SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 24
An interview with America's sweetheart, the one and only Ethel Cain.
If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably aware of how tapped out I am from the music writing game. Whatever the reason, I’ve been more or less “sitting this one out” for going on five years now, culturally speaking, as the world of TikTok dances and Jack Harlow passes me by, and that’s just fine by me. But every so often, a record will come along and grab me by the throat, compelling me to re-organize my own life so as to better fit into its world.
This summer, for me, that record is Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain, the creative alter-ego of 24-year-old true-blue Southern girl, Hayden Anhedönia. 76 smoldering minutes long, it is an album that feels delivered straight out of my NOWHERE FAST fever dreams—the winsome world of the lonesome highway, the haunted gas station, the apocalypse billboard, the antlers hung on wood-paneled interior. I’ve been not only playing it obsessively but surrounding myself with what I’ve deemed Ethel Cain-core: American Honey and Picnic at Hanging Rock, or the writings of Flannery O’Connor and Donald Ray Pollock.
If you’d like to read my review of the record, it’s over here at NPR. But I was dying to speak with Anhedönia further for my humble vibes-based newsletter, and to my great pleasure, she agreed. (DIY or die, baby!) Read on to hear Anhedönia break it all down: life, love, Def Leppard, the goth club scene in Tallahassee, snorting ketamine at the antique mall, and other such pressing topics at the forefront of American discourse. It should be noted that, though she was late for our Zoom call, she had an excellent excuse: her sister had just stabbed her hand with a knife, attempting to saw through a Precious Moments doll.
Well, first of all, what were you up to this past weekend that looked like a freaky little seance?
What?!
It was on your Instagram!
Ohhh, my god. I had ordered this little Korg synth and it had come in. So we were just playing with it, going through all the patches with my best friend, who lives with me. She started playing it like crazy and I just started, like, shrieking in the middle of the night. We both have bipolar and when we get manic together, it’s really ridiculous.
Okay, are you hip to this whole “trad” thing? Like, the concept of being trad?
What is that?! I’ve just recently been inundated with comments like, “I’m so sick of Ethel Cain’s tradwife bullshit.” I’m like, what does that mean?
I think it’s people who are so over-interneted to where they’re like, I need to get knocked up and wear my prairie dress and churn butter, or something.
I mean, hey, that sounds like me. There’s this weird micro-labeling thing on the internet right now where, like, not everything needs a thinkpiece. Some people just want to churn butter. I grew up watching The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, so my version of escapism was running through a field and churning butter and going to the swimming hole. And truth be told, I’m so oversaturated with media and technology that sometimes I need to go to the bank of the river and fuck off, full stop.
I’ve noticed when people write about you, and also more generally, people who live in New York or L.A. think that everything else is “the Midwest.” Like, they just refer to the whole rest of the country as Midwestern. It’s so funny.
I literally saw a tweet today that was like, “Ethel Cain is for Midwesterners…” I’m like, I’m from Florida!
They think it’s all just cornfields and people drinking Mountain Dew. I’m like, dude, this country’s hella big and really gorgeous, and you’d rather sit in your $3000 apartment and like, take Ubers?
Every time somebody comes to visit me, they’re like, “Wow! You really live like this!” I’m like, yeah, and so do millions of other people. They’re just mind-blown. As if I invented the state of Alabama!
What’s the vibe in the town where you live? What’s everyone do on the weekends and stuff?
Where I live is an Army base and then a little town where the family members live. I honestly haven’t made too many friends with the locals because I work so much, but from what I’ve gathered, most everybody will drive down to the panhandle and they’ll go fishing in the gulf. I spend a lot of time on the river and there’s always people putting in with their boats or fishing. Especially in the South, and probably also in the Midwest, there’s not a lot of stuff to go “do,” so a lot of time is spent in backyards. It’s very communal. I see people riding four-wheelers and golf carts and just going out into nature together, which I love. You get off work, you buy a six-pack of Bud Light and maybe some sunscreen, and an inner tube or something, and you just float down the river for hours. And that’s just what you do: you get drunk and go down by the water and hang out. My sister and I just drove to Florida to this little swimming spot just across the line, and there’s hundreds of people, boats doing donuts in the river blasting country pop on boomboxes, hucking cans of beer into the river and they float along until somebody grabs them. It’s just the life.
Do you love America? I know it’s a cheesy question. I have such a toxic relationship with America where on one hand it’s so pathetic and disgusting, and on the other hand, man, we’ve got all the best shit.
To me America is the people. So I kinda separate all the people like us who are just chilling and vibing from, like, the government and all that stupid shit that actively works against us. When I talk about loving America it’s like: I love my neighbors; I love the people in my town; I love the woods and the rivers and I love to drive west and see the mountains. I love the little corner stores. I love all the hard-working everyday people. It’s kind of impossible to split stuff up, and this country is a psycho nightmare all the time, but I love the parts I stick to and know to be good. I feel like I’ll probably never leave the South. For better or worse, this is home, and I like home. So I’ll probably be here forever.
One thing I like about your music is that I don’t like to be empowered. I enjoy wallowing. Do you ever feel like making music from a place of happiness?
I’m looking forward to that for the next record. Whenever I wrote this first record, I loved to be depressed. You could not tell me shit because I was gonna be miserable and I was gonna enjoy it. But I’ve gotten a lot happier in the past year or two. 2020 was very bad, and it pushed me to take my happiness into my own hands. So it’s been funny working on this record that I wrote when I was like, “I want to roll around on the ground and cry and grab my stomach and act like I am the biggest sad baby victim in the world.” But this next record, I really want to do things that are brighter. I mean, every good story needs a conflict that runs through it, but I really do want to bring it from a place of, “I’m gonna be happy, goddamnit.” I also find that making music is purging and cleansing, so the more I think about sad stuff, the easier it is to be happy. But I will always be a sad girl at heart, and I will always be making shit that makes you totally miserable.
I definitely used to romanticize abjection in my personal life, and now I’m like, fuck that—I want to go swimming and see beautiful nature and be in love and wild and free. But I still gravitate towards all things melancholy. Why, I don’t know.
I just posted on my Tumblr a week or two ago and said, “A small part of me will always choose suffering over moving on.” I was standing out in my carport, smoking my little CBD cigarette, listening to some sad song and it was cloudy outside. I had absolutely nothing to be sad about, but part of me just wanted to clutch my knees and be like, “Ugh! Life is so hard!” I feel like if you’ve spent a large part of your life being miserable, there’s so much comfort in it. It’s so silly. I love to just sit and listen to my favorite sad album and wallow and be like, “Oh god, everything is torture!” It’s one of my favorite pastimes.
I’m like, “My life is like a movie…” Like dude, you’re literally just taking a walk. Relax. Okay, but I’m dying to know about the goth club scene in Tallahassee.
Did you have a theater department in your high school? And you know how everyone in there is like “I’m a misfit” to the max, and they’re just the most misunderstood person ever? So it’s this little strip bar—it’s literally the venue I’m playing in Tallahassee on my tour, which is really embarrassing. We were a bunch of 20-year old shitheads who would wear all black, black eyebrows, black lipstick, so slutty, so goth. Every weekend you’d get drunk, put on your best outfit, walk over to this little bar in this weird part of town, and they’re playing The Cure, Deftones, all this heavy thump-thump goth music, and there’s people getting whipped on stage and everyone’s hot and crazy. Then you’ve got the older generation of goth people, like rockabillies and bikers. It was so fun to get so fucked up and smoke cigarettes on the patio with someone twice your age and play pool with all these goth people. You were always out until four in the morning and then somebody is drunk-driving to Steak ‘n Shake who should not be. Tallahassee’s a college town, so there’s the rich kids partying in their $4000 apartments and being uppity, and then there were the parts of town where the weirdos congregated, all the different flavors of alternative. I did a performance there once, under my old name, in a bodysuit and I painted horns on my face. It was so weird. The vibes were, like, rancid, but they were also great.
Florida gets such a bad rap. There’s the whole “Florida Man” thing where, like, tweakers rob people with swords.
My mom is always worried about me, because she’s my mom. I’m like, “Mom, if I can survive in Florida, I can survive anywhere.” Florida is not real sometimes. There’s an energy in that state I’ve just never experienced anywhere else. Pretty much those four years in Tallahassee, I was on drugs the whole time, I was so drunk, I was working at a nail salon. Every day was like, “Nothing matters, there’s no consequences, just go balls-to-the-walls crazy.” And then I woke up one day in Indiana and I had a CAREER. Like, what just happened?!
I lived in Indiana for a few years, and boy did that suck. I didn’t like it at all. But how did you enjoy your time there?
I spent one year there, and in retrospect—I don’t want to speak ill of the people I lived with, but we were friends when we moved in there, and we were not friends when we moved out. You go from sunny Florida where you’ve lived for 22 years, and you move to a random town of 2000 people to live in a church. All the locals said it was one of the worst winters they’d had in a while. It snowed up to my thighs and then froze and I was snowed into my house. I finished my EP and then slept for 12 hours a day under a sherpa blanket in the basement watching Family Guy. I spent all my time listening to Chelsea Wolfe and driving around this frozen tundra of farmland. I had an encounter with a cryptid out in the middle of nowhere while trying to do a photo shoot. I love the Midwest because it is so scary and weird and cold and bleak. There’s a bleak charm. In Florida, there’s never a dull moment, and the Midwest is nothing but dull moments. I found myself retreating inward because there was nothing else to do, so I would just skulk around this 200-year-old church or go for drives for hours and hours, just driving every single back road listening to my heavy goth rock music. But I will say, spring did come, and I had about three to four good months sitting on hills, riding my bike and hanging out in cemeteries. But yeah, the Midwest is mad bleak. It’s a crazy spooky place.
What are some of your favorite antique malls?
Oh, god. My favorite one I’ve probably ever been to was the Centerville Antique Mall, about 15 minutes from my house in Indiana. It was literally a shed that had been stapled together, ramshackle, and there was a carriage restaurant, literally an old-timey carriage car from a train, and a super old man brought you your food in the little booth. Indiana was my ketamine era, and we would snort ketamine and go to the antique mall. I would get so much Dale Earnhardt merchandise, so many hand-sewn bunny rabbit stuffed animals. I probably have spent more money there than anywhere else, because they have the best stuff consistently. The Midwest is a treasure trove for antiques. We’d buy a bunch of shit, go to the carriage restaurant, eat a hot dog from this old, old man, then go back and spend more money because there was literally nothing in that town but the antique mall. So yeah, it was great. I recommend it to everyone.
What would you say is the Ethel Cain primer: like, if you like Ethel Cain, you gotta check out this other shit in the canon?
If you like Ethel Cain, you should get into late ‘80s, early ‘90s films like Thelma & Louise, obviously my favorite movie ever. Bruce Springsteen. Weed. Slowcore. You gotta get into antique shopping, you gotta get into synthwave music, you gotta get into Def Leppard.
Wow, I’ve actually been in my Def Leppard era lately! I go to the YMCA and listen to Pyromania and like, pump iron.
It’s sooo good. I heard “Pour Some Sugar on Me” in a YouTube video a couple years ago and I was like, I forgot how good this song is. I immediately went back full force on my Def Leppard kick and bought every CD that they have. And it’s so funny that they give me “American road trip, I’m a bad bitch, you can’t fucking stop me” vibes, because they’re fucking British. I didn’t even know until probably last year when I googled them for fun, and it was their logo in front of a UK flag. I was like, what the fuck, they’re British?! Oh, I just remembered: if you’re into Ethel Cain, you have to be into Little House on the Prairie and you have to be into The Waltons.
What’s The Waltons?
Same time as Little House on the Prairie, but it’s this TV show with like twelve people and they all live in this big white house together in the mountains of Virginia. I think it was set in the Depression era or right after, but it’s just this family, these little mountain folk, and they walk around barefoot in their overalls and they get into adventures. There’s these spinster sister women and they make something they call “the recipe,” but it’s moonshine, and there’s just all these colorful characters, and the theme song is so cute, and it’s one of these ‘70s television shows with family values. It’s so good. I have the box set.
I was just telling my mom this the other day: I have been so dissatisfied with life, I think, because I grew up in a bubble where everything I consumed was from the ‘70s and ‘80s, everything. Old VHS tapes, old cassettes. I was raised through the 2000s on this shit from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and then I woke up in the early 2010s when, like, swag was a thing. I was like, this is not the future I was promised. I was promised a Model T, gingham aprons, an apple pie in the windowsill, I was promised I Love Lucy and fishing holes and dirt roads. And then all this shit is happening? I got majorly swindled. I see people talk all the time about how, oh, nostalgia fetishization is so bad, but I can’t help it. I wish I lived on a little farm and I had 42 cousins who lived on the same dirt road.
I’ve been reading the Unabomber’s manifesto, and the Unabomber has a lot of great shit to say about society these days. He’s like, basically we’re so oversocialized we can’t even think straight. I mean, do I want the full Little House on the Prairie deal? Not really. But I certainly would like to throw my phone off a bridge sometimes.
I told my mom, I really do believe that technology will be what does us in. I feel like throughout history, humans were meant to live in little towns and rely on each other. We’ve built ourselves up to do so much stuff that I feel is unnatural. You have a whole generation of iPad babies. I mean, I like running water and air-conditioning and modern medicine, but my whole life I’ve really just dreamed about marrying a little country boy and having a couple kids, an acre or two of green grass, a dog, and raising my kids simply with good values: be kind to other people, work hard, play hard, get the most out of life.
Can I ask you about your love life?
Yeah!
How’s your love life?
It’s good. I’ve actually never dated before, but recently I met this guy. He just spent a week and a half in Alabama, and then I drove him back to Missouri and spent another half a week with him and his family. There’s not much to report, honestly, because I’m still so green to the situation. I’ve always been so goal-oriented about my art and my music that I’ve never really taken the time to do anything other than daydream about being in a relationship someday in the future. We both very much like each other, but we’re both playing chicken, in a way. It’s very interesting, because it’s a new part of my life I’m unlocking—just figuring out where love and romance and boys fit in my life, other than as this monolith I write music about.
Do you enjoy being a public figure?
No! No, no, no. I do appreciate the platform, not that I think I’m anything of an oracle or prophet or some shit like that; but I have things I would like to say that I think might be relevant to this clusterfuck of a country. But I don’t want to be famous. And people are always like, but you’re actively taking the steps to become successful. Well, the world is a scary place, and I would like to be at least a little bit comfortable and be able to have enough extra money that if my sister slices her hand open, we have enough money to stitch her up. I’m not going to go for something and be bad at it. My parents raised me to do everything you do 100%. So I’m going to do a good job and make good music. I would like to have the resources to help people who need it, and nowadays, if I want the reach of my work to go far, so does my face and the parts of me I don’t really care to be known. It’s an interesting thing when you’re raised the way I was—none of that is achievable, it’s like a pipe dream. So when it starts happening, and you’re 24, like, I don’t know how to handle this shit. There’s so many things going on all at once that I’m kind of just like: “Stick to your words, stick to your goals, do a good job, and be as nice as you can to everyone you meet, and whatever else happens, happens.”
There isn’t much of an artistic middle class anymore, and there’s also this kind of fetishization, or at least an extreme interest, in pop music. For instance, lots of people refer to you as a pop star and your songs as pop music.
At this point, I don’t know what that means. Obviously I’ve been doing my little press runarounds, and I read all the reviews, and it’s all “pop.” I had a very different understanding of what pop music was: I thought it was fun, it was upbeat, it was short, it was catchy, you can TikTok it, you can play it at H&M. Seeing this record that has been inspired by so many things that are not pop get called a “pop record,” I’m just like—maybe it is a pop record, subconsciously? I have no idea.
The line “God loves you, but not enough to save you” [on “Sun Bleached Flies”] is so crushing. Is that a sentiment you came to through music, or in your own life?
Years ago, I got “God Loves You,” this big one right here, tattooed on my arm, because that has always been kind of my spiel. I say it in so many different songs of mine over the years. I thought it was very striking. For a brief second when I started making music, it was, like, upside-down crosses and Satan, but I came to this realization: Satan is not in control; Satan doesn’t have any power; God is what’s scary. God is all powerful, all-knowing, puts Satan in his place, if we’re going by biblical mythology. If you want power, if you want horror, you have to go to the biggest boss. And growing up, I heard the words “God loves you” all the time. Somebody would say the most rancid, evil shit to you and then they’re like, “God loves you.” So I loved to put it in the music—it’s like, is that a threat?
But then it was summer 2020, and I was sitting at my parents’ piano, and I wrote “Sun Bleached Flies,” all in one day. It was the first week of quarantine, and I knew I wasn’t going to see them again for a while; I didn’t know what was going to happen. I knew what the vibe of the song was going to be, and I don’t know where it came from, but I was thinking about the pandemic and the state of the world: “God loves you, but not enough to save you.” Like, show me that you love me, don’t tell me.
To me that’s the scary thing, and you can apply it to religion, nature, politics, interpersonal relationships, whatever—the universe really is apathetic, and it will swallow you back up like you never fucking existed.
That was one of the crazier realizations I had towards the end of this record: there really is no good or evil. There are people who do things. Now, I do think some things are abhorrent and the closest you can get to true evil. But in everyday life, it’s not these crazy cosmological forces, it’s just people doing things to each other based on an entire lifetime of experience. Tornadoes aren’t evil, plagues, death—it just is. And it could be so easy to lie around and act like the ultimate victim, but the universe sometimes just throws shit at you. Sometimes a tree falls through your house! You are in the washing machine of life, and you are going to get tumbled until you die. At some point I had to be like, “You are not some tortured character in a book like you want to believe. Take the bad, enjoy the good, and if you think that toss-up is worth it, live to see another day. If not, go jump off a bridge! It’s up to you!” I think that the bad’s worth the good. Life is the most insane experience ever. Ever, ever, ever.
What was the happiest you’ve been this year?
I wrote this song called “Dust Bowl” and put it on my Soundcloud. I got up at like 10 AM and got in my truck, and I drove for seven hours—all over Alabama, random back roads, I didn’t even put in a destination, just, I’m gonna take a left. I wandered for seven hours listening to this one song on repeat, and I was just looking at the trees, and the hills, and the cows, and the old buildings, and the gas stations, and the people. And then I went home and took a nap. And I was just like, everything that I do is so I can continue driving around and exploring and witnessing all of this green and blue and brown. And I want to do that for the rest of my life.