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Megan Joy and Quinn Allman always knew they would have children.
"We always thought we'd have a girl, and we'd name her Vada," Joy said.
So when the married Utah musicians — she was a finalist on "American Idol" in 2009; he was the founding guitarist for the Orem-based rock band The Used — learned that their first child together would be a boy, they applied the girl's name to their other creation: their musical duo, VadaWave.
The duo's first EP, "Out of Body," will be released Dec. 9. Their baby boy is due a few days after.
The six tracks capture the mix in the couple's different musical styles, with Allman's hard-rock edge balanced by Joy's bluesy, R&B-inflected vocals.
"Finding a way to mix my style with hers has been fun and challenging," said Allman, 34. "I think it comes out with a really unique sort of thing, which we're still homing in on. It's really cool, because it's new for me."
"We both love all music, so it's easy to not be closed off to the other's ideas and preferences," said Joy, 31.
The couple have been together six years and married for five, but Allman's commitments to The Used ate up time for musical collaboration. Since leaving the band in 2015 ("I was essentially forced out," he said), the two have been "tinkering with different musical ideas at home, recording at home," he said. "I had scraps of ideas laying around."
Allman said he and Joy "had put a lot of pressure on ourselves to dive headfirst into something. So, as time passed, we were like, 'Let's spend our days just having fun with this and do something we like.' So it started as an outlet for us, and as soon as we took that pressure off, it just started to flow."
There's a lot of back-and-forth in the songwriting.
"Quinn will make a piece, or a sample of an idea he gets, a lot of loops and things he does on guitar," Joy said. "I'll go through them, pick which ones call to me. And I write the lyrics and the melodies to his ideas. And from there we just grow the ideas."
The resulting tracks range from pulse-quickening rock to soulful ballads.
The most hard-rock song on the EP is "Escape," in which Joy sings in the persona of a young woman fleeing the grip of the Fundamentalist LDS Church, the polygamist sect led by the now-imprisoned Warren Jeffs.
Joy had become fascinated by the FLDS when she read Carolyn Jessop's memoir, "Escape," while competing on "American Idol." "I just grew a little obsession with the culture and what was happening there," she said.
The couple also learned that their home in Little Cottonwood Canyon was not too far from the Alta Academy, a school run by Jeffs (which was demolished in 2014). "Once we realized that was right by our house, it kind of reignited this flame we had to learn about it," Joy said.
Allman said they tried to get past the stereotypes that have formed around the FLDS. "Of course there are cultlike characteristics, the oppression and the domination," Allman said. "But when you actually look at the people, they're very hard-working people. Their convictions are very strong. So [we were in] more of a place of empathy, not so much casting judgment."
What's especially chilling in "Escape" is the use of audio of Jeffs himself, preaching to the women in his control.
"There's the main crescendo in the bridge, which is kind of like the escape," Allman said. "And then there's the doubt that would come — I imagine a boy or a girl walking through the desert, thinking, 'Am I going to burn in hell for this?' I wanted to add Warren, or some kind of internal struggle motif in there.
"His voice is terrifying," Allman added.
A video for "Escape" was released online Monday. Joy and Allman have teamed up with Holding Out Help, a nonprofit that helps people who leave polygamous communities. "We're trying to help them in any ways we can," Joy said.
The EP's title track and first single, "Out of Body," speaks to the sort of love/hate relationship a person develops with one's hometown. Specifically, it was inspired by the winter inversions that turn the Salt Lake Valley into a gray, smoggy mess.
"It was late winter when we started writing that, in that time when we're all so sick of winter and the smog," Joy said. Before she met Allman, she said, "there were times when I've been depressed and feeling miserable, and feeling like I needed to get out of here and do something else, and take my son somewhere less cold." (Joy has a 9-year-old son, Ryder, from a previous marriage.)
The lyrics in "Out of Body" — "I gotta get out of the valley / These winters they do us no good / Salty lake great beehive life / Smog hides the city lights" — suggests Joy and Allman are considering a change of address.
"Eventually, we'd like to have a little condo somewhere else that we can go when winter's at its worst," Joy said. "We dream about it, but our families are here. … I don't want my 9-year-old to go back and forth. He already does, between me and his dad. But I don't want it to be long distance."
Allman added: "Just being able to say we'll have some mobility in our lives, that's really the most valuable thing now. To be able to say, 'Let's get out of here for a minute.' "
For the present, Joy and Allman are preparing for hibernation mode, taking care of their baby and writing and recording more songs for a full-length album. Sometime next year, in late spring or early summer, they intend to take VadaWave on tour.
"We have a stockpile of songs," Allman said. "This EP was putting down a stone to step on."
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