to love me is to suffer me
ethel cain's "nettles" and anticipatory grief: an analysis
In a world saturated with commercialized pop ballads and sanitized indie wannabes, there is Ethel Cain. I first discovered “nettles” as a staticky demo on Soundcloud (as did many other daughters of Cain I may add) via one of my dear friends. It was short, just around two minutes with little to no production and Hayden’s bare vocals, but it soon echoed in my head for days on end.
The haunting of Ethel’s one true, pure love bellows throughout Preachers Daughter, and Willoughby Tucker is seemingly there to greet her in her ascent when she meets her dire end at the end of the album, but not much is known about the mysterious boy that got away. There are many theories in bottomless fan forums about the fate of dear Willoughby— some think he took his own life, others that he died in war or tragic accident, or simply a bad breakup in which he ran away from their small town. One thing is for certain however, Ethel’s role as an often unreliable narrator leaves his disappearance disorienting and foggy. In her reflection dedicated to her lover, “House in Nebraska,” Ethel mournfully admits “And it hurts to miss you, but it’s worse to know // That I’m the reason you won’t come home.” Without closure, we enter a new storyline with little to go on but yearning remembrance.
After nearly 200 streams in the days since the single’s release, I wanted to organize my thoughts and analysis into one piece that includes the Preacher’s Daughter timeline, imagery and foreshadowing, and the inner psychology of a love that was seemingly lost too soon. And since I’m impatient for August, this is the first installment of a later series about the album as a whole!
One of my favorite easter eggs from the released version of “Nettles” is the story behind much of the production— specifically the synths. After watching a video of Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti explaining how he created the infamous “Laura Palmer’s Theme” (a moody instrumental that featured prominently in the show by interpreting scenes described out loud by David Lynch on the keyboard), Hayden tracked down the very same synths used on its soundtrack to feature on the album.
Since my most recent rewatch of Twin Peaks following Lynch’s death, I’ve come to realize just how many parallels there are between the album’s protagonist and the likes of Laura Palmer. For one, both beautiful young women thought to be known and beloved in their respective communities: a source of purity taken too soon. Both Ethel and Laura are secretly hiding a secret double life of trauma and duality, leading to them being lured by a predatory force (Ethel's Isaiah and Laura's BOB) to a gruesome demise. Preacher’s Daughter’s eighth track, “Gibson Girl,” could practically be Laura describing her time working at the Velvet Room/One Eyed Jack's, with passages in her diary that read very similarly to some of the lines in that song, but I digress!
A decent amount of my analysis will be influenced by Hayden’s wonderful Genius annotations, so I wanted to start from the beginning and work my way through each verse.
“Life’s a race,” a phrase abused by many to dismiss hardship, is a metaphor used to describe one’s life as an existential competition. To think ahead to your next move is to still be slow in the game of life. Both Ethel and Willoughby are innocents on the brink of a community that can offer them little solace, so the “race” to grow up is the only protection that both souls hold and initially bonds them together. To the intellect of Hayden’s remarks, Ethel and Willoughby were constantly pushing forward, prematurely aging themselves under the weight of their circumstances.
“This yearning is ironic in nature; by rushing into adulthood, they bypass the security and care that might have saved them; trauma accelerates time and robs people of the slowness that growing up should be. For Willoughby especially, this race ends in disaster; foreshadowed by his injury mentioned in the following line.”
It’s also important to note that the two seemingly grew up together, rather than meeting as teenagers or young adults, meaning they were friends/ classmates/ playmates before they were ever lovers.
This is where reflections of Ethel’s anticipatory grief begin to surface. Throughout the song, she is constantly reliving scenarios of losing Willoughby to a force foreign to herself— as if she’s bargaining that it was the cruel world that took her love, not her own action. One of these cinematic scenes is Willoughby returning home drastically injured from some far off war— with references to bullet shrapnel and the presence of a trauma doctor. The specificity of “shrapnel” and “slowing” is representative of just how deeply entrenched she is in these catastrophic thoughts; it’s her grief rehearsing itself before anything has even happened.
A thread from Tumblr that I recently came across also drew parallels to Preacher’s Daughter’s “Thoroughfare,” in which for the first time, Ethel has hope that a future is possible without Willoughby’s companionship, and yet Ethel ends up being brutalized by yet another man who saw her as an object of twisted salvation. The parallel with these lines is obvious: just when sunlight seemed to slither through, it got shut out of the story right away.
The romanticization of violence against women and girls in the name of ‘love’ or ‘desire’ are not unfounded even upon young, isolated Ethel. Unlike sanitized depictions of pretty crying and rescued damsels, Ethel’s reality is brutal and unvarnished: something that cannot be prettified or softened for an audience that has already seen so much of her dehumanization in previous work.
Raised in a deeply religious, conservative and Southern environment, Ethel’s trauma is not only intensely personal but also systemic; the “movies” itself may represent the idealized narratives of suffering she might have been taught to accept or aspire to and such false narratives of redemption and beauty that her background tends to offer; yet her lived reality is far grimmer. To be a devotee of Christ is to accept suffering as an element of God’s plan, and his will for your repentance. The abuse that Ethel will bear witness to her entire life is internalized as an accepted part of the relationship to the divine power.
It’s clear that Ethel’s anticipatory grief had an effect on Willoughby. In my mind, the most realistic theory into his absence is that Ethel simply becomes too much for him: only adding the weight that lies upon him to escape the environment that has suppressed him for so long. In a way, this line can also parallel the outro of another song, “Hard Times.” The overlay of her talking to herself is extremely reminiscent with echos assurance that may never actually materialize: “Tell me a story about how it ends // Where you’re still the good guy, I’ll make pretend.”
To say that someone is “a half of you” is to believe that you are not a whole person, rather a reaction to the thoughts and actions of someone who you co-dependently rely on for a peaceful existence. Whatever is left of Ethel is inextricably tied to Willoughby’s being— losing him means losing a part of herself. She is probably also deeply depressed, relying on her lover to have the will to wake up in the morning at all. Whether from her enduring abuse or her deepening fears of losing the only person who ever understood her, Ethel is a caged bird unable to sing.
“Nettles” as a single ties thematically heavily to another beloved unreleased demo titled “Dust Bowl.” Unlike the latter however, “Nettles” is a representation of soft and vulnerable organisms, evolved to be outwardly painful in self-protection, attempting to grow and survive in a place that makes this difficult: not unlike its namesake plant that commonly grows beneath bellowing trees. More specifically, “where the greenery stings” is a reference to the plant Urtica Dioica (known commonly as the stinging nettle) which produces a painful stinging sensation on contact with the leaves— possibly referencing the lovers’ defense tactics used to protect one another from the oppressive environment they are forced to inhabit in their childhood.
“To love me is to suffer me” has become the line of the entire song, in many ways encompassing the entirety of Ethel’s mindset towards the fleeting love she once held dear. She believes truly that her love is a death sentence to Willoughby, inevitably becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy to a chain reaction of Ethel’s demise and surrender to a predatory mystery. Like the stinging nettles, Ethel worries that if Willoughby gets too close, he will hurt himself in the process.
The so-called ‘auld lang room’ comes from the Scottish phrase “Auld Lang Syne” commonly sung internationally as a New Years hymn, translating loosely to “old long since” or “for old times’ sake.” Not unlike their ‘house in Nebraska,’ Ethel now finds herself lying next to Willoughby, yet she still feels hollow or emotionally mismatched. The second line of the stanza refers to Willoughby’s efforts to tell Ethel that he is okay, he is safe, he is alive, happy and not in pain following his injury. Ethel, knowing that these are lies he makes up to keep her from worrying about him.
My favorite line in the song, however, is “You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing.” A direct foreshadow, Ethel acknowledges, in part self-destructively, that their love had been doomed from the start. Willoughby, a boy at the end of the twentieth century on his way to becoming a man, will handle his pain the way he believes men should. He’ll go out into the world and fight his battles, confronting his demons by force in a way that Ethel could never afford. Hayden’s previous album Preacher’s Daughter takes place five years later to the events of the song setting it in 1991, possibly implying that Willoughby went off to fight in the Gulf War as a way of escaping both Ethel and his overall predicament.
Shifting partially to Willoughby’s psyche, it’s evident that he fears becoming like the men that have hurt Ethel: more generally the kind of violent, tortured men that he is too often exposed to within his own family and community. He is perhaps violent, broken or emotionally distant; yet that resemblance is undeniable — no matter how much he tries to avoid becoming that person, the cycle of generational trauma is closing in. Even the National Institute of Health has done extensive research on religious trauma survivors and their behavior involving that of domestic abuse, with strong correlations often found among evangelical, rural Christian communities. Additionally, military-related trauma is heavily alluded to in “Dust Bowl” with references to a portrait of Willoughby’s father: “Smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam.”
The role of gender envy within Ethel’s reflections of Willoughby come into play in the next couple of lines, with her yearning to be able to express her anger in pain in the the perceived emotional clarity and physical freedom boys are often allowed when expressing distress through anger or violence. She sees the same feelings in her lover, but knows that unlike Willoughby, her expressions of her trauma are culturally-expected to be hidden away and bottled. Ethel doesn’t necessarily yearn to be a boy, but instead wants to be valued for her intense reaction in a manner that her community perceives her as strong rather than broken. In her annotations, Hayden writes:
“Gendered envy is seen here, not of being a boy, per se, but rather to access the same privileges of suffering: Ethel yearns for the right to be visibly angry, reckless, or damaged without it being pathologized or romanticized; wanting to bleed and hurt the way boys do alludes to her craving to feel raw and seen; rather than quietly suffer under the burden of emotional repression.”
Even among their gendered differences, the world outside their little bubble weighs heavily on both of them. While Willoughby is obviously struck with the burden of knowing the life that awaits them post-graduation, Ethel is more than eager to shut it out and not acknowledge it in favor of her own fantasies.
A nearly repeat in its first half, the chorus then strays into the fantasies that Ethel still bargains will come one day— in life or in death. She sees Willoughby as her only way out, even in death, and as an escape from everything in her life that’s led up to her finding him again. Like many little girls, she imagines the day they are married and have their own piece of paradise, far from the rest of the world, where she will finally feel safe in a way that ensures her security.
Like earlier, any glimmer of sunshine is broken by the reality of their situation: whether this song is set in the present of adolescence or as a reflection in the later event of Preacher’s Daughter where Ethel seeks escape from a far-darker reality. From Ethel’s perspective, when we are trapped in broken dreams we inherit, in a house built by others, with their rules, their prayers, their punishments. And when pain becomes routine, silence becomes a cradle.
As the song closes at just around eight and a half minutes, Ethel envisions her and her lover newly-wed, at home in the house that is only theirs, surrounded by the same feelings of countless stories relayed onto them of when their own parents were young in love. She imagines having that kind of love, where emotional unavailabilities and insecurities are a thing of the past. In the end, Ethel’s perpetual state of anticipatory grief overshadows her mere desire to be at peace with the only person who was ever close enough to pass the nettles without retreating or flinching— unconditionally.
this is amazing and really helped me understand and appreciate Hayden's genius lyricism.