‘God loves you, but not enough to save you’
I’ve been obsessed with Ethel Cain’s “Preacher’s Daughter.” Obsessed.
She did a whole “Freezer Bride” tour that I never even heard of.
And I would never have heard of her if not for “Strangers” being in “It Ends With Us.”
I’ve been particularly haunted by “Televangelism.” It’s an instrumental track that ends very off key. I assume that’s Ethel dying and her soul going wherever it’s supposed to be.
“Televangelism” ends and “Sun-Bleached Flies” begins. And it’s such a good song on its own. It has some zingers like the line I picked for today’s subject line.
In context:
“God loves you, but not enough to save you
So, baby girl, good luck taking care of yourself.”
She’s obviously already dead at this point and reflecting on her life.
All the religion beaten into her by all the sun-bleached flies who prayed for miracles that never came.
They and their babies just sit on the windowsill “breathing in the poison of the paint” rather than escaping small-town life that revolves around church and angry men like her daddy and every man she ever dated.
She goes back in her head to a time when she was longing to leave Alabama with her first love Willoughby. How Nebraska was all they ever wanted.
“I’m still praying for that house in Nebraska
By the highway, out on the edge of town
Dancing with the windows open
I can’t let go when something’s broken
It’s all I know and it’s all I want now.”
Ethel’s life review, as I interpret it to be, feels a lot like I interpret mine will be.
“It’s all I know and it’s all I want now.”
She went on to meet more exciting (abusive) men. She met Logan and they stole and killed until he was captured. She met Isaiah, finally “a man who wasn’t angry,” yet he sold her into sex work (“Gibson Girl,” where he hurts her) and plied her with drugs and raped, beat, killed and ate her. (And potentially filmed it all.)
Willoughby doesn’t seem so boring now, eh.
I don’t think I wished away my life with Mom but maybe I did. Like I know “love’s out there, and I can’t leave it be” (from “Thoroughfare”) but I already had it.
Who’s going to keep me safe from an Isaiah? And will I be left wishing for my own version of Willoughby?
Ethel knows she’s been reduced to “a polaroid in evidence.” Which is one of the most haunting lyrics.
The most devastating lyric, I think, is from “Ptolemea”:
“There’s nothing you can do.
It’s already been done.”
That’s Isaiah or the god of the underworld or who the fuck knows, telling her not to fight. She’s been promised to him. Basically just die already and stop hiding.
I hope my mom’s passage was better than that. If there’s anyone who deserves to have a good afterlife, it’s her. Only FOTUS and his associates should go to Ptolemy.
This is clearly art. If it invokes a visceral, long-term impact, that’s art. I love the album, love the way it’s made me think, love that it can exist in FOTUS’ world where Ted Nugent counts as culture.
Consume it while thought is still legal.