Preacher’s DaughterEthel Cain

By JILLIAN CHENG

Trigger warnings: sexual abuse, domestic violence, substances

My first encounter with Ethel Cain was not from the depressing side of TikTok nor Barack Obama’s Favorite Music of 2022. It was from sitting in a movie theater with my friend, throwing artificially buttered popcorn in my face watching “It Ends With Us.” In the middle of cringing at Blake Lively’s dialogue ten minutes into the movie, a haunting voice emerged under the strum of an electric guitar: “In your basement, I grow cold.” 

Thus began my Ethel Cain internet spiral. Behind the alias is Hayden Silas Anhedönia, a transgender 26-year-old singer-songwriter. I scoured her Wikipedia page, searched up every concert clip I could find, and finally, listened to her debut studio album Preacher’s Daughter, front to back, in the backseat of my mom’s car. 

Preacher’s Daughter tells the story of a young teenager named Ethel Cain in a small Alabama town and her struggles with family trauma and relationship abuse, from her adolescence to her eventual death. The album opens with “Family Tree Intro.” Dull bass notes drown out “Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother’s blood.” The line echoes the generational trauma theme of the entire album: Ethel literally cannot escape her genetic ties with her parents.

The song leads us directly into “American Teenager,” which delves into her troubled adolescence. Compared to “Family Tree Intro,” the chords are brighter, and Ethel’s voice flows freely over the thumping drums. 

Ethel was born into a deeply religious family as Ethel’s father was a preacher at their local church. From the start, the family dynamic is tense, told through the lyrics “Say what you want, but say it like you mean it / With your fists for once, a long cold war / With your kids at the front / Just give it one more day, then you’re done, done.” Ethel is frustrated with her father’s passivity and wants him to express himself through a language that shows his true beliefs: violence. Throughout her childhood, she faced either a completely closed-off, violent, or abusive version of her father. 

After her father passes and she becomes a teenager, she turns to alcohol to convince herself that she is having the American teenager experience. Throughout the song, conveniently titled “American Teenager,” she begins to question her faith with the lines “Jesus, if you’re listening let me handle my liquor / And Jesus, if You’re there / Why do I feel alone in this room with You?”

“House in Nebraska” throws the listener back in time, recounting Ethel’s experiences with her ex-lover Wiloughby Tucker in an abandoned house in, confusingly, Alabama. In an interview with W magazine, Anhedönia explains that the use of Nebraska is metaphoric, saying that “I saw Nebraska as the center of America, a wide open expanse, an open wheat field that just went on forever and ever.” 

Ethel’s voice cries through ethereal chimes and deep electric guitar strums: “You know, I still wait at the edge of town / Praying straight to God that maybe you’ll come back around / I cry every day, and the bottles make it worse / ‘Cause you were the only one I was never scared to tell I hurt.” 

However, Ethel eventually meets new lover Logan Phelps in “Western Nights.” He is charming, dangerous, and beautiful. The tone of the song is darker, each note thumping in the accompaniment. “I watched him show his love through shades of black and blue / Starting fights at the bar across the street like you do.” The “you” references Ethel’s father, who Ethel believed showed his love through bruises. 

Despite his violent nature, Ethel still feels compelled to stay with Logan: “I’m never gonna leave you baby / Even if you lose what’s left of your mind / ‘Cause you know I’ll still be right behind you / Riding through all these western nights.”

In the song “Family Tree,” Logan is killed in a cop shootout in a swift turn of events when he attempts to rob a bank, and Ethel is forced to flee her hometown. 

“Hard Times” tells Ethel’s experiences with sexual abuse as a child. She sings, “I was too young / To noticе / That some types of love could bе bad.” The memories still resurface years after they occurred and years after his passing. Her father died only a year after the abuse occurred, and being the preacher of the town, only words of praise for her abusive father surrounded Ethel. Never facing the consequences for his atrocity, Ethel’s father died content and unharmed, and she expresses how “I hate this story / Where happiness ends / And dies with you.”

The song concludes with a drained repetition of “I’m tired of you, still tied to me.”

“Thoroughfare” introduces the main lover of the Preacher’s Daughter: Isaiah. Ethel is on the run, and while wandering through the midwest “in some torn-up clothes with a pistol in my pocket,” she meets Isaiah on the side of the road. Isaiah coaxes her, saying “Baby, don’t run, I’ll take you anywhere,” and from there they begin their relationship. The couple travel by truck to California, where Isaiah then introduces Ethel into a world of illicit substance and prostitution (“Gibson Girl”).

As Ethel spirals from the substances that Isaiah feeds her, she hallucinates in the climax of the album,“Ptolemaea,” a rumbling song that builds both Ethel’s fear and anger from a buzzing silence to a crashing chorus:  “I am the face of love’s rage.” Throughout her life, Ethel has experienced countless experiences of abusive love, and as Isaiah murders her throughout the song, she boils over. Ethel’s iconic scream of “stop” chills any listener to the bone as she fends for her life, and yet it is no use. The song ends with distorted static and a murmured sentence: “Blessed be the Daughters of Cain, bound to suffering eternal through the sins of their fathers committed long before their conception.

How can you possibly portray death in a song? Ethel does so in instrumental “August Underground” and “Televangelism,” illustrating her demise and ascension to heaven through a contrast of eerie and dreamy tracks. 

“Sun Bleached Flies” is a song of reflection. Ethel thinks back to her life, her poor decisions, and the generational trauma that she could never escape. The song echoes the album’s theme that God can love but not enough to save certain individuals, and that sometimes one must save oneself. 

“But I always knew that in the end no one was coming to save me,” Ethel sings, “So I just prayed and I keep praying and praying and praying.”

The album concludes with the famed “It Ends with Us” track “Strangers.” Ethel’s remains are literally growing cold in Isaiah’s basement. Eventually, Isaiah cannibalizes Ethel: ““Freezer bride, your sweet divine / You devour like smoked bovine hide.”

Even with Isaiah’s abusive and brutal treatment of Ethel, she still has an inherent desire to be loved by him. She sings: “Can I be yours? / Just tell me I’m yours / If I’m turning in your stomach and I’m making you feel sick.” 

The song ends with a bittersweet message to her mother, who unwittingly triggered a second generation of familial abuse: “Don’t think about it too hard / Or you’ll never sleep a wink at night again / Don’t worry ‘bout me and these green eyes / Mama, just know that I love you / And I’ll see you when you get here.”

From tales of her teenage rebellion to her experience of being dead in her boyfriend’s stomach, Preacher’s Daughter blew my mind in terms of the storytelling, the songwriting, and the message of the entire album. I loved Anhedönia’s smooth and dramatic voice, the way she used the volume and tone of her voice to convey her anger, sadness, and frustration. 

Music in recent times often feels created in a factory, or perhaps even by artificial intelligence, but Preacher’s Daughter is not only an album; it’s a story.