Song Exploder - Ethel Cain - Nettles

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Hayden Anhedönia has been making music under the name Ethel Cain since 2019. But it’s not just a band name or a moniker; Ethel Cain is a fictional character, a sort of alter ego that Hayden’s been creating and world building around throughout her albums. The first Ethel Cain 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 ten on the Billboard chart. In 2025, she put out the second Ethel Cain album, called Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. For this episode, I talked to Hayden about how she made the song “Nettles.” As you’re about to hear, it took on a lot of different forms, over several years, before she got to the final version. For more info, visit songexploder.net/ethel-cain.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Hayden Anadonia has been making music under the name Ethel Cain since 2019. But it's not just a band name or a moniker. Ethelcane is a fictional character, a sort of alter ego that Hayden's been creating and world-building around throughout her albums. The first Ethelcane album, Preacher's daughter, came out in 2022. It ended up blowing up, and it made Hayden the first song. openly trans artist with an album in the top 10 on the Billboard chart.

In 2025, she put out the second Ethel Cain 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. As you're about to hear, it took on a lot of different forms over several years before she got to the final version. My name is Hayden Onodonia, also known as Ethelcane. And the project of Ethelcane is like this big kind of sweeping, narrative. And what era is the world of Ethelcane said 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. And 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. And 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. 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. I 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.'s hot. And the sun was shining, and it was coming through my lace curtains. And I had my guitar on my laptop on the floor. floor and I said, I just want to write something that just feels like a returned home.

And I started just kind of strumming the guitar. I found this little rhythm. I always usually make simple tunes 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. 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 loving someone through their trauma, loving someone through mine. Because, 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,

and 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 so romantic. Until tomorrow. When I was a kid, there was a gas plant near our house, the children 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 a piece of shrapnel flu 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 you you know we're just

two people at the mercy of life and 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 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 it 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.

And 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 twisted into the Ethel Cain story

because she is at the end of the day a part of me. the demo as it was came to be in like an hour and 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, it'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'll be. 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, I 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 her 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, all right, let's do look at a soft indie rock version of the song. So kind of simple drums with a ride, put some more reverb on it, make it really just kind of twinkly like that. And were you doing that with real drums or were you programming drums? That was real drums. My good friend Stephen Collier, he did this demo with me. I just recorded some lazy vocals.

Kind of wanted to test out that idea of what if it wasn't so focusing, what if it was more of kind of this indie, like, cigarettes after sex kind of vibe or that kind of beach house. because I'm a big fan of both of those artists, especially when I'm in the desert. I'd never been to Coachella, so I was listening to them a lot and thought, oh, this would be so pretty. After I made it, I thought, this has no heart, this has no substance, this isn't nettles.

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. That'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. After 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 flare. What do you mean by flare? I thought it just needed a pedal steel or maybe some, bando, I kind of want to bring it back to this kind of countryish, twangy place, but keep this beautiful lushness of it. This 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 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. I don't want people to be happy to listen to this. I want them to be miserable. So that's where this super slow demo came from. Was that miserable feeling also reflection of how you felt at the time?

Oh, yeah. I mean, after Preacher's older 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. Very quickly, everybody in my life was like, this is not it. We don't want this version of this demo. My conversation with Ethel Kane continues after this. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length,

and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in

cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott. Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. live. Thanks. So 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. And I said, all right, I'm going to 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 swinging 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 how more authentic and real. And so I went to Muscle Shoals, had some friends in Muscle Shoals, put these. these like instruments on it, fiddle, more banjo, more acoustic guitar, and pedal steel.

Those were the instruments that we recorded that day. And was there a moment or like a session where you tracked all of your final vocals? No, the product is a huge mishmash. It's just like it's really not that polished. It's just such a like conglomeration of all the different periods that I've worked on it and mindsets and whatnot. But there's like some takes that I just can't get over. so I'll leave it and then record new takes. It's kind of what I love about it.

I can listen and hear all the different times and memories. Can you tell me about that lyric, To Love Me, is to Suffer Me? Well, I've always had this very kind of unhealthy view of love as being, I'm so weak and I'm so pain and I've been through so much. And so to love me is to suffer me, being very self-critical and self-deprecating, but then saying, I need constant validation.

I need a man who's big and strong and can handle me and will like hold me down and protect me and he's so mean to everybody but me like, you know, that kind of possibly corny view of love. But then I thought that can't be real. That's so shallow and two-dimensional. So then I said, let's dig a little deeper. Let's say he's scared of becoming his father. That picture on the wall you're scared of looks just like. like you.

I want to bleed. I want to hurt the way the boys do. Nettles is saying, I'm afraid. You're afraid. You've been through things. I've been through things. But I love you. And Nettles are still the fantasy.

Like, I don't want to confront the problems. I'd rather you just tell me that it's not real and that one day will just magically be together and it won't be hard. And you can kind of. kind of get the feeling that Ethel Kane is not going to take the right path because she's avoidant and she's deflective and she would rather live in her head in this delusion. Which is so funny because coincidentally I'm now in my very first relationship and it is exactly how I thought it was going to be and I am acting exactly the way that I predicted I would.

And so it's been very funny nettles coincidentally coming out at the same time that I'm feeling all these emotions again, but for real this time, not hypothetical. I mean, the week that it was coming out, I was literally texting him the same stuff. I was saying, I'm so anxious because for the first time of my life, I have someone that I care about. It's so scary, and it's all kind of coming to pass. I just listen to these songs and say, okay, this is the fork in the road. I can either go down this and do this the way I wrote about in the song and ruin it, or I can learn from my own predictions and choose to do it differently.

We would listen to the song together. I would always sing Tommy all the time. And then he would look at me and go, Not to worry. Not to worry. Yeah, that's why I always call it a cautionary tale because I say, look, this is what happens if you fall in love

and you project things onto them and you don't actually learn who they are and you neglect them as a person. You're going to drive them away. So let me run this scenario in a controlled environment, like in my head, and learn from it before I have to learn from it really in person. That was a much easier way to go about it

than actually falling in love for the first time with a good person and ruining it. And even with the cautionary tale, I'm still like, I'm crazy. I'm putting that man through hell right now. And so I will run that cautionary tale time and time again if it means I don't have to end up the same way that Ethel Cain ends up. And now here's Nettles by Ethel Cain in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net to learn more,

including some footnotes that go with the episode. You'll also find links to buy or stream Nettles, and you can watch the music video. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistants from Tiger Biscop. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo.

The Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me about what I'm listening to and thinking about these days, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You could also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi K. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia