Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You

Preacher’s Daughter gave Willoughby too heavy a place. He became almost all the good lives Ethel could imagine having. This prequel finally lets the two of them spend real time together, and it made me realize that the love she keeps longing for was never very secure from the start.

Janie puts the story back into a relationship between young people. Friends begin to have new lives, people who were close slowly move apart, and the one left behind may not be able to accept it gracefully. This gives Ethel’s unease a very everyday way in. She hasn’t yet reached those terrible events, and she is already very afraid of being left behind. Hayden hides her voice inside the slowly spreading accompaniment, and many of the words sound a little hesitant.

Willoughby’s Theme is in no hurry to write an introduction for this boy. The instrumental stretches out time, so that before a person has formally appeared, he already has a feeling that belongs to him. This kind of arrangement happens again and again across the album, and themes, interludes and long songs take up a lot of the space. It asks the listener to stay with the characters for a while and feel the waiting and the blank spaces.

Fuck Me Eyes is a clear brightening. The synthesizers carry the color of eighties pop, and the rhythm is easier to follow. But the gaze it writes about is not light. The conspicuous beauty and attraction Holly has mix envy, jealousy and moral judgment together. When a young girl looks at another girl, she is often also measuring how worthy she herself is of being liked. The brightness of this song makes that comparison even clearer.

Nettles is the song I most want to take out on its own and listen to again and again. The texture of the plucked strings and the string section is very soft, the sound has the warmth of wood, and Hayden sings close. She says her fear very specifically, but always has to go around once before she can get near what she really wants to ask. Will you leave me, how long will what you say now count. The gentler the melody, the less sure these questions feel.

I think what she gets most right about first love is that she doesn’t treat trust as something that happens naturally. Liking someone easily makes life suddenly have meaning, but being liked can also bring new fears. The promises in Nettles are very moving, and the listener can still feel that the people making them are still young and actually know nothing about the future.

After Willoughby’s Interlude, Dust Bowl puts the sound further away. The guitars and reverb melt many details together, and the voice seems to arrive from across a distance. The love in this song carries a lot of projection. The two have not really found a way out yet, and already they begin to believe each other can provide some kind of exit. Thinking of the longing in A House in Nebraska later, listening here makes me a little sad. That ideal home may have been carrying too much from the very beginning.

A Knock at the Door gradually loosens the album’s stability. Hayden doesn’t keep using clear narration to tell us what happened. The length of the instrumental passages and the process of the tone growing dark also create information. By Radio Towers, this uncertainty becomes stronger. It is hard to grasp a place to land that lets you feel at ease, and there is no clear rest between songs either.

This is also where I occasionally felt it was hard going when listening to this album. Some of the ambient sounds and long instrumental passages matter a lot to the overall mood, but on their own they may not leave an equally deep impression. In the second half the slow pace continues without a break, and attention easily slides off the lyrics. It needs patience, but patience alone doesn’t guarantee that every minute is equally effective.

Tempest tightens the feeling again. By this point in the relationship, even hearing the other person’s explanation may not clear up the misunderstanding. The more heavily two people need each other, the more easily a silence or a pulling back is understood as not loving. Hayden is very good at writing this kind of situation so that there is no one easy to blame. The hurt has already happened and the love is still there, and that is what makes it hard to deal with.

Waco, Texas closes the album with fifteen minutes, which is really long. It slowly repeats and piles up, letting one thought stay in the music until it is almost unbearable. That overlong attachment is also very fitting here. When a relationship can no longer continue, people still arrange the next day, the next year, even another life for it in their imagination. What wasn’t fulfilled in reality can still be kept for a while in the song.

I don’t think you have to translate every sound effect into plot to have understood this album. Its more direct power comes from its observation of attachment. Ethel holds on to Willoughby, and also holds on to a self that hasn’t fallen apart yet. Later, when she longs for him, what she longs for may also include what she still dared to believe in back then.

So this prequel doesn’t make Preacher’s Daughter any lighter. It gives those old place names and old promises a more specific sound. After knowing how they once loved each other, when I hear Nebraska again, it is harder for me to treat that empty house as merely a sad image.