Ethel Cain, Preacher's Daughter and The Fact That I’m Literally Just A Girl.
/I want to take some time to rave about how I love Ethel Cain and her PHENOMENAL 2022 album, Preacher’s Daughter. It’s helped me accept many parts of myself and face the reality of my own trauma. It’s an album that is overlooked because of its contents and perhaps because of the artist. As a trans woman, Ethel Cane’s target audience is smaller than any of her musical peers and stylistically her music can be strange and isolating.
WARNING: This blog post contains discussion of violence, trauma and sexual abuse
As an album, Preacher’s Daughter excels in creating a strongly relatable narrative of womanhood and trauma. It delivers a large, spacious soundscape, building an aura of unknowing and distance. The music on this album is very sparse and echoed. Even the most straightforward pop-esque track on the album, “American Teenager” is layered with a nostalgic thick reverb. When done wrong, this can come across as annoying, corny or pretentious. But Ethel and her engineers have mastered the effect, creating a unique sound for the album, working in tandem with its themes.
Narratively, the album is a dark tale of womanhood and trauma. Ethel recites the story of a girl growing up in a religious household. She seeks to escape without any real guide on what it means to be a woman. She recounts highschool, lost loves and those who never returned. The first track opens with lyrics about hiding bones, a double entendre about skeletons in your closet and the process of transitioning. The album continues to dance between trauma and transitioning--the battle with one's personal faith and relationship with religion.
As a trans woman who has had her own battles with religion, this is incredibly relatable to me. However, I believe what makes this album so relatable is that even without the personal connection to transition, the themes of womanhood resonate for so many.
The next few tracks set up the world and characters. She ends up falling for a man named Logan in “Western Nights.” He leads her down a dark path, ending up dead in a shootout with police. With Ethel on the run, she has to acknowledge her trauma and the sexual abuse she suffered by her father. The songs “Family Tree” and “Hard Times” deal with this. Lines like “Nine going on Eighteen,” “tell me a story about how it ends where you’re still the good guy,” and “I’m tired of you, still tied to me, too tired to move, too tired to leave,” are haunting yet sadly relatable statements.
Continuing on, we come to understand that these traumatic events are never a singular occurrence. It’s a cycle of abuse. It has set Ethel, and many others, on destructive paths. On “Thoroughfare” she meets a man named Isaiah who she travels the western United States with.
We see the cycle continue on the following track, “Gibson Girl”. The trauma has affected her so much that she finds herself in a similar situation, seeking validation as a woman, resulting in being sexually exploited.
Immediately, the illusion of seductive energy is violently shattered on “Ptolomea”. To be quite frank, it can be difficult to listen to the pleading of “stop… stop… STOP.” The listener comes face to face with the sexual assault. The song is one I cannot hear. It brings up too many memories and emotions that are impossible for me to deal with.
The rest of the album contains instrumental tracks and closers. They deal with the fatal fallout of her trying to escape Isaiah's abuse. On the penultimate track “Sun Bleached Flies”, Ethel speaks from the afterlife, reminiscing on early memories one last time,”, and how she longs for the simple life. The closing track, and another favourite, “Strangers”, wraps up the album beautifully with Ethel saying goodbye. She claims sympathetically “I tried to be good, am I no good? I just wanted to be yours,” putting a bow on the themes of the album.
I think what takes the album from a good to great is its narrative commentary on how women, especially trans women, crave validation in destructive ways. It’s an album that forces the listener to acknowledge their own past and face the gruesome reality for many women. While it doesn’t often offer solutions to these problems, it’s an important piece for displaying these problems in the first place. Sometimes it’s enough to be heard and recognized. For that I say Preacher’s Daughter is a classic.
Please listen to this album.
