Ethel Cain Fears No Darkness

Midday light beams in through stained glass, illuminating a realm that, depending on where you look, could belong to an ancient church lady or a ghoulish goth teen. Inhabitants include a stuffed bunny in a dress, an angelic white teddy bear, and a black-eyed doll that just might snap to life and suffocate you while you’re asleep. A crucifix hangs on one wall, a rip saw on another. A Holy Bible sits next to a thrift-store novel about a mass murderer called Shadow of Cain. There’s a deer skull on the dresser and a deer foot under the bed. All of the furniture looks at least a hundred years old, and haunted. “Not pictured is my crazy dead cicada collection,” says Hayden Anhedönia, breezily, wrapping up a tour of her bedroom over Zoom one afternoon in March.

She then steps through a doorway into an open space with even more stained glass and pews and an altar. It is the sanctuary of the converted 19th-century church in rural Indiana that Anhedönia currently calls home. She moved all the way from her native Florida into the 6,238 square-foot, $950 a month rental with three friends last summer, after seeing a listing online. “It felt like it was meant for me,” she says as she sits down in front of the altar.

 

Though Anhedönia was raised in a tight-knit Southern Baptist community—her dad was a deacon, and she and her mom sang in the choir—at this point, the 23-year-old’s relationship with religion is complicated. She left the church at 16, a few years after she was first ostracized for being gay, and a few years before she would come out as a transgender woman and start making harrowing music under the name Ethel Cain. She insists that her choice to live in a former place of worship—and to sometimes explore the nightmarish side of Christianity in her work—was made not out of spite but rather in the spirit of reclamation.

“Everything I do through my art is a way to get my thumb on top of what’s happened to me in the past, because now I’m in control and I can’t be hurt by it again,” she says, a slight drawl peeking through a tone that’s both disarming and determined. “So for me, living here, I can walk around the sanctuary and there’s no bad vibes. It’s this weird, bittersweet comfort. It’s just me and the quiet.”

Well, maybe not just the quiet. Early on in our conversation, Anhedönia, an avowed horror movie fan and supernatural skeptic, casually mentions how the church doors will lock and unlock themselves when no one is around, and how her fluffy black cat Agatha seems to have the ability to teleport into the sanctuary at night, when the room is completely closed off. There was also that time she glanced into one of her antique mirrors and saw a spirit on her bed staring back at her. “I looked over, and she wasn’t there,” Anhedönia recalls, scooping out a gold cross necklace from underneath her top. “She kind of looked like me.”

For this interview, Anhedönia originally planned to put on an old white dress, heels, and Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds perfume, to gather her cat onto her lap, light a few candles, and embody her spooky alter ego, Ethel Cain. But she mixed up the time and didn’t have a chance to prepare. “Instead, you’re talking to Hayden,” she says sheepishly. “So hi.”

She’s in her pandemic best—a dirt brown sweatshirt covered in images of leaves and tree bark, and pajama bottoms dotted with skulls—her hair pulled away from her face with a scrunchie, exposing a ring of tiny tattoos lining the top of her forehead. Though her music floats along a mood of dreamy doom, her unflinching lyrics detail scenes of self-harm, toxic sex, and hopeless decrepitude, and her very active Twitter feed (which she refers to as her “ADHD ramblings”) is filled with scary-funny bon mots like “all u need to know about me is that i was the girl in middle school who wanted to fuck slenderman,” Anhedönia is nothing but polite during our chat. She starts a story about a pivotal acid trip she took in the woods last year with something of a disclaimer: “I don’t even know if I can say this on here…” And she loves using the word “funky” to describe everything from her sheltered religious upbringing to a Tallahassee house she once lived in that was situated in the middle of a car lot and crawling with every insect imaginable. “The quintessential Florida experience,” she quips.

As far as where Hayden Anhedönia begins and Ethel Cain ends, exactly, it’s still something she’s working out. “Ethel is not a separate character as much as a chunk of my life that I cut off to make her own entity, because it was getting to a point where she was taking me over,” Anhedönia explains. “But she’s also my role model in a way, because she’s what I want to be.” Anhedönia began releasing a string of wispy songs and EPs under the moniker two years ago, sounding at times like a slowed and reverb version of her teen idol Florence Welch, or Lana Del Rey under the spell of Grouper. Her forthcoming EP, Inbred—which, like her other releases thus far, she wrote, recorded, produced, and mixed almost entirely on her own—expands Ethel Cain’s stylistic range considerably. Whether she’s offering power ballad perfection on “Michelle Pfeiffer,” epic folk-pop on the eight-and-a-half-minute “God’s Country,” or unsettling grunge on the title track, an aura of eerie grandeur, along with Anhedönia’s versatile vocals, keeps everything bound together.

She describes Ethel as no-nonsense, intimidating, dominant—a woman in control. “Nothing can happen to her that she doesn’t want to happen. You can’t catch her lacking, I suppose.” She clears her throat before adding, “I’m also bipolar so I’m constantly flip-flopping between stuff. Who knows, I might have a manic episode that makes me scrap her later down the line and go by a completely new name. I can never tell you for sure.”

Hayden Silas Anhedönia was born on March 24, 1998, and grew up in a woodsy small town called Perry along the Florida Panhandle. The oldest of four kids, she describes her childhood as simple: riding around on the four-wheeler, digging for crawdads in the creek, picking sand spurs out of her feet. “We were just total little shits, but it was fun,” she says of her fellow homeschooled Baptist kids. But she always felt like the odd one out. She was treated differently by her friends’ parents, and wasn’t allowed to go on sleepovers at their houses. “Everywhere I went, I felt like I was in a glass bubble; nobody could see me, but I could see them.”

When she was 12, she told her mom she liked boys, and remembers the feeling of shame that went along with it. “I was the spawn of Satan to most people,” she says. “The first person who told me that I wasn’t going to hell when I died was my therapist that my parents forced me to get when I was 16.” Everyone pigeonholed her as gay, though she remembers thinking, That doesn’t really fit me. “As I got older, I found out there were other options,” she says, “and it made sense.”

Even in her early teens, she wasn’t allowed to go on the internet, listen to non-Christian music, or pick out her own clothes. To escape her religious community, which she now describes as “cult-y” and “psychotic,” she invented elaborate fantasies in her own head. They were, she says, “the only thing keeping me from not having a single person on the planet who believed in me.” When she was 13, she started imagining what it would be like to live the life of a successful singer à la Florence, one who resides in a mansion, goes on tour, and does interviews. “That fanatical delusion was definitely the stepping stone, and I’m just stubborn enough to have actually tried to make it happen.”

After shutting down emotionally and gritting her teeth through most of her teen years, she moved out of her parents’ house at 18 and started making music for real the following year. By then, she had been identifying as non-binary on the low for a while. “I was too scared to come out as a trans woman ’cause I was dreading the thought of having to come out for a second time after how it went the first time,” she says. In 2018, right before she turned 20, Anhedönia shaved her head and told herself, “I’m going to be a boy, and my family is going to love me, and I’m going to make them proud.” But afterwards, she never felt more miserable. She publicly came out as trans on Facebook on her 20th birthday. “There were no more band-aids to rip off, no more secrets. It was so liberating.”

Since then, she’s only stepped further out of the shadows in her art and life. She started collecting a small but devout fan base including likeminded musical outcasts Nicole Dollanganger and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal. Rapper-singer and songwriter-for-hire lil aaron, who features on “Michelle Pfeiffer,” connected Anhedönia with L.A.’s Prescription Songs, and she signed a publishing and label deal with the music company early last year that includes her own imprint, Daughters of Cain. Though Prescription Songs is owned by tainted superproducer Dr. Luke, and typically helps put together megahits like Doja Cat’s “Say So” and Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now,” Anhedönia insists she has full autonomy over her work. “It’s 100 percent my creative process,” she says. “I don’t want to work with someone like Capitol or Atlantic who’s going to cram me down into a box.”

Sitting in the sanctuary, surrounded by hanging lanterns and colored glass, Anhedönia looks at peace. After recounting her past detail by detail, she sits up straight and surveys just how far she’s come. “I’m having a good time being exactly who I am now,” she says. “I know how to put my foot down. I’m ready to be in the light regardless of how other people feel. This is Ethel Cain. This is Hayden Silas Anhedönia. This is what’s going on.” At that, she allows herself a small, satisfied smile.

Hayden Anhedönia: In Florida, I spend most of my time either in the woods by myself or in parks in the middle of the night where there’s nobody anyway, so it didn’t really affect my immediate life for a while. I’m very ADHD, and there’s just a lot going on in my head all the time. It’s very loud, very constant: work, music, friends, everything going on in the world. So being out in nature is just a chance for me to catch my breath.

But I’ve been going crazy since moving to Indiana last summer, because there’s nowhere to go walking. It’s all cornfields, and you can’t trespass. Last night, we were taking photos in a bunch of abandoned places, a pig farm, an old barn. We drove to an asylum a couple of hours from my house. We weren’t going in, but we hopped the fence and walked just a couple yards to get some photos in front of it. Then a cop came around the corner and was like, “No trespassing.” He was a total asshole, and we all went down to the station. So we have to show up in court next month, and I was like, “I can’t, I have music videos to shoot, damn it!” I can’t wait to be back down South.

It’s one of those things where it’s fun until you realize how scary it was. All the crazy shit that you hear about Christians in the media is not an exaggeration. As you get older, you start to look back and realize how weird it was that God is always watching. One of my core memories of being a child was being scared to go to the bathroom alone, because I thought God was watching me go potty, because God sees everything you do. It’s like the Elf on the Shelf taken to a psychotic religious level. It creates a lot of paranoia and guilt in you. I still have paranoia now. If I’m changing in my bedroom, I feel like someone’s watching through my window. I feel like I’m never truly alone.

I have a weird relationship with putting religion in my art. I’m so far removed from it now, but considering that’s really all I knew for my whole life, it’s definitely the main source of inspiration. Looking back on it from the outside now, it’s a cult, but I’m very fascinated by the psychology of cults.

My mom would play Gregorian chants a lot, so it was just that very smooth, soft choir voice. I really love that cerebral type of vocal where it’s ethereal and almost cooing. I want my singing voice to be almost like a lullaby—even when it’s powerful, you feel comforted by it. And no matter what I’m singing about, I want it to feel like I’m singing to you specifically. My mom and grandmother used to wake me up in the morning by singing to me when I was a kid, and it was just the most comfort I’ve ever felt in my whole life. That’s what I want my voice to be. Even if I’m singing about something rough, we’re here together, so it’s not dangerous.

It’s almost like different characters in my head. The low voice is very dominant and powerful and controlling, then when the vocals are higher I feel more at the mercy of what I’m singing about. My voice is naturally higher. I have a hormone imbalance, so when I hit puberty, it really didn’t go anywhere. I’ve pretty much retained the same range that I’ve had my whole life, which I’m kind of mad about, because I love when women sing as low as they can, where it’s almost gravelly. It’s one of the most beautiful things on the planet. I wish more women did it. I wish my voice was even deeper. I wish I could growl at people.

Oh, one hundred percent. Trans women have a very specific makeup in their brain and their body that makes them the way that they are, and it all comes into play with Ethel Cain. She’s tall. She’s got sharp features. She’s got a low voice. She’s got broad shoulders. She looks loving and soft but she also looks like she could rip your heart out with her bare hands. That’s how I feel in my everyday life.

Obviously, trans women should be more accepted in society just for the fact that they are human beings. Beyond that, trans women offer such a unique perspective in music. Once we’ve moved past a point where we no longer feel like we have to fit in we can fully start embracing the unique points of view that we see life through, and that’s when I think trans art will really hit a peak. Trans women have something so beautiful to offer, and I love working with other trans artists. Their art just hits in a way that nobody else’s really does. I don’t really think that being trans is one of the most interesting things about me, but it’s definitely a unique quality that adds to the pile, and I love it.

My head was definitely in the wall when I made it. I had been out of a really dark period of my life for about a year and a half, and all at once I started to process a lot of different stuff: from my childhood, from my teenage years, from the couple of years on my own as an adult. It felt like I was relying on those experiences to make art. I was perpetuating the tortured-artist gimmick and I was like, “You cannot get healthy or heal, or else you will not be able to create good art anymore.” And I’d been listening to this song by Title Fight, “Head in the Ceiling Fan,” which has the most beautiful guitar I’ve ever heard. It just struck me to my core. It felt like the end of the movie, after everything bad had happened to the main character, and then you’re just driving away with that blank stare out the window, like, “What the hell have I just gone through the past 21 years of my life?” That’s how I felt when I listened to that Title Fight song.

So I looped the guitar at the beginning of it and literally wrote “Head in the Wall” in 10 minutes on my bedroom floor. I was taking all of that trauma and giving it a personified terrible lover, like, “I’ll never be able to leave you until we’re both dead.” I just kept writing verse after verse, there was no chorus, no real structure to the song. It was this exclamation of frustration. “Head in the Wall” is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. I listen to it often to this day.

When I was 19, my mom called me one day and was like, “Don’t freak out, but there’s a school shooter threat at the high school, and your sister’s there right now.” I was terrified. I just remember being like, “Is my sister going to die today?”

When I was writing it, it was me and my thoughts. I was in my room here in January. It was the darkest part of winter in Indiana—cold, brutal, awful. And if I’m alone for too long, I start to get in my head about things I don’t like getting in my head about. There’s definitely a very personal frustration on “Inbred.” Just kind of recalling shit from childhood that you didn’t really understand at the time and now it comes back and you’re like, “Whoa.” I had all this stuff running through my head about different times that people in my life failed me or did things they weren’t supposed to do. And I was angry. I was like, “You’ve put me in this place that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life trying to get out of, and I don’t know if I ever will.”

A lot of times in order to not feel things so strongly, I have to put them into songs. It’s like an exorcism: Let me pull it out, put it in a box, lock it up, and not have to deal with it anymore because now it’s happening to the girl singing the song and not me.

It’s been kind of a 180 with them. They’re completely different people than they were when I was growing up. They’re still Christians, for all intents and purposes, but I think they just got exhausted with it and were like, “We will be Christians from home.”

My dad’s not really in touch with my art, but he’s also a total country boy who married an artsy-fartsy, Ms. Frizzle-type woman. My mother is supportive of me and my artwork now. I send her the music that she calls “mommy-friendly,” because she doesn’t like it when I swear or talk about graphic stuff. She has a nail salon in my hometown and shows all of her clients “Michelle Pfeiffer.” She loves Ethel Cain.

The way that I perceive my childhood is not shared with my mom. She thinks she was just trying to parent me the way that she best saw fit, but for me, it was like I was being tortured. She’s like, “Why do you write about such graphic stuff?” And I’m like, “Mom, I’m a 23-year-old trans woman living in modern day America, bad shit’s going to happen to me.” Life is very raw and visceral, and it’s almost harder for me to live through rose-colored glasses. So I’m going to write about what really happens.

Lord. I’m almost done with it. Over this summer stuff will start going out, and people will start seeing the beginning stages of what I hope to be the next great American record. I’ve been working on it since I was 19, and it’ll probably be out this time next year. I’m a total perfectionist. It’s the ultimate culmination of all my interests, this American gothic, country, rock, folk, alternative record. It’s two and a half hours long. The shortest song on the album is five and a half minutes. It’s ridiculous. All the songs on it mean more to me than any other songs I’ve ever written. It’s this massive Armageddon of an album. I’ve got visuals coming forward. I want to write a book for it. It follows a linear story, because the origin of the album was a movie script, but I couldn’t make the movie the way that I wanted to. Making a feature film of it is the end goal.

It is Ethel Cain at its core, so I’m excited to finish this bitch and put it out because she’s killing me. It’s the glue that’s holding me together as a person, and once it’s done, I’m going to have to go out into the wilderness and find a new purpose.