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Memory Isn’t Fact
Memories are truly fascinating parts of being human. The biggest part of our lives is literally based on the way we interpret previous events. Our memory can’t be a true log of the exact things that happened because everyone sees the world differently. It is just our own perspective of events. Thus, even though people are saying I have an excellent memory, I still often find myself changing my story when I come across a video of the event or a recording, and I get to watch or listen to the event again.
Besides that, research confirms that thinking through an event later on has a big influence on our memories. In short, it means that we can become the strongest believers of whatever story we choose to tell ourselves, or whatever story other people persuade us. This is exactly the process that forms the basis of psychological operations (psy-ops) and brainwashing, the methods which governments have secretly but continuously been using for a long time to influence people’s thinking.
Nostalgia’s Golden Trap
Though the process of memory is fascinating, the strong emotions that memories evoke, particularly nostalgia, is even more appealing. Nostalgia is the experience of an intense, occasionally melancholic yearning for a time in the past that one recalls as very happy and peaceful. For this reason, we quite frequently apply the term to refer to arts such as songs, pictures, or films. These artworks evoke not only the feeling of perfect harmony but also a somewhat strange sadness. The source of the sadness is the recognition that the feeling of oneness, which is lost forever, is the very cause from which the small joy of the mixture is derived.
Often, the powerful emotion this creates feels almost sacred. Significantly, it points to a basic human wish for pure innocence, a kind of perfect “Eden” we imagine existed in our past. But crucially, that perfect place probably never truly existed out there in the real world like we remember. Not to mention, it was most likely the fact that we ourselves experienced an inner calm and joy at that time, and therefore everything looked like paradise. Hence, feeling nostalgic means that we mostly crave our past emotions rather than the exact place or time.
Memory’s Dangerous Power
This idea is something many people understand deeply. Yet, if I tried to describe a specific happy childhood memory out loud, the warm, glowing feeling would likely disappear. And seriously, did that moment ever really happen exactly the wonderful way I picture it now? Did yours? Soon, doubt starts to creep into your mind. Then, this doubt creates an opening. Suddenly, any enticing new concept that could revive that lost shine might almost attract you – a new belief system, a religion, a political party, a leader, or a major change in life, constantly murmuring, “One more step only, it’s right there!” Indeed, our memories, which we hold dear, can turn out to be snares, showing a lot more about our hopes and fears than about the outside world.
Ethel Cain’s True Vision
Perhaps this tricky nature of memory and longing explains why I struggled at first to appreciate Ethel Cain’s music, before hearing her amazing song “Perverts.” Initially, I mistakenly saw Cain’s work as just a bright, jumbled mix of styles used by other current artists and familiar dark stories about the American South popular with millennials; imagine JT LeRoy filtered through Lana Del Rey’s style. However, “Perverts” completely shattered this wrong idea. Instead, it presented something darkly magical, shocking, and truly frightening—a close relative to the disturbing, violent world Nine Inch Nails created in their “Broken Movie.”
This song takes the listener on a terrifying trip that somehow makes you feel partly responsible for the horror. Consequently, “Perverts” forced me to look again at Cain’s first full album, Preacher’s Daughter. Now, I see it as a symbolic trip through the powerful stories America tells itself. Importantly, the album uses a narrator you simply cannot trust to use familiar music styles like a sneaky “Trojan Horse,” secretly getting inside the minds of people who dream of a better past. Ultimately, it’s far more like the raw, unsettling work of Dennis Hopper than the pretty, polished Americana of something like Norman Fucking Rockwell.
Expanding Cain’s World
Now, with her latest release, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, Ethel Cain presents a significant addendum to the opening chapter of what fans perceive as her planned trilogy. Essentially, you might call this new work “the B-sides,” or perhaps consider it a prequel, or even a parallel story unfolding alongside her previous material. Importantly, Willoughby Tucker deeply explores the painful history of lost innocence and inevitable death, themes heavily coated in the distinctive magical realism that Hayden Anhedōnia, Cain’s primary persona, famously uses like a protective cloak.
While working on this project, the authors tend to obscure certain specifics and use quite complex metaphors; thus, characters seem to be the very essence of the flick: they appear to be indistinctly drifting in and out of the shot. Strange enough, most of the songs that this album consists of have been live at Cain’s concerts for years, rough demo versions leaked online quite a long time ago, and the lyrics of these songs were thoroughly interpreted by fans of Cain. However, despite this prior exposure, these finalized recordings borrow a crucial element from the lurid, unsettling tone of her earlier track “Perverts.” As a result, they present a noticeably more confident and far less artificial artistic vision compared to the sound found on her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter.
Ghostly Heartbreak
This development in her voice is very bright from the dreadful first track, “Janie.” Incredibly, the song gives a “knock out” emotional punch with its minimal musical arrangement, thus its value reaches the level of one of the most elegant and classic pieces of music history like Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Talking about the combination of the elements in the song, it is Cain’s tired out by life singing that really clings to the theme of the heavy loss in the song.
And in particular, when she gently sings the words “I know she’s your girl / But she was my girl first / She was my girl first,” a very deep feeling of loneliness due to a breakup is mixed with every note of her singing. Such a naked honesty leads the whole song to be “raised” beyond its original scope, to become like a sad, almost spectral requiem, an impression that the very first lines of the song, the mournful chant “You keep changing / But I will stay the same.”, reflect the characteristic of the whole song.
Shifting Perspectives
Moving forward, it often feels unclear exactly who the protagonist is within these songs, or precisely who they are observing, without diving deep into Ethel Cain’s own pre-established mythology and lore. For instance, the track “Fuck Me Eyes” vividly imagines a captivating “bad motherfucker” girl who effortlessly commands the love and attention of all the boys, representing a certain ideal of powerful womanhood. Simultaneously, this figure seems strangely aligned with a mythical mother character referenced within the lyrics, a woman whose beauty was tragically eroded by the harsh realities of drug use and a difficult life – a point starkly highlighted by the lyric: “She told me all / She’s not good at raising children / But she’s good at raising hell.”
Naturally, this ambiguity raises compelling questions: Is this song depicting Ethel Cain herself being viewed from an outsider’s perspective? Alternatively, is it Hayden Anhedōnia deeply ruminating on her own complex experience of femininity through the unique lens of being a trans woman? Furthermore, does this exploration suggest a distinct, unique dialogue inherent within that specific lived experience? The song lyrically is a perfect combination of heaviness and nostalgia that evokes the blue-collar glamour of the 1980s Bruce Springsteen era, with Cain’s very strong vocals giving the final touch. The fascinating thing is that the track’s atmosphere is almost leaning towards dream pop for some moments, but in the end, it still stays a powerful and easy-to-like radio single. Reportedly, its clearest musical point of reference is actually the distinctive work of singer Kim Carnes.
Dying Fantasy
With the solemn epic “Nettles,” the focus shifts directly onto the character Tucker as he lies dying within a stark hospital bed. Significantly, Hayden Anhedōnia herself has clarified that this entire scene represents merely Ethel Cain’s intense personal fantasy, vividly expressing her profound fear of experiencing sudden, dramatic, and deeply traumatic loss. Furthermore, this imagined scenario deliberately mirrors the brutal, harsh realities constantly faced by the characters inhabiting Cain’s musical universe within their own everyday lives.
Therefore, when Ethel sings the stark lines “The doctors gave you until the end of the night / But not ’til daylight,” this should be understood as a grim, overarching assessment of survival: you might possibly endure a traumatic event itself, but you will never truly witness another hopeful dawn approach afterward; the trauma permanently steals that hopeful future. Through this lens, Ethel consciously likens herself directly to the song’s titular nettles, positioning herself as a fundamentally toxic person whose inherent nature and inevitable actions will lead only to destruction. This self-awareness pours out in the haunting plea: “Lay me down where the trees bend low / Put me down where the greenery stings / I can hear them singin’ / ‘To love me is to suffer me, and I believe it’.”
Romanticizing Poison
Indeed, we must have gone through a bunch of such persons in our lives – these human nettles who by their mere being or staring seem to be able, quite magically, to change the normal daylight into evocative poetry, or to make their crazy nights with red wine become moments of eternity. The potent, sometimes tormenting memories that intrusively bleed from our past into our now are, thus, suddenly at our doorstep. Nevertheless, Cain shows a definite recognition that this powerful, disruptive interplay is a manifestation of a profoundly sad romanticism, one which is to be broken by reality This harsh truth is captured perfectly in the resigned, knowing lyric: “When I lay with you in that auld lang room / Wishin’ I was the way you say that you are / You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing / I warned you, for me, it’s not that hard.”
Basically, these characters are insanely nostalgic for the moment they are living in and they are holding on to it with all their might. Why? Because they have a deep-down feeling that once this fugitive night is over, they will fade away. And so, their whole life is the only definition of three very delicate and temporary things: their overwhelming love for one another, the still vibrant and wild youth that they have, and the strong drugs that they took. On the other hand, the song’s soft and mournful musical construction, which is made with sad violins and has a folk root, fits beautifully with this sad story. Besides that, this particular music piece embodies the song’s heavy emotion as part of a long and lamenting tradition of similar narratives, going back unbroken through many centuries.
Dust Bowl’s Mythic Core
Building upon the mythical concept of Willoughby, the track “Dust Bowl” delves much deeper into this idea, standing out as arguably the most crucial and eagerly awaited song on the entire record. Essentially, this piece is a heavy, sludgy slowcore anthem that vividly imagines the character of Willoughby Tucker. Cain, in a very graphic way, says that he was “A Natural blood-stained blonde / With the holes in his sneakers / And his eyes all over me,” thus giving an immediate impression of a crude, almost beast-like physical form. Eros (desire) and Thanatos (death), the two opposing but powerful concepts, are depicted in this song as tightly united when Willoughby and Ethel have sex while watching a drive-in slasher movie.
As a result, this gesture spiraled into a harrowing chaos that was rich with the juxtaposition of the most vivid pieces of the culture: blood and exposed breasts, drugs and a suffocating feeling of doom. At the same time, when these characters show signs of romance appearing in the play, Ethel reveals a very deep insecurity and a prophetic aspect, admitting that she “rode home crying / Thinking of you fucking other girls.” This line starkly shows she has already mentally prepared for the relationship’s inevitable, painful conclusion long before it happens. Finally, the song masterfully concludes by transforming the repeated line “His eyes all over me” very gradually into the haunting, fading mantra: “Over, over…,” musically reinforcing the theme of ending.
Gothic Anxiety Surge
After that energy, the track “A Knock at the Door” comes with the feeling of the “Perverts” unsettling atmosphere that is still there. From a sound perspective, it picks up the stripped-down, Grouper-style ambient that was typical for the album. On the other hand, Cain’s voice becomes more and more anxious, as if being invaded by the evil, low voices in the background that make up the lyrics.
It is also, moreover, like a crucial turning point, leading the listener from the first part of the album to the second one, where the hours of the night are more represented and the gothic style, more intricate and woven, dominates. By the way, it would be remiss of me not to mention the two instrumental pieces that come before the album “Willoughby’s Theme” and “Willoughby’s Interlude.” While inherently cinematic and genuinely evoking the feeling of a film score, discussing them earlier felt less relevant. However, their true power and meaning become significantly better understood and contextualized specifically in the shadowy light cast by these later, more intense pieces like “A Knock at the Door.”
Instrumental Atmosphere
As for “Willoughby’s Theme” and “Willoughby’s Interlude,” these are two fancy and impressively atmospheric pieces with no doubt. In essence, they use louder, but heavily processed guitars that are layered on serious synth beds to very carefully evoke the very same intense feeling Ethel gets when she is in the vicinity of Willoughby. Nevertheless, despite their strength, these instrumentals truly reach their full potential only when paired with the oneiric (dream-like), almost hallucinatory intensity found in the subsequent track, “Radio Towers.”
Twilight Signal World
Returning forcefully to the dense, architectonic mysticism pioneered in “Perverts,” the track “Radio Towers” serves as a complete reworking of the previously unreleased outtake “Kudzu.” This reimagined version generates a potent, hallucinogenic force that actively drags the listener down into a strange twilight world. Within this space, the crackle and hum of radio signals become disturbingly equivalent to the steady, ominous beeping of hospital heart monitors. This powerful equivalence strongly suggests that the musical signals transporting Ethel and Willoughby are, in fact, manifestations of their own vital heartbeats.
Consequently, this understanding places both Preacher’s Daughter and Willoughby Tucker as two deeply related sub-places or spaces that are in-between life and death. To be honest, this idea is bound to provoke passionate discussion and make a metaphorical opening of the whole range of different interpretations. Yet, the potential it offers for reading Ethel and Willoughby as starkly modern, doomed counterparts to the ancient mythological figures Orpheus and Eurydice remains incredibly compelling. Ultimately, this layer once more actively transforms and deepens the intricate make-up of Ethel Cain’s self-created mythos.
Willoughby’s Confrontation
The track segues into the epic “Tempest”, a brutally quiet 10 minute sludge-metal track, where the perspective seemingly switches to Willoughby, as he confronts Ethel. It is not pretty: the character is certain of being abandoned, embracing nihilism like a shroud: “I’ll hurt myself if I want / I don’t care / Do you swing from your neck / With the hope someone cares?”. There’s one line here that is especially harrowing: “I can lead you to bed / But I can’t make you sleep / I’ve heard it before / From someone who leaves”. Ethel has created the image of a person who is so broken that she can merely provide sex and physical closure, but no peace of mind or healing. Which, to Willoughby, is already an admission of defeat and the preparation of abandonment, a self-righteous and aggressive act.
Waltzing forward, the song is especially heartbreaking because it reveals how this nostalgia that the two characters feel is inherently linked to their inability to allow themselves to grow alongside each other: their love is their need to re-enact familiar, familial trauma. Willoughby earlier mentions how his father’s Vietnam trauma is to blame for him being unable to realise his dream of becoming a writer – but the irony here is that writing is the one artistic form that requires truly no further expenses beyond pen and paper. These two are caught up in a story they already conceived as perfect tragedy. Maybe that’s why “Waco, Texas”, the incredible 15-minute long closer, becomes such an immensely cathartic climax for the album. Mirroring “Amber Waves” off Perverts, the song describes a moment of stasis, where time is frozen.
Frozen Fatalism
Willoughby is both with Ethel, but already gone, as her perspective is intruded by the same fatalism that gives Willoughby the very glow that allowed Ethel to fall in love with him: “I’ve been picking names for our children / You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them / Love is not enough in this world / But I still believe in Nebraska dreaming / Cause I’d rather die / Than be anything but your girl”. There’s an interesting parallel here to Preacher’s Daughter‘s closing tracks “Sun Bleached Flies” and “Strangers”: Ethel is, symbolically, already frozen in time, a “freezer bride” that is cannibalized: “The air in your room never moves / Live and die by TV no one’s watching / Do you hate me? / When this is over / Maybe then we’ll get some sleep”.
Suspended Endings
First, it’s particularly interesting to observe that all three albums created by Hayden Anhedōnia conclude with this distinct moment of profound suspension – a suspension of time itself, a halt to physical change, and an existence akin to a living death. Furthermore, this recurring theme powerfully highlights the possibility that the entirety of her album Preacher’s Daughter could very well function as a purely symbolic reconfiguration of Ethel Cain’s complex relationship with Willoughby Tucker.
Essentially, this interpretation presents the album as embodying a deep-seated dream: the fantasy that a wild, completely unruly stranger will suddenly arrive to pick her up and carry her far away. Ultimately, this figure would finally liberate her from the relentless, crushing passage of time and from the sheer brutality of an utterly ordinary, completely loveless marriage. Crucially, this stranger would then prove his raw, bestial love through the ultimate, horrifying act of consuming her physical body. However, even within this powerful symbolic landscape, these elements remain mere shadows cast by the core narrative that both Ethel and Willoughby themselves had already preconceived and set in motion as an inescapable, self-fulfilling prophecy long before the events unfolded.
Mythic Deconstruction
Admittedly, absorbing all these intricate layers and connections presents a significant challenge; the sheer density of meaning and the deep cross-pollination of themes within Willoughby Tucker feels immense and sometimes even surpasses the thematic breadth achieved on Preacher’s Daughter. Specifically, where the earlier album functioned somewhat like a detailed travelogue journeying through the very concept of the American mythos, positioning Ethel herself as a symbolic stand-in for the Statue of Liberty, Hayden’s third album deliberately ventures elsewhere.
Purposefully, it pushes directly into the dark, often hidden backbone of reality itself. Think of it as the Fire Walk With Me is to the original Twin Peaks series; Willoughby Tucker ventures deeper, further exploring the intense psychological depths of its central characters and providing compelling counter-weights to the established mythology. Moreover, the significant fact that the album directly addresses its own protagonists as fundamentally unreliable narrators, characters who actively flirt with fatalism and addiction, naturally leads listeners to ponder a crucial question. Essentially, one must question how much of Hayden Anhedōnia’s meticulously constructed lore is, itself, partly deliberate play-acting and partly the vivid daydreams belonging solely to her fictional characters.
Sonic and Narrative Darkness
Then, we absolutely cannot overlook the distinct musical quality defining this album. Sonically, Willoughby Tucker consistently veers much closer into the murky, oppressive dark underworld first introduced by the unsettling track “Perverts,” significantly distancing itself from the more polished, glam-infused soundscape of Preacher’s Daughter. Therefore, in a profound way, this album actively deconstructs the carefully crafted image of Ethel Cain, the character. By showing that her beginning is the very nature of a death end in horror films, Preacher’s Daughter has made the most brutal and earthiest version of the myth that it is a terrible finale in the genre of horror movies: a frozen corpse is the she image. The stripping off goes quite far in this turn of the myth in a disturbing and shocking way.
Solemn Layer
But then there’s another layer, which is more solemn and less romantic. While Preacher’s Daughter was all about dreams and desire, Willoughby is fundamentally about the raw grit that exists outside of the individual perspective, forcing us to confront uncomfortable truths beyond our personal fantasies. We humanise the people we love, because, well, they are everything we want them to be in our idealized visions, because they symbolically lead us directly toward what we consciously or subconsciously desire most deeply. But the crucial thing we ultimately desire reveals itself as merely the bittersweet nostalgia for an imagined place – a place our own memories have already distorted and betrayed through repeated retellings and emotional embellishments.
Willoughby undeniably has creative potential, but his unprocessed trauma tragically drives him to compulsively re-enact the self-destructive path of his father, while conveniently excusing his profound lack of artistic inspiration through escalating drug addiction and self-pity. Simultaneously, Ethel sees reflected in him a painful mirror of her own crippling inability to feel authentically loved and recognized as a whole person; consequently, she deliberately uses him to manifest a twisted Ophelia complex, being paradoxically more in love with his terrifying potential to emotionally traumatize her than with the actual person hidden beyond his carefully constructed artifice and defensive masks.
National Trauma Embodied
Both characters are harrowingly and magnetically attracted to this dangerous nostalgia for shared trauma, which, ultimately, isn’t just personal but solemnly enshrined within the very DNA of the broader American existence itself – a toxic inheritance passively passed down through generations scarred by the original sins of chattel slavery, the lingering divisions of civil war, and the ongoing echoes of native genocide. Through their self-destructive relationship, they vividly embody an entire nation seemingly doomed to endlessly consume itself from within during its relentless quest for a mythical empire – an empire whose iconic, subconscious appeal (subliminality) is entirely self-constructed through propaganda and selective memory, and remains deeply, fatally entwined with an almost romantic yearning for self-annihilation and martyrdom.
Doubtful Simplicity
Or maybe I am completely wrong in this complex analysis; maybe my own subjective memories of these haunting songs, their densely layered lyrics, and their sonically intoxicating warmth is already clouding my critical sanity, leading me to find meaning where none was intentionally placed. Maybe this ambitious album is, at its core, just about capturing those primal, visceral moments we psychologically can’t forget no matter how hard we try: a specific image like two reckless teenagers, entangled in the humid darkness of a decaying drive-in theatre, desperately fucking naked in a rusty car, while fictional blood dramatically splashes across the flickering silver screen before their dazed eyes.
Maybe, stripped of all grand symbolism, this raw, transient instant will become the sole lasting echo of their entire tragic life: the one defining moment of intensity and connection which they will futilely chase through every subsequent relationship and experience, again and again in an endless loop, until their bitter end finally releases them.
