00:00Ethel Cain, as a character, is the daughter of a preacher who's passed away.
00:05She feels very kind of weird and on the fringe of her already small town
00:12and just kind of feels very down and hard on herself.
00:15And then she meets this boy when she's young, a child, in a fleeting moment.
00:22And then he disappears and she doesn't see him for years.
00:25When he returns into her life, she latches back onto this idea of him and becomes consumed by the idea of loving him and being loved by him.
00:40I remember I had just moved in, my studio wasn't even set up, and I was looking out the window.
00:45I just put my lace curtains up and it just felt so sweet and simple being back home and everything was so green outside the window.
00:51And I just pulled out my guitar and made up this funky little tuning and started just kind of strumming along.
00:58And it just became this little sweet ditty that I wound up falling in love with.
01:03When I wrote the song, I originally wanted to call it Nettles because I had been running around the yard.
01:10And that was the first week that I moved to my house in Alabama, and I was running around barefoot.
01:15And I got dropped by this plant that was so painful and spiky, and it jabbed into my foot and I fell.
01:21I originally thought that it was Nettles, but it was a thistle, this kind of spiky, painful plant that is beneficial and good and healthy for you, but also painful.
01:30And I thought that that was kind of a good metaphor for being someone who feels like you are difficult to be loved, but still craving to be loved.
01:38And so that's where the song got its name.
01:40There's this gas plant that was in my hometown that my mom always told me stories of.
02:08It was kind of down the road from where we lived and it exploded when I was a kid.
02:11It kind of became this motif of like industrial accident, you know, this kind of scary thing that happened.
02:38For me, the song began vignette of being in like my hometown and just being some small town girl loving some small town boy who works at the plant and have this very childish love that's very innocent.
02:54But then the real world seeps in death or accident, realizing that just because you've got that love doesn't mean it can last forever.
03:02Just because you did, again, the hard part of getting it, now it's actually, you have something to lose.
03:08And so that first verse is kind of the bad dream of there are things in this world that could take you away from me and that's terrifying and that kind of sets the stage for the whole song.
03:38For the pre-chorus, it kind of now directs away from the bad dream of losing a lover and it focuses more on the pain that you already know that you feel internally.
03:51Formative memory that I have of walking barefoot down Tennessee Street crying on like a weeknight and just for whatever reason everything, getting ready to leave Florida was kind of crashing down on me and realizing everything I'd been to, everything that had happened.
04:03And I remember for a long period of time there was kind of an urge to romanticize the things that you'd been through, romanticizing being tortured or in pain or whatnot.
04:12And in that moment, I remember thinking, it's not like the movies. You're not some tortured vignette of a character. You're a real person.
04:20I fear these things happening to you in the first verse and then these are the things that have happened to me.
04:25And it's kind of just on both sides of the coin, whether it's you or whether it's coming from me.
04:28Things are not right. This isn't a perfect vacuum of love.
04:33You know, the whole song kind of flows in and out of reality and fantasy.
05:03Instead of laying me down amongst the flowers or, you know, like a soft bed of grass, it's laying me down where the greenery stings.
05:09I can't hide this from you. I can't hide what I've been through. This is all going to come out.
05:14She's kind of sympathizing with the nettles and saying, I can hear them singing, to love me is to suffer me.
05:21It's like, to love me, to be here with me. And vice versa, to be with you, it's to suffer me, you know, to suffer this time.
05:30When I lay with you in that old laying room, wishing I was the way you say that you are, you'll go fight a war, I'll go missing.
05:50I warned you for me. It's not that hard.
05:58One of the key themes of this record is that she, desperate to be loved, doesn't necessarily see him the way he is because she sees him as what she needs him to be.
06:07And so she sees him as being this tough guy who just doesn't let anything affect him.
06:14And she wants to be like that. She wants to be tough. She wants to be hard so that she can stop getting hurt.
06:20You know, it's men will go out and they'll get to show their anger. They'll get to be brash and violent or however they want to show it.
06:26They get to explode with their anger. And this is what she's projecting onto him. She's imagining him getting to go be free.
06:33The expectations of her are she'll just retreat because she's not afforded the same luxury of going out and making her pain the rest of the world's problem.
06:44That picture on the wall you're scared of looks just like you.
06:50Both characters in this record, Ethel and Willoughby, have complicated relationships with their families.
06:55The kind of biggest overarching theme of the entire Ethel Cain project is about family history, blood, escaping cycles.
07:02It's just another kind of motif of him looking at this picture of his father on the wall looking just like him.
07:10And he's afraid of that. He's afraid of just perpetuating this cycle.
07:15I want to bleed. I want to hurt. The way the boys do.
07:22Maybe you're right and we should stop watching the news.
07:30Cause baby I've never seen brown eyes look so blue.
07:35Ethel Cain as a character being so rigid in the role that she's played.
07:42It's so tied to the female experience, not given the same grace for emotional expression.
07:49And she thinks if I'm going to hurt, I want to bleed the way the boys do.
07:53I want to feel pain the way that you feel.
07:56It does go hand in hand with you'll go fight a war lyric.
07:58She says, I don't want to retreat into myself. I don't want to be smothered.
08:01I want to lash out and I want to be violent and I want to be angry.
08:05Tell me all the time not to worry And think of all the time I'll have with you
08:17When I won't wake up on my own Wake up on my own
08:24We're married. We're bound together.
08:40There's nothing that could take us from each other.
08:43Just build this place with me in our heads that's an escape.
08:46You know, and it's childish and it's a fantasy and it's not real.
08:50But it is, you know, the desperate fantasy of a child who's scared of the world
08:55And needs a place, one single place, that's theirs together where nothing can get them.
09:04Suffering the world to lie a time or two Where we won't wake up on our own
09:13Wake up on our own Held close all the time, no end
09:22And this was all for you
09:26Tell me to think about when I won't wake up on my own
09:28When all this is past, when the love that we share is so concrete and undeniable
09:33That I don't have to be afraid anymore
09:35That we could live forever almost
09:37Kind of in this moment of love where there's some possibility
09:40To build this place, a room, a house
09:44Somewhere where nothing else can get in
09:47Gardenias are my favorite flower, they're my mother's favorite flower
10:04And so in the story they're Ethel Cain's favorite flower
10:06And Ethel Cain's mother's favorite flower
10:08And she has this idea of this love story that she's mimicking
10:11And modeling after her parents' love story
10:13And gardenias on the tile, you know, the flowers are here
10:17It represents this love and this security and loyalty
10:21And all you have now is each other
10:23There's nothing here but us
10:25My favorite part of this song is probably the harmonies on
10:32You'll go fight a war, I'll go missing
10:35I warned you, for me it's not that hard
10:37Something about that part of the song every time I hear it
10:39But I also love the gardenias on the tile line
10:43Because that was actually a line I'd made for an old demo
10:47And then I scrapped it, but then at the very end I thought
10:49I want to bring this back
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