Ethel Cain
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
Daughters of Cain/AWAL
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The most compelling track on Ethel Cain’s 2022 magnum opus Preacher’s Daughter is “A House In Nebraska.” It’s the first track I heard off the album, and something about it stuck with me and wouldn’t leave. There’s something about its spacious, sweeping structure that reminded me of driving through the American South, where I currently live, and seeing a peeling, bleached-out church here, a Jesus Saves sign there, and maybe an old, rusted-out gas station or roadside strip club or abandoned diner there. With its droning piano, cathedral-style vocals, and wailing, Springsteen-esque guitar solo, the spaced-out placement of these curiosities within its eight minute expanse is both a journey and destination. A road trip on a lost highway of hope and heartbreak, where the searing ache is the entire point.
It's no wonder that this song was Hayden Anhedönia’s entry point into the world of her character Ethel Cain, which she would craft with deep care and intricacy. The same year Anhedönia came out as trans and began her medical transition, she found a dusty, haunting piano loop, and that became the foundation of “A House In Nebraska,” and the beginning of a flourishing creative period. On Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, Anhedönia revisits the romantic relationship in “A House In Nebraska” as a prequel to the tragedy that befalls Ethel Cain in Preacher’s Daughter.
Preacher’s Daughter is a genre-spanning, 13-track concept album in the novelistic Southern Gothic tradition of Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor. The story begins in 1991, after Ethel’s abusive father, an evangelical preacher, has died and her relationship with her boyfriend Willoughby dissolves. She leaves home, has a dalliance with a sexy criminal who robs ATMs, and then eventually hooks up with a man named Isaiah who forces her into sex work and keeps her heavily drugged and sedated, only to eventually murder and cannibalize her. The end of the album sees Ethel reflecting on this gruesome journey in the afterlife.
Willoughby Tucker takes us back to 1986, where Ethel’s romance with Willoughby begins. As with Preacher’s Daughter, Anhedönia gives us plenty of Southern feel and flavor and introduces us to the various characters in Shady Grove, Alabama, where the story unfolds, including Ethel’s best friend Janie, as well as the town slut—and object of Ethel’s rapt fascination—Holly Reddick. And as with Preacher’s Daughter, the lore surrounding this album is detailed and complex, so I will leave much of the narrative deep diving to the online sleuths, fans, and stans.
Anhedönia has called Willoughby Tucker “one long love song.” This description is apt; the album is a slow burn—it meanders, it takes its sweet time, and interspersed between songs are long instrumental interludes, some of which serve as character sketches in much the same way that Angelo Badalamenti’s “Laura Palmer’s Theme” or “Audrey’s Dance” do for Twin Peaks (In a recent Instagram post, Anhedönia shared that she even tracked down the synths Badalamenti used for the soundtrack.)
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While Preacher’s Daughter is dynamic in terms of its exploration of genre—it includes Swiftian arena pop, R&B, Americana, and even doom metal—this album, which takes cues from Anhedönia’s project Perverts from earlier this year, is more droning and hypnotic. It doesn’t suffer, however, from its lack of structural mirroring with Preacher’s Daughter. Willoughby Tucker invites losing oneself in the slowcore, in the vast—and in this case, very murky and dark —emotional sea of first love.
The album opens ominously, and then, like a dust-shimmering beam of afternoon light through a window, pensive guitar breaks through on “Janie.” Anhedönia’s vocals are ethereal as always, like a painterly finger stretching towards God, as she guides us through Ethel’s relationship with her childhood best friend. Janie is Ethel’s “only real friend,” a girl who when Ethel turns 16 ends up getting a boyfriend. Like so many female friendships at this age, there’s a deep intimacy and intensity that mirrors but often doesn’t touch romance, and the potential loss of Janie sends Ethel into a tailspin. “I know she’s your girl now / But she was my girl first / She was my girl first,” she sings, almost pleadingly, to Janie’s new boyfriend, either directly or maybe just in her own head.
To Janie, she turns and confesses, “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 won’t watch you leaving / I will always love you.” The sense of abject grief is palpable here, and beginning the story with this highly emotional, but typical, teenage situation is a brilliant narrative choice. It imbues Ethel’s journey with lived-in authenticity, while setting up the listener—and Ethel—for more loss to come.
In a noticeable reversal of how “Janie” begins, the instrumental and cinematic “Willoughby’s Theme” starts out with sunny skips of piano and then begins to buzz with a dark, ominous drone that slowly builds from the edges and bleeds into the center. We get the sense that there is beauty here, but also maybe something deeply rotten, too. Something consuming, and perhaps all-encompassing.
Then, with a thunderclap, the ’80s synths roll in. “Fuck Me Eyes” is the type of song you can imagine roller skating to in the actual ’80s, a 2025 update to “Bette Davis Eyes” that zigzags and soars and pulsates in your solar plexus. It’s Willoughby Tucker’s “American Teenager,” a pop anthem crowd pleaser delivered with a mischievous wink. In it, Ethel fixates on Holly Reddick, a fellow classmate, with envy and intrigue, imagining—or maybe intuiting—that she’s interested in Willoughby.
Like a true ’80s girl, Holly’s “got her hair up to God,” “her nails are heartbreak red because she’s a bad motherfucker,” and she wears some cut-off jean shorts that really show off her assets. Ethel’s got some cattier observations, too: “They say she looks just like her momma before the drugs.” Anyway, the whole point is that Holly is kind of—no very—slutty, and Ethel views the whole Holly package with a mixture of horror, fascination, and admiration. As one naturally does with the town harlot.
The album then takes an introspective turn with the folky, bluegrass-tinged “Nettles,” a sun-dappled meander down country roads and winding creeks with banjo, fiddle, organ, and lap steel. We learn that Willoughby, though idealized by Ethel, has his own sad backstory. The son of an abusive Vietnam vet who soothes his PTSD with drugs, Willoughby works at a factory that’s suffered an explosion, and he’s now in the hospital. As Ethel worries over him, we discover that the two have grown up fast and feral, and that Willoughby is afraid of becoming his father—“That picture on the wall you're scared of looks just like you”—either through drugs, or by one day fighting in yet another pointless war.
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“Willoughby’s Interlude” begins with muffled TV in the background, and a sleepy, pulsating darkness reminiscent of “Punish” on Perverts that expands and retreats. There’s a heartbeat quality to it, a feeling of being inside something living and breathing, that’s not entirely unpleasant.
“Dust Bowl” is beautiful, languid slowcore, and an intimate glimpse at the relationship between Willoughby and Ethel. She refers to him as “pretty boy / natural blood-stained blonde,” ostensibly due to the abuse by his father or the accident at the factory. Between shimmery guitar riffs and piano swells, Ethel recounts their date-nights tenderly: “Drive in, slasher-flick again / Feeling me up as a porn star dies / He’s watching me instead.” But she also admits to “Cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam” and laments missed opportunities, telling Willoughby, “You’d be a writer / If he didn’t leave all his hell for you.”
“A Knock At The Door” features a lo-fi, old-timey sensibility, with acoustic fingerpicking, charming fret squeaks, and Anhedönia’s voice taking on an innocent, almost ’50s-sounding quality. For anyone familiar with both artists, the track seems like a deliberate, reverent nod to Anhedönia’s friend and mentor Nicole Dollanganger. The song is filled with an existential dread, where Ethel is afraid of everything, and Willoughby is moving through life with a flat detachment.
The next instrumental track, “Radio Towers,” is another piece strongly reminiscent of the pink noise-tinged Perverts, and we stumble through a dark and pulsing soundscape punctuated by beeps that might be Willoughby’s heart monitor in the hospital. It’s meditative, wholly enveloping, and itchingly ominous.
Taking a turn for the worst, “Tempest” details a night a tornado hits the town of Shady Grove, and, coincidentally, Willoughby’s biggest fear is the weather. For some reason, possibly due to an argument, Ethel leaves him alone on this night, and the song is told from Willoughby’s perspective. It’s unclear whether Willoughby survives the storm, but he speaks to Ethel from a place of anger: “Do you swing from your neck / With the hope someone cares?” The song convincingly mimics a violent storm with big, booming drums, velvety layered harmonies, and swelling synths.
In much the same way Preacher’s Daughter ends with a summation, where Ethel reflects on her harrowing ordeal from beyond the grave, the electric guitar-driven “Waco, Texas” ends Willoughby Tucker with Ethel meditating on the doomed nature of her and Willoughby’s love. Whether he’s died or simply left her, it’s clear that their separate but shared traumas have had a devastating impact. It’s a song of gutted grief: “Save me from another late night of red eyes / But then the morning comes / You were there looking for me but I / I was gone, turned my back for a moment and / You had fallen apart.”
This final track’s title and theme borrows from the 1993 Waco siege, involving David Koresh and his cult, the Branch Davidians. “Eventually, the real world comes knocking and everything goes up in flames,” Anhedönia explained. “I just like the parallels of their relationship and the events of the Branch Davidians. Ethel sees him [Willoughby] as being this beautiful, enamoring God and she’s deeply in love with him, but in the end she realizes he’s just a broken boy and they’re both too far gone.”
The release of Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You marks the end of Anhedönia’s record deal with Dr. Luke’s Prescription Songs, and on her next album she hopes to go independent. As she’s been planning since she was struck with the idea for Preacher’s Daughter, Anhedönia will now leave the story of Ethel Cain behind and explore the world of Ethel’s mother, Vera, in a different era.
Meanwhile, on a truly sunny note, as she was recording Willoughby Tucker, Anhedönia met a trucker named Austin, a preacher’s son from Mississippi who was passing through Florida. They bonded over their shared love of the musician Grouper, and Anhedönia found herself contemplating a relationship, something she hadn’t had time for since Preacher’s Daughter. She and Austin finally made it official right after she finished Willoughby. “It’s about, Is it possible to find love in this place with a kind of person that you want to fall in love with?” she told New York magazine. “But a lot of these country boys are more open-minded than you think.”
Notable Tracks: “Fuck Me Eyes” | “Janie” | “A Knock At The Door” | “Nettles”
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