music may: ethel cain.

anybody wanna talk about cannibalism??

this edition of the abbiestack is a part of music may, a monthlong series where i write about some of my favorite artists.

i’m sure you’ve noticed i don’t listen to a ton of ~new music. and by that i mean, like, brand new music. up-to-the-minute music. i don’t know, i come into things slow. the closest i tend to get is a couple years off. “decide,” which dedicated readers know i’m obsessed with, was a 2022 release, and so was “preacher’s daughter” by ethel cain.

ethel cain gets all the credit for getting me to listen to music again. i’d heard of her through the internet, tumblr and shit, but i’d never listened to her. and then it was like, okay, why not? the first song i listened to was “a house in nebraska.” i didn’t love it. i thought it had atmosphere and shit, but it didn’t leave a big impression on me. i don’t remember how it happened, exactly, but a few weeks after that, i was like okay, let’s give the rest of this a shot. i picked through “preacher’s daughter,” double-clicking titles i thought seemed interesting, or eyeballing the total amount of plays to see what was most popular on spotify. “american teenager” grabbed my ear the hardest because it’s the most radically different from the rest of the songs on the album, albeit purposefully. i listened to it a couple times. i liked it enough. and then, like, one evening i just… double-clicked “family tree (intro)” and let it rip.

man, that first month, i listened to “preacher’s daughter” a million times. easily. i begged my phantom limb, megan, to listen to it. “you don’t understaaaand,” i said, “you have to listen to ‘hard times’!” i wanted to infect everyone with it. i wanted to share. i couldn’t remember the last time i was so desperate to share music. maybe not since middle school. i felt crazy.

it has the DNA of the kind of thing i always favor. a folksy heart, though it’s ornately decorated with other stuff, with beautiful things. anecdotal lyrics. god. female hysteria and anguish (“live through this,” you are imprinted on my heart and my head and my bones and my everything). really, when you sit down and study it, it’s no surprise i love it. her voice is so humble, to me, the kind that i like—everything is the kind that i like, and that’s why i like it so much.

so, i’m a fake fan. i’m always a fake fan. i’ve only listened to “preacher’s daughter,” a million times, and “inbred” once, and her cover of “everytime” which was my favorite britney spears song when i was like twelve. yeah, i’ll plumb her modest catalogue sometime, without a doubt, but i haven’t yet. i’m slow, i like to take my time with these things. it’s one of the few gifts i give myself, loving an artist but being so slow that i don’t waste it all at once. for right now, i just love “preacher’s daughter,” and the rest will come when it comes. there’s always a right moment for everything, especially music.

kind of a sentence, but i love her deal with cannibalism, too. from an interview with vice: “i think cannibalism itself is crazy and it’s not anything new, but i think there’s a similarity between cannibalism and not being able to get someone that you love close enough to you so you have to literally devour them, and that’s still not close enough. […] i think this new rise of cannibalism in media […] is such an act of devotion, metaphorically.” girl, i AGREE! i was really into the musical “sweeney todd” at a young age, via the tim burton adaptation from 2007. i was a big “special features” person with my DVDs, and there was honestly a shit ton of really nice, super produced ones on my two-disc set. i remember one of the segments talking about cannibalism, and i’ll never have the direct quote, but a producer or crew member or writer or someone was talking about how we get very intimate with each other, but we don’t eat each other. at least, not usually. and i think that planted seeds in my head for seeing cannibalism as something so intimate and devotional, at least in metaphor. should i write about cannibalism?? on the abbiestack?? anyway, what i’m getting at here is that she’s a kindred spirit, in this regard.

favorites:

• “a house in nebraska”

• “hard times”

  • this is the song that makes me ache. honestly, a lot of the songs on this album are a little samey, something leo brought to my attention. there’s a lot of slow builds with cacophonous endings. “hard times” is the softest song, the rawest. it hurts. for me, it picks at something that i’m afraid of, even if the context, the circumstance, isn’t quite the same. her voice is so soft here, so bare, and the music is so gentle that it might as well not be there. it’s confessional.

• “ptolemaea”

  • the song that made me listen to music again. dedicated readers will remember the story of how i played this for leo and said “i want to listen to stuff that sounds like that.” this was the song that rearranged my braincells. the ANGUISH!! the SCREAMING!!! so far in my musical travels, nothing i’ve found has scratched this itch. nothing sounds like this, to me. and nothing ever will, because it has a golden thread wrapped around it now, in my memories and in my heart and in my soul and in my everything. what’s not to love??

• “sun bleached flies”