Sunday's Cool: Now That's What I Call Christian Music!
Ethel Cain's 'Preacher's Daughter' is my favorite album of 2022.
When we talk about Christian art, we tend to think of the Kinkade-lite kitsch of the 80s and 90s with White Jesus playing baseball and Bible verses over paintings of deer and stuff. At least, that was my earliest reference point for Christian art. My grandparents ran a little shop for Christian books and gifts out in the rural Nebraska town I grew up in, so all this was a pretty big part of my childhood. There was (and, for all I know, still is) an enormous painting in the little country church we attended of Jesus at his Bill Ray Cyrusiest, pulling Peter from the waves.
But the more I reflect on Protestant Christian art in America, the more I think that while that particular aesthetic might be the most lucrative version of it, there is a better, truer version that is more representative of the actual evangelical legacy. And it’s the style captured in Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, my favorite album of the year.
Ethel Cain is actually Hayden Anhedönia, who grew up homeschooled in a very Christian household, just like me. Sadly but probably not surprisingly, things did Not Go Well when she came out as trans to her parents. She left the Florida panhandle for Tallahassee and, after a grim bout with bad drugs, either adopted or was adopted by this Ethel Cain persona, equal parts all-American pastor’s kid, hellraisin’ outlaw and, as Megahan Garvey observed at NPR, final girl in a horror movie.
As Ethel Cain, Anhedönia captures the real art of Protestant Christian America as I think is truest of it: HELL IS REAL roadside billboards, three crosses on Golgotha tramp stamps and “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God” bumper stickers. This stuff isn’t exactly rare in pop culture, of course — spin virtually any Nashville country artist — but Anhedönia’s wry relationship with it is more Flannery O’Connor than Morgan Wallen. In that sense, it’s not exactly Christian music, nor is it music by a Christian artist but it is music that is in a lot of ways about Christianity. Across the thirteen tracks in her Preacher’s Daughter opus, Anhedönia crafts a sparkling portrait of the honey-haired titular PK in Alabama and follows her on cross-country misadventure with rough n’ rowdy men before finally dragging her to hell in, where else, California.
Sonically, Anhedönia follows Cain’s trajectory, beginning with the summer flourish of “American Teenager” which is reminiscent of Sam’s Town-era the Killers before descending to more somber and eventually terrifying corners of Americana. You can feel Ethel’s American Dream rusting in real time along with the music, which starts like Springsteen but ends more like Reznor. The word “Lynchian” gets thrown around an awful lot, but it’s rare to find art that does feel like such an apt companion piece to Wild at Heart and even Fire Walk With Me in function if not exactly form.
Preacher’s Daughter travels in a few different dimensions. Latitudinally, we follow Ethel west, through my old Nebraska stomping grounds which, here, represent utopian peace and freedom; through places like Texas where, on the run from the law, Ethel meets a nice-seeming young fella who takes her out to California where her dreams finally rot into nightmares. Horizontally, we’re first drawn downwards through several circles of Dante’s Hell (explicitly referenced in “Ptolemaea”) and then back up through the strange arithmetic of grace.
But we’re also drawn inward, as Anhedönia peels back the layers of Christianity she grew up around, starting with the sticky, candy gloss of those White Jesus paintings before getting to the sour core. In other words, Anhedönia is one of the few artists working who is able to see the American Church as it is, as it wants to be and what it so often reveals itself to actually be — probably because she’s spent enough time in that world to be intimately familiar with its peculiarities.
“It never so much for me was about God,” Anhedönia told W Magazine. “It was more for me about the way people were interacting with each other in the name of God. All of the personal drama was really weird. I was like, God does not even feel like he’s in here.” In character as Ethel Cain, there does seem to be a lingering belief in God, even as we discover ugly truths about what happened behind closed doors in Ethel’s church experience. But Anhedönia still uses Ethel to explore this culture propped up by vocabulary about God even as it sometimes seems to rarely deal with God in any substantive way.
Whether Preacher’s Daughter ends on a happy or sad note depends on your definitions of grace and violence. Anhedönia says she’s not a Christian anymore, but she utilizes the evangelical definitions of Heaven and Hell in unexpected ways throughout the album, suggesting that they both might be closer than we think and the doors through which we enter may not be the ones we expect. Now that’s what I call Christian music.
Anhedönia’s done a great job crafting the lore for this album and scattering it across the internet in unexpected places. With a little internet sleuthing, you can find stuff like this “interview” between Ethel and a fictional reporter that provides some background on her dearly departed father.
Liz and I are moving back to the states next week as our time in Paris is coming to a close, for now. Please be nice to me as I will try to keep up on my publishing schedule but it’s gonna be a crazy few days.
Currently reading David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon to prep for Marty’s upcoming film adaptation. He’s gonna make a meal of this one.