Lyrically Speaking: Daydreaming and despair in Ethel Cain’s ‘Nettles’
The world of Ethel Cain is so much more than songs. Sure, you can just listen and enjoy, bask in the high emotion and high drama of Preachers Daughter, or swim in the dark noise of Perverts. But it’s always more than that, and it was the second that Hayden Silas Anhedönia decided to publicly name her project Ethel Cain; the name of the girl who possesses her debut album, or even possessed Anhedönia herself, as so much of her work is dedicated to telling the tale of Cain.
Preacher’s Daughter is that story. In the 2022 album, Cain’s life is chronicled from her first love and heartbreak, through to her running away from abuse and trauma, only to land in more of the same, finally ending up being murdered. Cain dies at the end of the record, so afterwards, fans were immediately wondering what would come next.
After an interlude to explore her other passion of ambient and noise music on Perverts, Anhedönia announced a second chapter of Cain’s story, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. This is where we get into the weeds of the world the artist has built. While Preacher’s Daughter can be enjoyed just as an album, it also comes with an entire story and a cast of characters. With Willoughby Tucker as the name of Ethel Cain’s first love, for fans, the announcement of the second album was confirmation that this would be a prequel.
That was further confirmed by the release of ‘Nettles’ as the first track. For long-term dedicated fans, it was an awaited moment as the track has existed in demo form since 2021, just waiting for this moment Cain was ready to share this chapter of the story where we flash back to the first love that inspired ‘A House In Nebraska’ and began the tale of Preacher’s Daughter.
One of the most alluring things about Cain, or Anhedönia, as an artist, is her willingness to let fans in. The theories surrounding the music aren’t just something fans have concocted, but are part of a genuine plan of hers. She’s hinted that she’s written a novelisation of this story, as the arc of it and the characters are so important to her. It’s rare to find a creative who will be so open about their meanings and intentions, but with Cain, she will present a fully annotated rundown of the lyrics, just like she has with ‘Nettles’.
First, a scene setting. In ‘A House in Nebraska’, listeners are introduced to the suggestion that Tucker is seemingly dead as she sings, “Your mama calls me sometimes to see if I’m doing well / And I’d lie to her and say that I’m doing fine / When, really, I’d kill myself to hold you one more time”. At the opening of ‘Nettles’, it seems to be confirmed as we land in a hospital scene with Cain singing “The doctors gave you until the end of the night / But not ’til daylight”.
But ‘Nettles’ isn’t about Tucker’s death. In her own words, Cain said that the song is about “a dream of losing the one you love, asking them to reassure you that it won’t come true and to dream, instead, of all the time you’ll have together as you grow old side by side”. That rings true throughout the track as Cain flits between daydreams and pure anxiety, between the choruses and verses.
It’s in the chorus where the dreaming exists. “Tell me all the time not to worry and think of all the time I’ll, I’ll have with you”, Cain croons angelically. The imagery in these moments always comes back to domesticity and her desire to simply have a life with Tucker, fantasising, “When I won’t wake up on my own,” wanting to be “held close all the time, knowing I’m half of you” and taking it even further in the bridge when she sings, “think of us inside after the wedding”.
Her biggest wish is simply to spend their lives together, with the loudest vocal performance in the track being on the line “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who”, which Cain herself explained, writing, “Gardenias are her mother’s favorite flower; she envisions them at home, newly-wed, surrounded by the imagery that envokes the stories of when her own parents first fell in love. She imagines having that kind of love, where emotional unavailabilities and insecurities are a thing of the past. They are simply together in love, and that’s all that will matter.”
But in the verses, it’s like Cain can’t quite hold onto the fantasy without the fear and anxiety of their situation and her mental state, creeping in. The opening verse is dedicated to the fact of it; Tucker in a hospital bed, injured after “the plant blew up”. But the second goes deeper, spiralling into a classically nuanced Cain verse that expands the world into broader considerations of gender, fate, purpose and doom, with the devastating lyric, “to love me is to suffer me” echoing throughout.
“You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing”, she sings, laying out these two stereotypical fates that most commonly affect their genders in their circumstances. Tucker would go out fighting, Cain would simply silently disappear, exactly as she does in Preacher’s Daughter. But she makes it clear that she wishes it could be exactly the opposite, singing, “I wanna bleed, I wanna hurt the way that boys do”. Cain explained her lyrical intention here, stating, “Ethel yearns to experience pain and expression in a way that is culturally coded as ‘masculine’; She envies the perceived emotional clarity and physical freedom boys are often allowed when expressing distress through anger or violence, such methods mirror the self destructive actions Willoughby has done throughout the album; whereas girls and women are frequently denied those outlets or punished for using them”.
It spirals towards the track’s most impassioned line: “This was all for you”, used not only as the climax of this track but as Cain’s leading line when it came to launching this new chapter; it seems like a vital one. Capturing the character’s desire for her suffering to be worth something in the end, or that the pain in her life is all in service of her desperate desire for love and to be with Tucker—it’s a cry either way—perfectly capturing the track’s battle between romance and fear.
