‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’: A track-by-track breakdown of the lore forming Ethel Cain’s new album
The world of Ethel Cain is bigger than the music.
Created by Hayden Anhedönia, Cain is a character of her own imagination, a figure that she once felt utterly possessed by, and through whose eyes, every song became a new chapter in a bigger story.
On Preacher’s Daughter, that story is of Cain’s demise and horrific death, dealing with topics of abuse, religion and even cannibalism. But as she announced Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, the story grew even bigger as fans found out they were getting a prequel.
On this second album, Anhedönia returns to her character, five years before the story of Preacher’s Daughter. Here, she deals with Ethel’s relationship with Willoughby Tucker, the first love that inspired ‘A House in Nebraska’ on her debut, and seems to represent, in Ethel’s life, a pure love before the darkness truly sets in.
But, as with any of her releases, there is darkness there. As the story reveals itself through twists, turns and gut-wrenching lyricism, the fate of the protagonist and her first love is both complex and devastating. Opening up a whole web of fan theories about what actually happened between the two, with new lore and analyses to dive into, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is a love story from spark to dark after it was snuffed out.
A track-by-track look at Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You:
‘Janie’
Along with a whole story, the Ethel Cain world comes with a cast of characters. At the opening of this record, we’re introduced to a new figure, Janie.
“Janie is Ethel’s best (and only real) friend,” Anhedönia revealed on her Tumblr, “I’ve had her written for a while, but there wasn’t much of a place for her on the album”. The opening number, however, is her spotlight moment, but we seem to be coming in at the tail-end.
“I know she’s your girl now / but she was my girl first,” Ethel sings. As explained by the artist, “Ethel’s story begins the summer she turns 16 when her best friend gets a boyfriend. As Janie is Ethel’s only real friend, she fears this marks the end of their relationship as she knows it, where Ethel had her best friend all to herself. Her insecurities lead her to provocation, claiming Janie should just rip the bandaid off and be done with Ethel.”
Telling of a friendship that’s becoming more and more distance and isolating, it also touches on Ethel’s insecurities about her own love for Willoughby Tucker as she the tragic fate of her story is prophesised in the lyrics, “I can see the end in the beginning of everything / and in it, you don’t want me / but I still play pretend like I don’t watch you leaving.” Given that neither Janie nor Willoughby Tucket are around when Preacher’s Daughter begins, it’s a prediction we know will come true as she sings, “it’s not looking good, but did it ever?”
‘Willoughby’s Theme’
In the album’s first instrumental piece, Anhedönia ensures that any future movie adaptation of this story already has a score. The cinematic number sounds exactly like the moment the romantic lead walks onto the screen. Beginning light, airy, and romantic as he enters, it then darkens at the mid-point, seemingly tracing the way that Ethel loves and admires Willoughby, but also seems to know in her soul that he spells trouble for her.
Just like ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’ in Twin Peaks, or the way David Lynch’s long-term collaborator Angelo Badalamenti liked to give each character their own musical identity with chords and sequences that come around again and again, Anhedönia seems to do that on this record, as two instrumental numbers titled for Willoughby offer a musical pathway.
On this first one, falling in love is put to wordless music as the artist said, “I wanted to try and sonically capture the nauseating, dizzying fear and rush of falling in love and realizing that no matter what happens inside it, you will be fundamentally changed by it in the end.” But with the dark turn in the second half of the song, it seems to predict the way the gloom of their own lives affects their love, with their traumas and limited life choices in their small town world smothering them.
‘Fuck Me Eyes’
In many ways, ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ feels like a precursor to ‘Gibson Girl’ on Preacher’s Daughter. Ethel’s entire life has been limited, trapped in a strict religious community with an abusive preacher father keeping her stuck in a conservative life. On that debut record, we see her escape from that, landing in sex work where the seduction of ‘Gibson Girl’ watches her transform into someone “downright iconic” as if for a moment, she’s basking in this new sexualisation.
‘Fuck Me Eyes’ seems to be the origin of that mindset as Ethel looks at other girls in town, girls with more sexual freedom and wilder spirits, and views them with a mix of total admiration and total envy.
According to Anhedönia, the track is “an ode to the girls who are perfect and have everything, yet carry the reputation of town slut”. In this story, she notes that this girl is a character called Holly Reddick.
Merging Ethel’s naivety in the descriptions of the girls’ beauty and allure, with Anhedönia’s own wisdom from the other side, noting it’s about “the beautiful blonde who is just lonely and wants to be loved, that all the adults condemn to each other, who ultimately is the girl everyone simultaneously can’t stand and wants to be,” adding in context to the story.
“This song represents Ethel’s complicated feelings for the girl she’s convinced has caught her crush’s eye, as well as her 16-year-old thoughts on the matter,” she stated.
‘Nettles’
So, where are we by now? From what we can gather, Ethel’s best friend had Willoughby, but now she does. They’ve seemingly fallen in love, or at least she’s starting to dream up a full life together, despite her own insecurities. So then, if ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ was her immediate fears of other girls catching his eye, ‘Nettles’ is her more existential worries about the ways the world and their traumas could tear them apart.
Of the whole album, ‘Nettles’ is one of the most lyrically dense songs that moves the story along fast. First, we’re introduced to the fact that Ethel and Willoughby grew up together and that her love for him has been lifelong. For a lot of the song, the lyricism deals with the way that trauma forces people to grow up fast, depicting the couple in a “race” to an end point, in which, as Anhedönia says, “For Willoughby especially, this race ends in disaster; foreshadowed by his injury”, as she sings about “when the plant blew up”, depicting her protagonist next to her lover in a hospital bed.
However, one theory is that he was never injured, but that Ethel dreams up this tragedy either as a representation of her fear, or as an almost easier ending than him simply leaving her.
It’s wider than just a fear for Willoughby. As Cain sings, “It wasn’t pretty like the movies / It was ugly, like what they all did to me”, ‘Nettles’ represents her anger, fear and sadness at everything, from this doomed love to the abuse that’s discussed in the debut album. It even considers her upset about her own fate as a woman as verse two deals in that: “You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing”, which the artist explained is about the fact that she believes Willoughby will be allowed to process his trauma with rage or even vallour, while Ethel, a woman, will only ever silently suffer.
In this song, we also get the first glimmer of Preacher’s Daughter’s suggestion that Ethel Cain was always, to some degree, doomed as if she was prophesied to be heartbroken, singing here, “To love me is to suffer me”, and “I believe it”, marking the survivors mindset that love is pain.
But there is still light here. While Ethel is spiralling deep into her fears, each chorus brings her back to the dream life where she and Willoughby live together in a house with “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who”, and all this past means nothing in her hopes for their future stability.
‘Willoughby’s Interlude’
That doesn’t come, though. From the second ‘Nettles’ ends, the album noticeably darkens. This next dedicated instrumental is far more moody and sinister. Back on Preacher’s Daughter, the instrumental tracks represented wordless moments, like Cain’s murder, or changes of state, like her soul leaving her body.
If it’s true that Willoughby was actually injured in ‘Nettles’, ‘Willoughby’s Theme’ could be set in a hospital with the muffled voices that open the track being his family and well-wishers gathering around his bed.
But if that was all a figment of Ethel’s insecure imagination, bolstering her view of Willoughby to this heroic status she seems to see him in, perhaps this interlude is an insight into his mind itself. Sombre and distant, this musical theme could be the first insight into the fact that he, too, is traumatised, flawed and fragile, as so far, we’ve only seen him through Ethel’s admiring eyes.
‘Dustbowl’
On ‘Dustbowl’, things become clearer. Beginning “pretty boy, natural blood stained blond”, it’s confirmed that Willoughby was injured by has made a recovery, returning to his life with Ethel. But in a stark contrast to the romantic future painted on ‘Nettles’, the reality of that life spoken of here is dark as we hear of this couple clinging to each other while both obviously being weighened down by the trauma of their own lives.
For Ethel, that’s her abusive family and the belief that her blood is somehow cursed. For Willoughby, that’s his PTSD-stricken veteran father and the fear that he has no future beyond this town and this life, captured in the lines “Grew up hard, fell off harder / Cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam / You’d be a writer / If he didn’t leave all his hell for you,” right as the album’s loudest, thrashing drums break through.
In that moment, rage roars in. As her voice flits between dead-pan depth and angelic lightness, with the music too moving between lethargic haze into outright rage, the instrumental traces the character’s conflicting emotions. Their love can no longer be this idealised thing and Ethel is beginning to realise that the man she loved, that she had on a pedestal doesn’t exist despite her desperate devotion to him.
‘A Knock At The Door’
Of all the songs, ‘A Knock At The Door’ is the softest and rawest. Stripped back to nothing but a voice and acoustic guitar, much like the first-ever demos Anhedönia ever shared, that return to sparse purity also directs our attention to the lyrics.
On this track, Willoughby’s trauma and mentality are unpacked more. “Satan’s in the state penn / You’re here with both your fists,” she begins and the artist explains, “it can be insinuated that it is Willoughby’s father, whose return from Vietnam left him war-scarred and shellshocked, riddled with PTSD; now demonised by Willoughby, revered as ‘Satan’, he was most likely sent off by the family to the nearby penitentiary to get ‘better’ but nevertheless got worse.”
Considering his own trauma regarding his father, it deals with the difference between the couple. “Willoughby is much like Ethel, but while Willoughby took action to try and separate himself from his generational sting, Ethel is haunted on the ‘love’ her father once held for her, destined to forever look back and desire that love from a male figure she so desperately perverted to be normal.”
The result is two very different approaches to life. “Everything I’ve loved, I’ve loved it straight to death,” Ethel sings about her own trauma response to cling desperately to people. Meanwhile, Willoughby is detached and depressed. “You’re not scared of no knock on the door,” Ethel sings with a mix of admiration and fear about her partner, realising that he doesn’t particularly care whether he lives or dies.
‘Radio Towers’
“Do you think radio towers make deals with the wind to blow over and spare them?” Anhedönia shared as a Morse code clue about this song. With a loose beep in the background that subtly speeds up throughout the track, this instrumental is a warning call.
In a page from Anhedönia’s novelisation of the whole story, she talks of a tornado ripping through their town, listing the lost, and in the end writing, “I lost Willoughby that night.” As the radio towers predict the storm rolling in, the tense instrumental essentially becomes a countdown to disaster. Of all the songs, this one is the closest to her last project, Perverts, in which she credited industrial estates, lonely landscapes and pylons as major influences. “All drone music, for me, is part erotic, part meditative,” she said about that release and her obsession with instrumentals, and it seems to ring true here. But in this instance, ‘Radio Towers’ spells fear, mostly for Willoughby.
‘Tempest’
“Willoughby’s greatest fear is the weather, something Ethel failed to truly understand through her toughened projections of who she thought or needed him to be,” Anhedönia revealed in her annotations and in an instant, the story of the album is revealed to be a story of a devotional love blinding Ethel Cain to the reality of her lover’s struggle. As Willoughby’s greatest fear comes to life, we switch to hit view point as the artist says, “This is the only song on the record written from Willoughby’s perspective.”
Suddenly, ‘Tempest’ becomes a dark and almost cruel song. Ethel isn’t there as she’s abandoned Willoughby during his worst nightmare, leaving her partner cursing her blindness towards him as she’s so wrapped up in her own trauma. He taunts her with her own ideas that she’s cursed, asking “Do you swing from your neck / With the hope someone cares?” which Anhedönia explained as him “asking if she wears the curse of her lineage so openly in a bid for sympathy or rescue.” Instead, in a moment of crisis, Ethel’s love for Willoughby comes up short as Anhedönia says, “She can’t truly help him as she’s never truly looked at him for what he truly is or what he actually needs.”
Left alone in complete fear, Willoughby says, “’Cause death, it takes too long / And I can’t wait,” repeating “waiting on my own”. Knowing that Willoughby dies during this storm, it’s unclear whether he’s killed by it, or kills himself during it, given the final message of futility as Willoughby says, “You can try and stop me, hold me / Do all the things that you do / But it’s no good.
‘Waco, Texas’
Waco, Texas. WT, Willoughby Tucker. Similar to how Preacher’s Daughter ends with ‘Strangers’, finally laying out the fate of Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You ends with a summarising track, and it’s one that fans have been awaiting a while after the initial demo was shared in 2022, though the final version is three times the length.
“As Ethel and Willoughby fall in love, they find themselves blinded to the rest of the world for a while, captivated by each other and thinking that love could keep them safe. But eventually, the real world comes knocking and everything goes up in flames,” Anhedönia said on Tumblr. She added about her own view of the couple: “Ethel sees him as being this beautiful, enamouring God and she’s deeply in love with him, but in the end she realises he’s just a broken boy and they’re both too far gone.”
And on ‘Waco, Texas’, it seems that Ethel is reckoning with that, realising how doomed the love was as she sings, “I did it to myself in hindsight.” After the storm, her own blindness to his struggles becomes clear as the romanticism of their love cannot hold, singing devastatingly, “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.”
Knowing that she left Willoughby alone in his final and most fearful moments, Ethel curses herself, singing, “Are you angry? / Do you hate me? Darling, time may forgive me, but I won’t”.
But in an opposing theory, there’s the question of whether Willoughby Tucker did actually die, or whether he merely left Ethel, a fate that she sees as worse than death, and so sees as grief. In the spirit of ‘Strangers’ asking as a sort of final confession, maybe that’s what this is—the ultimate reveal that Willoughby Tucker survived, but that the trauma they were both dealt made their love unlivable, partly due to Ethel’s devotion to him and the way that made her blind. But, in the end, she seems to stomach it, settling into the self-descructive surrender to her own pain that colours Preacher’s Daughter, the chapter that follows, as the final word here is one of giving in: “Cause you’re right / I can wait if I want / but it’ll never be good enough like I want to believe it is”.
And so the scene is set. When Preacher’s Daughter begins, we meet Ethel Cain still in the throes of this grief and more certain than ever that her life is cursed, leading her further down a dark path to her eventual death.
