you might find yourself sitting next to Blake Shelton drinking vodka and eating brisket. It’s an industry town, and so much more, full of culture, surprises, beauty, and grit. It’s a place that oozes authenticity, but more sophisticated than you might expect, equally wholesome, laid back, and family friendly—everything I love in a country song manifested in a place. Do I sound like I am getting paid by the local tourist board? I should be.
I quickly got comfortable in this new but familiar world, maybe a little too comfortable. I spent my “bachelor” weeknights meeting new friends, and on a few occasions ventured to meet other gay men, even though I wasn’t yet ready to identify myself with that tribe. Sometimes on Grindr, the gay dating app, or even Craigslist, some new guy would catch my interest as I tried to decipher my feelings.
Nothing was happening. I only did it sporadically, cautiously dipping my toes in these waters. I didn’t want to sleep with anyone, so these liaisons were just conversations, mild, verbal flirtations at most. Physically and emotionally, I’d never been with anyone else besides Terresa. I was trying to figure out if I even enjoyed conversations with a man before risking my livelihood or my family with this kind of disclosure.
Maybe it’s all just a fantasy, I thought. Something that’s going to live inside my head and nowhere else.
I felt like crud. Back in Salt Lake I was pretending to be someone else entirely, with my button-down shirts and pressed khaki pants, teaching classes on spirituality and going to church with my beautiful, perfectly dressed family, while I spent my evenings in Nashville as the contemporary, ballcap-wearing, energetic DJ thinking and almost acting upon things totally contrary to my belief system. There’s always a sense of unworthiness in Mormonism, a religion that strives for perfection. In a sense, everyone is putting on a façade of devotion, faking it until they make it. But I felt like the biggest fraud of all. The dichotomy of my two lives was breaking me in half.
Then the rumors started flying.
Paul Anderson, my longtime agent and friend, who also happens to be openly gay, called me out of the blue.
“Hey, I just heard from someone in radio who said you’re running around in gay circles,” he informed me.
“What?! Me? Of course not!” I told him, pretending to laugh it off.
It frightened the hell out of me. I’d been discreet, hadn’t I? I must have underestimated my own visibility because, as a newcomer on the Nashville scene, it never occurred to me that I could be recognized. Maybe I didn’t do enough to disguise my identity online. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a celebrity. Paranoia took over my brain. Who saw me, and why would they want to out me like that? If some random guy in radio knows, maybe others do too. Maybe the entire industry knows?!
I felt shame and horror. Outing someone before they are ready, before they’ve had a chance to tell their loved ones and prepare themselves, can have devastating consequences. No one should be rushed into it. I needed to be ready.
Paying attention to your inner voice and hearing your own truth isn’t necessarily like flicking a switch. It’s a process. Sometimes it’s okay, even appropriate, to fully immerse yourself in another environment or aspect of your life until you are completely ready to go there. Meanwhile, your focus on new people and places, flexing your listening skills to acclimate and get to know these new folks in your life, at least on a superficial basis, can serve you well to a degree.
I realized that eventually I would need to go deeper, but I wasn’t ready for the big reveal as a gay man to myself, much less the world. Hell, I thought. I’ve only just been singing hymns in a Mormon church with my wife and children! Hold on there!
It was the first and only time I felt discriminated against as a gay man, and it shook me to my core. My agent wasn’t being judgmental, he was just reporting what he’d heard from sources whose intentions were not necessarily kind. But he knew I had been presenting myself as a Christian family man in country music, and this was in 2009, before the US Supreme Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage in 2015. This gossip was also going around only months after I landed the job at CMT, where I hadn’t yet built the kind of reputation needed to withstand a scandal. Worse was the thought of my beloved wife and kids hearing the truth from any source other than me.
I guess Nashville is a smaller town than it looks.