In August, you released your second album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, a Southern Gothic epic that runs from folk to shoegaze. Your personal story—growing up as Hayden Silas Anhedönia in Florida’s evangelical Panhandle, transitioning in your early 20s—isn’t what you explore in your music. Instead, you’re telling the fictional story of a character named Ethel Cain, a preacher’s daughter in 1980s Alabama. How do you want people to know who you are?
There are so many facets to my story. I’m like, However people come to know it is how they come to know it. The more I try to control the narrative, the more I find myself chopping pieces off to make it fit.
Was trying to tell this character’s story your entryway into music?
There are chunks of my life defined by stories that I was trying to tell. I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t tell these stories, and I never finished any of them. When the Ethel Cain story popped up, I said, “I’m going to finish this one.” It will be the thing that I continue chewing on until either I finish it or I die, whichever one comes first.
Are there other stories you would tell using different mediums?
I love horror, I would love to get into sci-fi, and I love fantasy. I grew up on The Lord of the Rings and Eragon. I spent a lot of my childhood wishing I had a dragon. I feel like I have my greedy, grubby little hands in every possible cookie jar, because I want to explore everything. Realistically, I imagine I will get to a small fraction of all of my aspirations in this life. Dreams are cheap and easy and fast, and actually making these projects is so time-consuming and intensive.
By making an album that’s more like a narrative saga, you’re offering people an off-ramp from the instant gratification culture of the Internet.
The entire Internet has gone from being a place of creative community to a giant billboard. Nobody has any time to sit with art and chew on it and engage with anything in a meaningful way. This is just one of the many, many downfalls of mass consumerism and late-stage capitalism. We can’t build deep, meaningful relationships with anything, so we just take sound bites and the funniest, most shallow bits of something and run with them. That’s all we’re really garnering from a body of work. It’s happening to all of us.
You were homeschooled and grew up in an insular, religious family. How did you get into underground music?
I had only VHS tapes of old Disney movies and VeggieTales, and then suddenly, when the Internet eventually crept into Perry, Florida, I was listening to rap music and country music and prog rock. I eventually found the Drones and Crystal Castles, TR/ST, Health, Death Grips, and regular Top 40 pop. There was a period when I would listen to anything if it sounded good. I think that’s one of the reasons why I love to bounce around so much, and why I want to cite Genesis P-Orridge and Rihanna as my influences.
This summer, the Billboard Top 40 was a lot of country music and heartland rock. Artists from many genres are now channeling country and western. Why do you think we’re seeing this return to Americana in music?
There was such a good, necessary push toward social progress in the 2010s, and we have flip-flopped so hard. Donald Trump is back in office. You’re seeing Roe v. Wade being overturned, a rise of white nationalism, and controversy over country music and blue-jean ads. That’s going hand in hand with a resurgence of Americana and American imagery. People are talking about what it means to be American because it’s a dark time in American history for a lot of people. It’s happening on both a shallow consumerist kind of aesthetic level and also in a deep, meaningful, painful way.
Why did you decide to remain in the Panhandle instead of moving to a big city?
I love where I’m from. It shaped me, and my heart will always belong to the Florida Panhandle. But I’m also very deeply disheartened by where I’m from. It kind of broke me growing up. There’s a very broad spectrum of people down here. I was taught all the wrong things growing up, and then I grew up and was taught the right things by other people. I’m very proud to have made it out of that environment and become the person I am today; and now I’m able to live there and try to be a positive influence.
You’re on tour this fall. What’s next?
I haven’t written in a long time. My heart has been kind of blocked off. There’s been a lot going on, but I’m chomping at the bit to write. As soon as I get home, I want to make music. That’s really all I can think about right now.
Hair by Jimmy Paul at Susan Price NYC; makeup by Kuma for MAC Cosmetics at Streeters. Photo Assistant: James Sakalian; Fashion Assistant: Celeste Roh.
Source: W Magazine