Over the last few months, Ethel Cain has been on the festival circuit, performing on stages like Coachella, and opening on tour for various pop stars, like Caroline Polachek. The crowds there might not be entirely her own, but when she looks out and sees people in crowns made of bones and flowy, white cotton dresses or NASCAR t-shirts and baggy jeans sitting low on their hips, she knows they're are there for her.
That's the aesthetic language in the world of Ethel Cain, the fictional protagonist whose story we hear in Preacher's Daughter. In case you're not familiar with the lore, the album Preacher's Daughter tells a story set in 1991, written by and starring singer-songwriter Hayden Silas Anhedönia, which unfolds as a one-person play when seen live. In the album, Ethel flees from the strong grasp of her religious childhood into the arms of a terrific and dangerous romance. Anhedönia couldn't just write the life and death of Ethel Cain — to make it real, she had to fill in the blank pages of Ethel's aesthetic sensibility. She describes the Ethel Cain visual world as "nostalgia porn," a portrait of rural American life, basements with wood-paneled walls and streets woven with telephone poles and wires, informed by her own upbringing in Florida.
"Everything was very simple, very laid back, very country," the artist tells Teen Vogue about her own past, shortly after bringing the album to life during her opening slot for Polachek at New York's iconic Radio City Music Hall, where she also took the time to snap behind-the-scenes pictures with her crew. “As I make my way through the world, everything gets more and more complicated. The further I get away from [my youth], the harder I cling to it, and I kind of created this world, a portable version of it that I can take with me. I fully need that on the road; I can say that much.”
Preacher's Daughter opens with the words, "These crosses all over my body remind me of who I used to be." Anhedönia wears her own tattoo sleeve of hand-drawn crosses. The idea was born when she was drawing characters in her sketchbook and drew one with a sleeve of crucifix tattoos. She began drawing a few onto herself with tattoo ink and needles she keeps at home. (Don't try that at home.) Now, the crosses are halfway up her forearm, most of them drawn by her friends. "I know each cross, who added it," she says. “I keep a record in a journal each time I add a cross so I have a list of when I got them and who gave it to me. I have a long way to go and a lot of real estate going on. It'll probably be years before it's done, but that's fine. I never really like to rush anything.”
When Anhedönia first felt the spirit of Ethel, she couldn't distinguish herself from her alter ego. "I was living life like that. Every day was a day in the life of that character I was trying to create," she says. She was eighteen, growing her hair out, dressing like Ethel, drawing, and writing songs in front of "approximately zero people." She was uploading music to the Internet, then deleting those songs. Wandering through abandoned buildings and collecting trinkets and ephemera to take home and add to her nest.
The solitude and silence during which Ethel Cain cut her teeth, roughly four years, is a time capsule for Anhedönia — but she couldn't live in character forever. "I feel a lot less like that character than I used to, but that's also kind of the point," she says. “I've always said that [Ethel] is kind of a bad timeline version of what I think would happen if you didn't take care of yourself. If I ever find myself crossing paths with her again, I think it will be time to make some changes.”
Anhedönia is far from finished with world-building and writing characters. She often makes the same joke when talking about the future of Ethel Cain: something to the effect of, "She definitely will evolve. Well, she's not gonna evolve because she's dead." But then she launches into where Ethel's world is going next. The women in Ethel's family, her mother and grandmother, will have stories to add to the anthology. It comes up a lot that Anhedönia loves slow and long-term investment in a project. "They're all related by blood in one way or another. There's gonna be a throughline, which obviously will be me, my taste, my personality, the things that I like will always be there as a baseline, but I'm excited to step into a different woman's shoes and tell her stories and explore what that will be like."
There is so much lore for Ethel Cain fans to sink their teeth into, so much that Anhedönia has made canon about the characters on her Tumblr and in her livestreams. There is cohesion in the imagery, calculation in the story, but on stage, the live show is simple.
Anhedönia's urge was to put as much production into her set as she did in the making of Ethel Cain, but "the music is so simple and so straight to the point that I was like, 'I think we just gotta go up there and do it.'" She and her band don't coordinate outfits — she hardly plans what she's going to wear herself. "Half the time, I wear clothes the audience gave me the night before. There was a T-shirt somebody threw on stage in Utah, and I wore that in Chicago. I've been wearing the beaded bracelets they throw me. I bought a hat at the gas station in Indiana [and] wore that last night in Nashville."
Anhedönia loves to see the range of inspiration fans pull out, what they are seeing when they look at the source material she came up with. "Obviously, for me, Ethel Cain is a pair of jeans and a t-shirt on stage," she says. “It's always funny to see what people are getting out of the music individually, what they're taking from it. It's really cute because, to me, that's the entire spectrum. You've got Gunne Sax dresses on one side, you've got wife beaters on the other side. That's the range. That's the basis of the world. It really is all those things at once.”
Performing at world-renowned festivals like Coachella this past spring or Leeds this coming August, or hitting the road to open for the likes of Caroline Polachek and boygenius for the rest of the summer, Ethel Cain might not have the home-field advantage of seeing crowds full of her people, but her devotees will always find their way to her. They're throwing gifts onto the stage, making grabs for the setlist, and asking for drawings to tattoo on their body. That's why, even without exchanging words, she knows when someone is dressed to see Ethel Cain. “It's always nice to see somebody from home.”
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