Ethel Cain - Nettles

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1:38Hayden Anadonia has been making music under the name Ethel Kane since 2019. But it's not just a band name or a moniker. Ethel Kane is a fictional character, a sort of alter ego that Hayden's been creating and world-building around throughout her albums. The first Ethel Kane album, Preacher's Daughter, came out in 2022. It ended up blowing up, and it made Hayden the first openly trans artist with an album in the top 10 on the Billboard chart. In 2025, she put out the second Athlecane album called Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. It's a prequel to the first album. For this episode, I talked to Hayden about how she made the song Nettles.

2:14As you're about to hear, it took on a lot of different forms over several years before she got to the final version.

2:27I'll think of all the time I'll have with you When I won't wake up on my own Wake up on my own Out close all the time Now when I'm half of you

2:51My name is Hayden Anadonia, also known as Ethel Kane and the project of Ethel Kane is like this big kind of sweeping narrative. And what era is the world of Ethel Kane set in? Willoughby Tucker spans from 1986 to 1990, so it goes through her last two years of high school and her first two years of adulthood. And it spans that four-year gap of her relationship with the titular character, Willoughby Tucker. It starts with her desperation to be loved and then it moves into her neglect of her lover and the way she casts his real person to the wayside to fall in love with a projected version of him.

3:39And what made you decide to put it in that era to begin with? Well, you know, the first love story that I ever saw was my parents. And so I always heard a lot of stories about my parents falling in love and all that stuff, like towards the end of the 80s, early 90s. That was their love story. And that was when my mom was in high school. So I always just loved the idea of love set against that backdrop. That's all the stories that I heard, all the pictures that I saw growing up. It very much was, I just found that time period fascinating. And I always thought that was like a cool backdrop for a story.

4:11And where does the story take place? It takes place in Shady Grove, Alabama, which is actually a real place. There is a real Shady Grove, Alabama, but it's not that specific one. And Shady Grove to me is a very nowhere USA. My family is from Shady Grove, Florida. And Shady Grove has that feeling of an era gone by. But again, it's like a fictionalized version of it. What do you remember about the first day that you started working on Nettles? I remember I had just moved into my house in Alabama, like not even a week before I had no furniture set up. It was August. I think I wrote nettles August 17th, 2021.

4:50I remember going outside and it was a beautiful hot day and it felt so good to be back in the South and I was just so happy to be home. And I was like running around my yard barefoot and I stepped on like a spiky plant and I thought it was a nettle. It turned out to be a thistle, but I thought, oh, spiky plant, that's a nettle. And I got in my head this idea of nettles. And so I just started to kind of write this little ditty. you know it was probably like 3-4 p.m. it was hot and the sun was shining and it was coming through my lace curtains and I had my guitar and my my laptop on the floor and I said I just want to write something that just feels like a returned home and I started just kind strumming the guitar.

5:42I found this little rhythm, and I always usually make simple tunings because I don't play the guitar that well. I'm not really good with my fingers like that. So I made this weird little tuning, and I was just sliding back and forth between these couple chords. I always kind of tend to gravitate towards love songs about, you know, I'm someone who's been through stuff and I'm in love with someone who's been through stuff and all the anxiety and difficulty of that, of like loving someone through their trauma, loving someone through mine. Because if, again, my parents love story and the love story of most of the people in my hometown, it's just, you know, you're in high school in a small town, you grow up, your boyfriend gets a blue collar job, you are a stay at home wife or you do your little thing.

6:24And just this very simple love of you go to work, you come home, you're in your trailer together, you love each other, you go through the trials and tribulations of small-town life, and that to me is so romantic.

6:51When I was a kid, there was a gas plant near our house, the trailer I grew up in. My mom would always tell me about this time that it blew up when I was really little. And it exploded. And I remember thinking, like, you know, all the guys that work there, you know, it was kind of this idea of, oh, I'm in love and we're children. We're in a race to grow up. But then quickly the real world sets in. The plant blew up. Piece of shrapnel flew and slowed that part of you. Suddenly the real world creeps in. We realize we're not immortal. This isn't timeless, this isn't forever. But when the plant blew up A piece of shrapnel flew and slowed that part of you The doctors gave you until the end of the night But not till daylight, not till daylight You know, we're just two people at the mercy of life.

7:58And we're getting scared. This is getting hard. Love is not just you find it and then you have it. And life is good because of it. It's difficult and it's scary and things can happen. Things can take your love away from you. And how terrifying that is. And is it still worth this pain?

8:22Not to worry And think of all the time I'll have with you When I won't wake up and why I wake up and why you How close all the time when I'm half of you

8:46It was me trying to work out the ways that I always predicted I would be in love and how badly I wanted it, but I think how badly it scared me. So at the time when you were writing this, had you experienced something like that yourself? No, I'd never, you know, I've had my brushes with love and met people and got scared and ran away almost immediately because I kind of had this inkling of an idea that this is too much for me and I'm scared. And if I even tried, I knew I was going to make a mess. So I just had a really good idea of what I was going to have to work through, accepting people for as they are, not as you want them to be.

9:36And so I kind of gave myself a playground to play it out. You know, me kind of saying, life is hard. I've been through stuff. I've made a fool of myself. I've been treated so badly and I would never do that to anyone. And you've been through stuff and you've been hurt. We have a past and a present. And then saying this is so overwhelming and it's so hard, just tell me all the time not to worry. Just tell me all the time. And think about the day where we can find our patch of paradise, where I can spend all my time with you and none of this will matter. The two of us together will be enough. So it started with personal experiences and then they kind of get, you know, twisted into the Ethel Cain story because she is, at the end of the day, a part of me.

10:23The demo, as it was, came to be in like an hour. Then I put it on my SoundCloud and just said, oh, you know, first week in the new house, this is like a little scrap of a song that I wrote. Here's how I'm feeling. And, you know, that scrap just kind of sat there like that for a while. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because for me, it would be really hard to be like, oh, here's an unfinished thing. and then share it with people. So for me, the Nettles demo isn't really a demo. It's just a different version of Nettles, but that is also a complete finished version of Nettles for what it is, the emotion, the intention.

10:57It's all intact there. I think sometimes people consider amazing production or crazy composition or whatever to have more integrity. And it does require more talent and more creativity to really go there and flesh something out. But right now, this is what I have to say. If I need to revisit it, if I have more to say, I will say more on the topic. But until then, she'll sit pretty just the way that she is because I love her in this form too. And so the first verse and chorus was what I had for years before I finished the song. And then two years later, I was in Mexico coming back from a festival that we just played.

11:35I don't know why it crossed my mind, but I thought I need to listen to this. And I listened to it and said, why is this not on Willoughby? This has such a place in it. And I wanted to explore that kind of difficult, immature, desperate desire. So that's kind of why we went back in time to explore her when she's kind of transitioning from her childhood to adulthood and the way that that affects this interpersonal relationship that she has. And that's when I dredged it back up and started working on it. And so how did you start? What was your first step for that? so I was playing Coachella and I was listening to a lot of like super dreamy dream pop because I was having a hard year and that's kind of one of my go-tos and I just love to listen to super soft indie rock and I said alright let's do like a soft indie rock version of the song

12:32so kind of simple drums with a ride put some more reverb on it make it really just kind of twinkly like that

12:42and were you doing that with real drums or were you programming drums that was real drums my good friend steven collier he did this demo with me i just recorded some lazy vocals

13:08just kind of wanted to test out that idea of what if it wasn't so folksy what if it was more of kind of this indie like cigarettes after sex kind of vibe or like kind of beach house because you know i'm a big fan of both of those artists especially when i'm in the desert you know i'd never been to coachella so i was listening to them a lot and thought oh this would be so pretty

13:39but after i made it i thought this has no heart this has no substance this isn't nettles and that's kind of why i scrapped that one that one was very short-lived but then I thought well I missed the old demo so I put the original guitar back and slowed it down

13:59that's when I kind of started to marry this kind of slower dreamier quality but with like the twang of the original so I was in Pittsburgh when I made this I had moved there end of 2022 I started to build over the drums and layer stuff with Stephen. And that's where I wrote the second verse.

14:40After you made that, did it feel complete or was it still missing something for you? I felt like the foundation was there, but then I thought, okay, now this needs some kind of flair. What do you mean by flair? I thought it just needed a pedal steel or maybe some banjo. I kind of want to bring it back to this kind of country-ish, twangy place, but keep this beautiful lushness of it.

15:15It was ugly life, but they all did to me. And they did to me what I wouldn't do to anyone.

15:30This version lived for a while. This version lived through the majority of 2023. But then I thought maybe it needs to be slower. Maybe it needs to be sadder. Maybe it needs to be devastating. Why did you think it needed to be devastating? especially for a love song. Well at that point I think that I was starting to kind of go through my my bout of insecurity with being labeled a pop artist or whatever and worried that people thought that I was just always making these little ditties and I thought well I need to make something slower and sadder and like it needs to be less accessible. I don't want to make something so beautiful.

16:02I don't want people to be happy listening to this. I want them to be miserable. So that's where this super slow demo came from.

16:13Was that miserable feeling also a reflection of how you felt at the time? Oh, yeah. I mean, after Preacher's Order came out, I got so depressed because I'd been working on it for years and years and put my whole heart into it. And then just a bunch of stuff happened with my career, adjusting to it, adjusting to being an artist whose work is being dissected. And I very much got into a mindset of, I hate this. I hate my job. I hate making music. I hate all of this. And I was so angry and sad. And I just felt so empty and depressed. And it affected all of my music. Tell me all the time not to worry, not to worry.

16:52Think of all the time I'm all about with you. Will you wake up and I won't wake up and I won't. Out close all the time No way It was all For you

17:27But very quickly, everybody in my life was like, this is not it. We don't want this version of this demo.

17:39My conversation with Ethel Cain continues after this.

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20:15So what happened after you made that quote-unquote miserable-sounding demo? One of my friends said, you are very obviously not doing well at all. You're not happy, and you are visibly different. the whole year it was just lights on but nobody's home so I took a six-month break from making music and then I just started working on this record again in January of this year I kind of looked at everything that I had and knew what I didn't want what I did want I said all right I'm gonna make it simple strip everything back to just the banjo and the guitar took everything off had my drummer record new drums Brian Brian did the new drums I wanted something that was a bit less like lazy and kind of swingy and just more of like a kind of like a pep kind of a more of an upbeat drum sound and I was like let me go to Muscle Shoals you know that's kind of like a huge hub for kind of like southern rock and country and a little more authentic and real and so I went to Muscle Shoals had some friends in Muscle Shoals put these like instruments on it.

21:18Fiddle. More banjo. More acoustic guitar. And pedal steel.

21:33Those were the instruments that we recorded that day.