Preacher’s Daughter

It is hard to explain it with just the word “like”. Some of the sounds are so beautiful I can’t bear to turn them off, and other places make me want to shy away by instinct. Once you know how the story ends, the bright-sounding songs before it change too. American Teenager is still so good to listen to, and Thoroughfare is still so open, but I can no longer fully believe them.

The Ethel here is a character created by Hayden Anhedönia. The album follows her family, her love affairs, her leaving home, and her death, and it writes religion and the living environment of the American South into one person’s experiences. The story itself is very heavy, but what really pulled me in is how each song changes the distance in what you hear. Sometimes she is so close it is like she is talking in your ear, and sometimes the whole band is playing and her voice is still pressed far away.

Family Tree (Intro) first brings a sense of pressure that has already lasted a long time. Low sounds and long, trailing echoes surround the voice, and religion and bloodline both take on a concrete weight here. She hasn’t started telling her own experiences yet, and the place she was born into has already set many things for her. This opening is very short, but it gives everything that happens afterward a source.

American Teenager then suddenly turns bright. The drums push forward, the guitar stretches out, and the chorus is big enough for you to sing along. It uses a pop-rock form that easily makes people believe in youth and the future, yet the lyrics hold the gap left by war, the pressure of religion, and doubt about those promises. What stays with me most is that she still needs this brightness to sing her distrust. A young person’s excitement and disappointment in life are squeezed into the same song, and neither fully wins out.

A House in Nebraska slows the pace down and also hands us the most important memory on the album. Ethel misses her first love, Willoughby, and misses the private space they once had. In her heart that house is more than a place; it keeps the self she once was, who could be needed and could imagine a future.

The piano repeats again and again, the voice is sung very slowly, and the length of over eight minutes makes the longing somewhat stubborn. When the electric guitar finally comes in during the second half, what was held down before comes pouring out. The solo doesn’t explain for her why the relationship ended, it only extends the feeling of still not being able to let go. I think this song has to take this much time, because she can’t work it out, and she is unwilling to jump easily to the next thing.

In Western Nights, the new relationship is already showing violence. Logan brings her danger, and she is still willing to follow him. The song doesn’t announce directly, with an especially fierce arrangement, that this person is a problem. Instead it keeps a slow and intimate way of singing. It is exactly this intimacy that makes people uncomfortable. The listener can already recognize the harm, and she still puts loyalty near the front, even counting being able to bear everything with the other person as part of love.

When Family Tree comes back, the shadow from the opening comes back too. The guitar becomes heavy, and the drums and voice push the song into a larger space. She wants to escape, to start another life, but the language of sin, bloodline, and punishment keeps following her. For me, the power of this song is that leaving is sung with so much effort, and getting free of the past is still so hard.

Hard Times, right after, pulls away almost all the force. Gentle guitar and a soft voice carry the memory of her father’s sexual abuse. This arrangement is harder to listen to than showing the trauma directly with noise. When she speaks of her father she still keeps a child’s need for closeness, and that need did not automatically turn into an easily understood hate just because the harm happened.

I don’t want to read the tenderness in this song as forgiveness for the abuser. What it lets me hear is that a person’s understanding of love may have been scrambled from the very beginning. Her later dependence, self-blame, and tolerance in intimate relationships become even sadder because of this. By this point, the earlier songs have also been reinterpreted once.

Thoroughfare is the song on the album that most easily lets me relax for a moment. The acoustic guitar, harmonica, and increasingly free playing open up the space all at once. Ethel meets Isaiah, goes on the road with him, and is willing to believe a new encounter might bring a different life. The nearly improvised unfolding in the second half of the song is very infectious, and time is no longer used only for enduring, it can start to be enjoyed too.

But put back into the whole album, you hear a dangerous kind of optimism. We can only hear the story Ethel believed at the time. Her excitement is real, but the sense of safety may not be reliable. Hayden doesn’t rush here to remind the listener of the ending. She lets this hope fully hold, which makes the destruction afterward harder to bear.

Gibson Girl then changes where the body sits in the music. The low frequencies get heavy, the beat is sticky, and the seductive voice is placed in an increasingly oppressive environment. In the story Ethel is controlled and forced into the sex trade, so the song’s sensuality cannot easily be taken as freedom. The voice sounds as if it is still trying to keep some initiative, while the space of the sound keeps tightening.

Ptolemaea is where this oppression is at its most extreme. A low male voice, noise, and distorted textures surround her, and the singing gradually turns into a cry for help. That scream is frightening because so much time was spent before it making you wait, and when it finally arrives there is almost no place to retreat to.

I don’t think it is only the song on the album in charge of scaring people. The earlier songs have already established this person’s desires, memories, and fears, and by here the listener knows what is being lost. The horror attaches to someone we already know, which is why it has such force.

August Underground and Televangelism appearing back to back is a key piece of handling on the whole album. The former continues the heavy, murky sound and holds the fear near death in place, while the latter leaves the piano, so that consciousness seems to slowly leave the body. Neither has conventional narrative lyrics, but the story doesn’t pause because of that. The sound itself carries the process of crossing death, and also lets people come out of the tension of Ptolemaea bit by bit.

Only then comes Sun Bleached Flies.

This is the song I prefer most on the whole album. When it arrives, the worst thing has already happened, and the music instead has an openness seen little before. The piano first supports the singing, the drums and guitar gradually come in, and the stacked voices increasingly sound like a shared prayer. The religious language that kept her trapped before has still not left here, only now she can finally say it again from her own position.

God loves you, but not enough to save you.

This line is cruel. Love was once promised, and salvation did not happen. Placed in the story of her already being dead, it especially cannot be lightly passed over. But I like that the song doesn’t spend all its strength on accusation. She remembers the church, and she remembers her family, she knows how she was hurt, and she still cannot peel that life off herself completely.

This makes me feel Sun Bleached Flies is very accurate. A person can be disappointed in a place and still miss its sound. After leaving a certain faith, the familiar way of singing hymns and the rhythm of praying may last longer than the reasoning. So the gospel quality of the song is somewhat contradictory, but very necessary. She is using the way she has known since childhood to deal with things that no one dealt with for her.

The phrases repeating through the middle and later part let the emotion loosen bit by bit. When I get here, I often feel that the things that had to be resisted and proven before have been set aside for a while. The forgiveness in the song still carries pain, and the wounds she suffered are not cancelled. The music gives her a stretch of time in which she can look back, and she finally doesn’t have to keep running forward.

What I can’t bear to leave most is the ending, which goes back to the house in Nebraska. The album has gone through so many places, so much intense sound, and what she finally thinks of is still that one small possibility. If she could have stayed back then, if that relationship could have continued, maybe the days could have been something else.

A House in Nebraska took such a long time earlier that we already know what that house means to her. So here there is almost no need to explain again; the moment it is mentioned, the whole memory comes back. This callback has weight. It lets the seven-minute-plus Sun Bleached Flies stop at last on a concrete wish, and also lets the so-called release keep its regret.

Strangers doesn’t follow this openness straight to an end. It brings us back to the ending where Ethel is killed and eaten, and lets her keep facing the person who hurt her even after death. The cannibalism plot can easily take all the attention, but what I care about more is that she still asks what she was to him. The harm has reached such a degree, and she is still trying to understand whether she was ever loved.

In the second half the guitar and drums expand greatly, the sound nearly swallowing her, and at the end it turns to her mother. This closing makes me feel that the whole album never forgot that she was also just a daughter who couldn’t make it home. Death doesn’t belong only to the killer and victim in the story; it also leaves behind a life that waits for someone who doesn’t come.

The narrative of Preacher’s Daughter is of course very dramatic, and several of the long songs need patience. But most of its length is spent on places worth staying in. A House in Nebraska lets you live inside a memory, Thoroughfare lets you believe in one journey, Ptolemaea blocks the way back, and Sun Bleached Flies slowly opens the view again. Every section of sound changes how we understand Ethel.

What I like best is still the feeling in Sun Bleached Flies of finally being able to look back. She didn’t get the life she originally wanted, but she still remembers where she once wanted to go. After listening, that house stays with me longer than many of the more intense scenes.