Hayden Anhedönia, the singer-songwriter often called Ethel Cain, attracts from an encyclopedic trove of cultural references for her work, stirring them right into a Southern Gothic brew that feels uniquely her personal. However lengthy earlier than the alt-rock visionary started constructing worlds together with her albums Preacher’s Daughter and Willoughby Tucker, I’ll At all times Love You, she was getting misplaced in these conjured by others.
“I used to be a large reader as a toddler,” Anhedönia, who’s 27, writes in an e mail the day after wrapping the North American leg of her Willoughby Tucker Ceaselessly Tour. “I used to be extraordinarily into the escapism of fantasy, so sequence like Redwall and Eragon have been my bread and butter,” she explains.
These books helped occupy the large thoughts of a small-town lady from Perry, Florida, who grew up surrounded by huge stretches of forests and swampland—an environment she’s evoked onstage with haunting fog, tree branches, and a cross-shaped pulpit. “I keep in mind being so painfully bored on a regular basis, so there was nothing I wished extra throughout the day than for everybody to fall asleep so I might flip my little flashlight on and browse till 4 a.m.”
As an grownup, Anhedönia’s life stays, in some methods, suspended between fiction’s fantasy and the bodily world. “I’ve at all times mentioned I’ve one foot wholly faraway from actuality always, however I prefer it that manner,” she says of residing her life half as Hayden, half as Ethel. “I really feel like I run parallel to so many narratives in my very own head, like my very own true mirror is cracked and displays my true self again at me in numerous other ways.”
She thinks she’d like to write down a guide herself at some point—ultimately. “It can take me some time,” she warns. “It’s exhausting to know what to say when you’ll be able to say something! I’ve to seek out my narrative type and the angle I need to take, however when the second is correct, I’ll transfer ahead with it.”
Whereas she says she isn’t an enormous reader on tour—“I largely sleep all day, daily or lie nonetheless at midnight simply to fight the extraordinary overstimulation of all of it”—books have considerably helped form her stay present, in addition to her pursuit of the “simplicity of mindfulness and presence” on the street.