The iconic synths that built Ethel Cain’s ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’
The lore of Ethel Cain is big, bigger than most people realise.
The master architect at the heart of it is Hayden Anhedönia, whose trials and tribulations through Cain have always sought to spotlight her own personal struggles across identity, love and romance, the darkness of the self, and everything in between.
A lot of this came from a place of processing what she’d never revisited before. As a teenager, mostly, and the kind of idea of love she experienced back then. “I see Ethel Cain as a piece of me that I separate from myself and discard, so that I can make good decisions in life,” she told The Guardian. “If Preacher’s Daughter was my learning experience of what not to do with trauma and healing, Willoughby Tucker has been my experience of what not to do in love.”
And so, love became the mainstay of the entire project. How it, “for better or worse”, guides everything you do. On the latest record, songs like ‘Janie’ anchor Cain’s foray into adolescent romance and the impact that has on her early friendship with the only friend she had. The instrumental ‘Willoughby’s Theme’ caught these characters and feelings inside the world of a single song, with Anhedönia catching “the nauseating, dizzying fear and rush of falling in love” without intruding on it with words.
Each of these resembles the way cinema often gives characters and stories their own scores, covering complicated perceptions with ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ and trauma on ‘Dustbowl’. And through it all, Anhedönia’s backdrop was Twin Peaks. “Every day it was wake up, work, Twin Peaks, work, Twin Peaks, work…” she told The Guardian. She even honed in on David Lynch’s longtime collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti, to bring her own world to life.
And that meant repurposing Badalamenti’s synths against many of Lynch’s familiar themes: innocence in the fires of societal and circumstantial evil, the weight of the world on the shoulders of youth and figuring out love for the very first time. Lynch’s death was an untimely development through this process, coming at a time when Anhedönia had just finished the final episode of Twin Peaks. “I was really happy that I finished the show while he was still alive,” she said. And the synths in Willoughby Tucker “felt kind of like an homage and a “way to keep David and Angelo and Laura [Palmer] alive in some small way”.
Complicated relationships with others and the self are something that Anhedönia has always faced in her own life. And many of the songs on Willoughby Tucker also feel especially poignant in the current climate, with songs like ‘Dustbowl’ chronicling light and dark with such a raw intensity that it’s hard to look elsewhere.
But feeling uncomfortable is also the point. Because, more than anything else, Willoughby Tucker is a minefield. But, as Anhedönia said, it might be difficult to face up to, but you’ll surely feel like a different person when you come out the other side, for better or worse.
