Following his second-place finish on The Masked Singer, David Archuleta is out with "Up," a new single that charts his struggle to reconcile his identity as a queer person with his Mormon faith and how he finally came to a place of self-love.

"I only wrote it recently and I just thought, 'This song will really capture where I'm at currently in my life,'" he tells ABC Audio. He adds that the song is about "looking back on where I was: thinking I failed, like I'm a lost cause, like I didn't fulfill what I needed to with my purpose of life."

According to David, who came out as queer in 2021, he was taught that "purpose" was to marry a woman and have children. He wondered, "If I veer off and do something else, am I going to diminish everything good I've accomplished ... because I failed to achieve this ultimate objective?"

It wasn't for lack of trying, either.

"I almost got married three times to a woman, and ... it wasn't fair to the girls that I was trying to convince to marry me," he says. He's now "stepping away" from the church, rather than waiting to be "excommunicated" for marrying someone of the same sex.

"The only place I'm going is up/ Only make room for love/ 'Cuz my story's far from over/ It's only begun," he sings. "Imma throw it all away/ Every last piece of your hate."

David says he thinks the message of the song will help others, as well.

"I want people to know that if they're in a hopeless place, that even when you're at the rock bottom, you can pick yourself up from the ground, and there is nowhere else to go but move forward and move up."

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.