Ethel, in the story, is the 20 year old unreliable narrator who runs away from home after dealing with multiple tragedies: the unspoken events between her and her lover Willoughby Tucker, intergenerational and religious trauma, and abuse. She meets lovers throughout the album, leading her through more misfortune, which eventually leads her to her downfall.
However, this new single ‘Nettles’ , is the first introduction we have to what really happened between her and Willoughby, years prior. Anhedonia announced via Instagram that her upcoming sophomore album, ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’, will take place 5 years before the events of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ . In 1986, “the year everything changed forever”, in the fictional universe of Shady Grove, Alabama, we will hear the story of Ethel Cain and Willoughby Tucker falling in love. A track Anhedonia calls “a moment of sweetness”, ‘Nettles’ takes us back to the time before everything went wrong.
Slowly, the song opens to a droning sound, like waking up from a hazy nap in the late afternoon. Anhedonia used the same synthesizers as Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti on the song's intro, adding a sonically distinct haunting atmosphere. There’s a broken fiddle, a pedal steel, and a gentle guitar, as we build up for about a minute and a half. Ethel’s voice, angelic but tortured, breaks through: “We were in a race to grow up / Yesterday, through today / til tomorrow”. For Ethel and the events of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’, she can’t seem to grow up fast enough. She wants to get out of her hometown where she feels no safety and has had to age so quickly. The race she references is the metaphor we all feel as teenagers, striving to feel accomplished right away when our whole lives lay before us. On the Genius page, Anhedonia herself has made several annotations to the official lyrics, including, that “this yearning is ironic in nature”, as both Willoughby and Ethel have rushed into adulthood without the comforts of a secure and caring childhood.
Ethel begins to hyperfixate on Willoughby’s death, whether that is from an accident or to a war, we are unaware of it. It is at this point in the beautiful love ballad we learn that Ethel is beginning to lose herself to her anxieties. She hopes that her suffering will have all been worth it if they make it out of it together: “Time passes slower in the flicker of the hospital light / I pray the race is worth the fight”. She describes her life as ugly, and how she would never hurt others the way they have hurt her, consumed by her thoughts.
As the chorus begins, it feels like sunlight is finally coming through the trees in a dark forest. And suddenly we are there with Ethel and Willoughby, as he reassures her they are going to be okay, “Tell me all the time not to worry / And think of all the time I'll / I'll have with you / When I won't wake up on my own”. The soft steel pedal returns as the motif of her ironic yearning for everything that Willoughby says to be the truth.
The second verse introduces the theme of the nettles themselves, a plant with prickly leaves and stems, representing how Ethel compares herself to them and that she too, is difficult to love, "To love me is to suffer me", and I believe it". Still, she fantasizes of running away together, “When I lay with you in that auld lang room / Wishin' I was the way you say that you are”. She is referencing their private getaway in ‘House in Nebraska’, where they had romanticized a new life out of Alabama. The “auld lang”, meaning “for old times sake”, is their inside joke, their secret together. Ethel wishes she had the strength and force like Willoughby, “You'll go fight a war, I'll go missing” as she fears she will retreat into her pain instead of facing it, and even foreshadows her own kidnapping in ‘Preacher’s Daughter’. Her vocals are pained here, as she knows she can’t face the world the way Willoughby does, and is afraid she will end up losing.
Ethel yearns to manifest these thoughts physically and emotionally “I wanna bleed, I wanna hurt the way that boys do”. Anhedonia annotates that Ethel “yearns for the right to be visibly angry, reckless, or damaged without it being pathologized or romanticized” like women so often are when they express themselves. But in the end, Ethel is more eager than ever to shut it all out in favor of the delusion of being happy with Willoughby, the only person she's ever loved: "Cause, baby, I've never seen brown eyes look so blue".
Once again back in the chorus, the instruments have built up into a full swinging folk song. Ethel begins to imagine a wedding with Willoughby and that all of their suffering, the ‘race’, the ‘fight’, has been worth something. “It was all for you”, she sings, lovesick and unwavering, “Think of us inside / Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who”, their teenage insecurities fading away.
The instrumental at the end is nothing short from magnetic, as we feel we can perfectly picture that paradise with Ethel too. It feels magical, and we understand why she would want to live delusionally. However, she still reminds herself, “To love me is to suffer me”, knowing everything comes to an end just like the song does. Anhedonia is a visionary. And not only is ‘Nettles’ a song that makes you want to cry, but it makes you feel like you are there with her, wanting to live in your own beautiful make believe delusions and avoidances, and sing along for the hope of a better future.
‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ is set to release on August 8th, with pre-save options here. Ethel Cain is also touring the U.S. and Europe starting this August with tickets available here.
Molly Spencer
Image: Dollie Kyarn
