In 2018, I wrote down a passing thought in my cheap little leather-bound journal I was writing a collection of songs in that would go on to become Preacher’s Daughter. “If I finish this album the way it needs to be finished, it will change my life, and it will leave a hole in my heart for years that I won’t know how to fill.” I’ve always had a knack for eerily accurate self-premonition. Preacher’s Daughter certainly left a hole, and it certainly changed my life, but only on the outside. All the songs I wrote for it were about characters, a girl in a “faraway” place living her “faraway” life, albeit still parallel to mine, but wholly detached from me. Willoughby was doomed to be closer to home. I wrote Nettles and Waco the same week, the first week I spent in the Alabama house where I would finish Preacher’s Daughter after so many years of trying. The difference was I wrote them about me. There were no characters at first; it was just me. In fact, I wrote them in an attempt to hide from Ethel Cain for a moment. She eventually devoured those little ditties too, of course, as she always does. In hindsight, I’m glad I had to share them with her. I couldn’t have carried the full weight of them myself, I know that now. My premonitions were out in full force; over the course of the next few years, I’d script out my own life in the same morbid fashion I always have. Maybe it was a lesson in not training my eye downward as I’ve spent the majority of my life doing.
I had 3 weeks for the holidays between mixing and submitting Perverts and jumping back into the maw of taming an unfinished Willoughby Tucker. I spent the first three months of 2025 on probation, unable to go much of anywhere, awake only when the sun was down. I’d never mixed a record of that magnitude, which was daunting with deadlines immovable. I remember 9am on my 27th birthday rolling around after being awake for hours whittling away at mixes, announcing the album and entire tour before going back to mix an album that still wasn’t done. I’ve never cried so much finishing a record, and that was before it was even out. Combining your Saturn return, your first shot at true love, and the longest tour of your life is something I would never recommend to anyone. It was the death of both ego and everything around it. I couldn’t be more grateful. Never in my life have I been so turned inside out, so uprooted and unraveled. Looking back, I needed it more than anything.
Thank you to everyone who listened. Ethel Cain and Willoughby Tucker will always be my children, my burnt offerings, what I leave in the storm. Sometimes I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I also fear it’s the only way. Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I really will always love you. I hope you can forgive me.
