Following her album, Preacher’s Daughter, which explores the character of Ethel Cain through a devastating adulthood into premature death, the musical artist Hayden Silas Anhedönia was unable to let Cain’s story rest. Instead, Hayden returns with Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, revisiting the lore behind Cain’s first love as a teen. While the narrative behind Preacher’s Daughter spoke to the messiness and discomfort involved in trauma and healing, that of Willoughby Tucker is an advisory story of what to avoid when you fall in love for the first time.

Despite the album’s title, the first track, and our first introduction to Cain as an adolescent, is dedicated to her best friend, Janie. The song serves as both a declaration of love and a lamentation of it as Cain sees her place in Janie’s life overtaken by Janie’s new boyfriend. This narrative is likely a relatable one for many (female) listeners – it is a familiar rite of passage where your closest confidante becomes increasingly distant, preferring to spend more time with her boyfriend until the inevitable moment that you can no longer even call her a friend. The instruments are slow and heavy; each guitar strum begs for permanence, reluctant to be replaced by the next. It mirrors Cain’s desperation to remain in Janie’s life but instead, Cain is dealt her first heartbreak – one that she is unable to ever recover fully from. Indeed, the swelling of instruments dies to expose Cain’s instinct to ‘play pretend like [she] won’t watch [Janie] leaving’ and her tendency to repress things that may hurt her. The opening song is a neat signifier of what is to follow and foreshadows the bleakness of the subsequent narrative – the introduction of boys, romance, and sex marks the conclusion of childhood innocence.

“Willoughby Tucker is an advisory story of what to avoid when you fall in love for the first time”

Some slight relief from Cain’s harrowing story, however, comes in the form of a synth-heavy, 80s-inspired track, reminiscent of Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes. It partially celebrates a sense of teenage freedom, with the subject of the song (Cain’s classmate, Holly Reddick) portrayed as a sexually emancipated party girl who seems free of all worldly worries. She is an embodiment of the laissez-faire attitude that many of us at Cambridge would love to have; where we could be blissfully unaffected by the banality of school deadlines or future plans. For some of us, she might also represent the newfound liberty that often comes with entering the world of independent university life (although Revs does not quite stay open long enough to go to lectures ‘straight from the club’).

Still, the track is not all playful and Cain’s own insecurities seep into the end of the track. She believes it is inevitable that a boy like Willoughby would be attracted to Holly and that thought leaves her spiralling into self-deprecation, desperately crying: ‘I’ll never be that kind of angel / I’ll never be kind enough to me.’ The stylised synth heard in the beginning of the track yields to an erratic explosion of drums and cymbal crashes as the narration turns towards this self-destructive jealousy; unlike Holly with her abrasive confidence, Cain’s is unable to see herself beyond a façade of failure and unworthiness. The insecurities she displays here go on to haunt her for the rest of the album’s narrative, and also into that of Preacher’s Daughter.

But Cain is not the only character who cracks under emotional instability; the penultimate track on the record, Tempest, exposes Willoughby to be similarly self-loathing and paranoid. Written from the perspective of Willoughby, the song dispels untrue narratives that arise from Cain’s viewpoint. Indeed, the Willoughby constructed by Cain in the previous tracks, Nettles and Dust Bowl, is the kind of man who joins the army to fight wars and is devoted entirely to his lover, regardless of outside temptation. Strong and staunch, he initially appears to be Cain’s dream man. But there is a revelation, which comes so late in the album, and too late in Cain’s story, that Willoughby is really just a frightened and weak young man - in the final lyrics he begs to be taken home. His voice is frail, the words barely perceptible at such a low register as a sprawling wail threatens to obscure him entirely. As Willoughby fades further into a haze, it is clear he is not the person Cain has led herself to believe.

“As Willoughby fades further into a haze, it is clear he is not the person Cain has led herself to believe”

With the romance collapsing, the final song on the record (returned to Cain’s perspective) dissects both the physical events and emotional episodes that made Cain and Willloughby’s separation unavoidable. Most importantly, she questions whether she ever truly understood who he was, and here her fatal flaw is finally laid bare. Just as she created a false fantasy about Janie all those tracks ago, she has idealised and over-romanticised Willoughby – he does not have the toughness that Cain needs to be supported with. Encapsulated in fourteen words: ‘I can wait if I want / But it’ll never be good enough like I wanna believe it is’ Hayden leaves us with the devastating prospect – love cannot conquer all.