Hayden Anhedönia, the singer-songwriter known as Ethel Cain, draws from an encyclopedic trove of cultural references for her work, stirring them into a Southern Gothic brew that feels uniquely her own. But long before the alt-rock visionary began building worlds with her albums Preacher’s Daughter and Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, she was getting lost in those conjured by others.
“I was a massive reader as a child,” Anhedönia, who is 27, writes in an email the day after wrapping the North American leg of her Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour. “I was extremely into the escapism of fantasy, so series like Redwall and Eragon were my bread and butter,” she explains.
Those books helped occupy the big mind of a small-town girl from Perry, Florida, who grew up surrounded by vast stretches of forests and swampland—an atmosphere she’s evoked onstage with haunting fog, tree branches, and a cross-shaped pulpit. “I remember being so painfully bored all the time, so there was nothing I wanted more during the day than for everyone to go to sleep so I could turn my little flashlight on and read until 4 a.m.”
As an adult, Anhedönia’s life remains, in some ways, suspended between fiction’s fantasy and the physical world. “I’ve always said I have one foot wholly removed from reality at all times, but I like it that way,” she says of living her life half as Hayden, half as Ethel. “I feel like I run parallel to so many narratives in my own head, like my own true mirror is cracked and reflects my true self back at me in various different ways.”
She thinks she’d like to write a book herself one day—eventually. “It will take me a while,” she warns. “It’s hard to know what to say when you can say anything! I have to find my narrative style and the angle I want to take, but when the moment is right, I’ll move forward with it.”
While she says she isn’t a big reader on tour—“I mostly sleep all day, every day or lie still in the dark just to combat the intense overstimulation of it all”—books have significantly helped shape her live show, as well as her pursuit of the “simplicity of mindfulness and presence” on the road.