"Thoroughfare" by Ethel Cain is a near-10-minute love ballad that takes the listener on the journey of how she met her lover on the Thoroughfare and they traversed across the country together from Texas to California. Like any good love song, you know exactly how it's gonna go. Girl meets boy, girl and boy are friends and looking for love elsewhere, the closer they get to one another, the more they realize that their one true love was right in front of them the whole time. The details slip through the cracks and it doesn’t matter exactly what the lyrics are saying--the music crescendos and the singer’s voice is sweet and powerful with a sultry undertone, and the song ends with nearly 3 minutes of vocal scatting and intermittent “Oh Yeah”s. By the end of the track most listeners remark feeling good and that they’re feeling jealous of the love story Cain describes, wishing that they could experience the Strangers-Friends-Lovers trope for themselves. The story of the love ballad is clear just from the structure of it; you don’t need to listen to the rest of the album and the tracks that follow it to understand what the lyrics mean---right?
What if I told you that none of this was true? What if I told you that “Thoroughfare” isn’t a love song at all, but was actually a 10 minute long recounting of a 20 year old girl’s kidnapping? The important thing missing from what you know of “Thoroughfare” is the context of the album in which it resides. Preacher’s Daughter is the debut album by Hayden Anhedonia, better known by her artist name, Ethel Cain. The story of Preacher’s Daughter follows the character of Ethel Cain, a 20 year old daughter of a preacher from the fictional town of Shady Grove, Alabama in the early 1990s. 10 years after her father died, following the mysterious disappearance of her one true love Willoughby Tucker, Ethel sets out to leave her small town and find the love of her life. I’m not gonna give you a track-by-track breakdown, as the story of “Thoroughfare” opens up the second act of the album, but I will give you the set up for how our protagonist, Ethel, ends up in Texas.
The first 6 tracks of the album set out to establish who Ethel is. As we already know, Ethel is a daughter of a small-town big-time Southern Baptist preacher, Joseph, who is the center-piece to Shady Grove. The family dynamic in private, however, is much more grim. Ethel faces Sexual Assault at the hands of her father who also abuses his wife, Vera. When Ethel is in High School, she enters a relationship with Willoughby Tucker and she considers him to be the one true love of her life. After a mysterious tornado hits the town, Willoughby disappears and never comes back home; his fate is left unclear. Later on, Ethel leaves town where she meets her next boyfriend Logan. The two are living a life of crime together before Logan gets tragically killed in a major Police shootout. After this, Ethel has to keep moving, and this is where she finds Isaiah.
From Ethel’s perspective, she meets Isaiah on the Thoroughfare and they fall in love. Her perspective of this as a standard romantic meet-cute is evident in lines such as, “For the first time since I was a child, I could see man who wasn’t angry,” “Cause in your pickup truck with all of your dumb luck is the only place I think I'd ever wanna be,” and “...we found Heaven in time where your western sunshine met my deep Southern wet.” All of these lines clearly depict feelings of romance towards Isaiah and a deep fondness for him, as she believes he is treating her like no man ever had before. And she’s right, technically, in the sense that no one else has treated her this way before, but not in the way she believes.
In the track immediately following “Thoroughfare,” “Gibson Girl,” we find that Ethel has been pimped out by Isaiah, who force-feeds her drugs and is making her dance in the back of shady clubs. Even in this song, the average listener, without context, is taking this as a sexy romantic track, due to the nature of its structure. It has overtly sexy lyrics and was produced fully with the intention of Anhedonia to sound sexy and sultry. It is not meant to be obviously bad. Anhedonia takes the expectations upheld by the sound and structure of typical songs about love and sex, and entirely subverts them in such a way that the listener is unaware of, unless they delve further into the context of the album.
Furthermore, following “Gibson Girl,” the next 3 tracks of the album detail Ethel being held hostage, shot, killed, and ascending to heaven. Most people upon a first reaction to the album reach the climax of the album (these 3 tracks, but specifically, “Ptolemaea” and “August Underground”) and feel scared, jarred, and confused. They were not expecting such a dark grim turn after what was just a happy and sexy and romantic multi-track run of the album. Again, this structure that upholds certain expectations leaves the listener completely shocked once it is subverted. How could the sweet man from Thoroughfare do this to her? What happened? Why did he change?
However, if we take an even closer look, we’ll see that there was one key clue that lets the reader know what really is about to happen to Ethel in “Thoroughfare,” and that Ethel is an unreliable narrator in this portion of the album. There is one line in “Thoroughfare” that can entirely slip through the cracks if the listener is expecting a typical romantic ballad (which of course they would be because if it looks and sounds like a love song, why wouldn’t it be one, right?). It comes toward the beginning of the song in the second verse (approximately the 1:40 mark), “I didn’t trust no one, but you said, ‘Baby, don’t run…’.” This is the biggest clue in the song that something is amiss here. Why would Isaiah tell her not to run if he was someone to be trusted? On an initial listen without context, this line could just be interpreted as Isaiah telling her not to run from what’s good for her, another common trope in love stories. But once the listener is aware of the context of the album and the true meaning of the song, it gets a lot more nefarious. Isaiah is literally telling Ethel not to run because he is kidnapping her.
In fact, the entire meaning of each lyric changes once you know the context. Upon deeper inspection, you come to see just how dark and one-sided the entire song is. Ethel is wandering the side of the road in torn up clothes, scared after what just happened with Logan. Isaiah, a man at least 10 years her senior, if not more, sees this girl wandering the side of the road looking tattered and vulnerable and decides to coax her into his truck. He manipulates her by saying he is looking for love, a love just like the ones his parents had. She literally states in the song that she is not looking for love, but she supposes she’ll come with him if it’ll make him happy. In a typical love story, this would be the part where Girl loves Boy at first sight, but decides to play it cool because of her scorned past. But in a subversion of this trope, it makes more sense that the listener takes Ethel seriously here and that she’s reluctant to go with him, but due to her past complex relationships with men, she can’t help but feel like she must please him. They embark on a road trip out west where, again, Isaiah is manipulating Ethel into believing that he’s looking for a lover for himself, and is totally not Ethel. She says that the more time they spend together, the more she starts to see him differently because, “for the first time since [she] was a child [she] could see a man who wasn't angry.” Within the context of the album, we know that this was Isaiah displaying the typical signs of an abuser in which he is lovebombing her and acting especially sweet as a manipulation tactic in order to further gain the trust of his victim. I am not going to keep going verse-by-verse to analyze how each one seems one way within the expected structure, versus what it is actually describing once you understand that the expected structure of a love song has been subverted, as that would get redundant, but I would implore you now, to take another look at these lyrics through this lens, and come to your own understanding of the story at hand.
In Mary Klages’ Literary Theory: The Complete Guide, she notes that Structuralism is the coming to know what a story is without needing to examine the content, and that simply understanding the story’s structure will tell you everything you need to know. She puts it like this, “Structuralist analysis bypasses [the problem of universality obscuring or erasing important differences between cultures, time periods, and belief systems] by bypassing all questions of content: a structure can be universal, the same in all times and all cultures, precisely because it is only a structure, a skeleton, a framework on which specific individual content is built.” She then goes on to liken it to Mad Libs, in which the structure of each story is the same, but the key details are going to be filled in differently by each player, creating a new, yet familiar story.
I find it especially exhilarating as a consumer of media, when the experience that the main character is going through is hidden to the viewer/reader/listener, and we are sort of experiencing the same thing alongside the main character. I think that experiencing stories from the perspective of an unreliable narrator is an exciting way to subvert the typical tropes and expectations found in every narrative, and provides a fresh perspective on something you thought you knew every aspect of. As the character of Ethel Cain is experiencing Stockholm Syndrome from her kidnapper, Isaiah, we the listeners do as well. We get so caught up in the romantic lyrics and jubilant production, and maybe we begin projecting our own romantic fantasies onto these characters, that we ignore the hidden-in-plain-sight signs that there’s actually danger present. In cycles of abuse, the one who has been abused is more likely to continue to be abused in further relationships as the signs become more muddied. The victim loses sight of what healthy love looks like, especially if it is something that they never even got to experience as a child.
Sure, it could be common knowledge that we shouldn’t talk to strangers who meet us on the side of the road in middle-of-nowhere Texas, but what if we’re the lucky ones? What if all of the turmoil and abuse we endured was all to get us to this point? What if we lowered our inhibitions just this one last time? Well, that’s how you end up in the stomach of your kidnapper 2,000 miles away from home.
Oh wow! I wasn't expecting that! Learning that the tracks described a girl's abduction story. The fact that these tracks are meticulous over depicting that is so cool! Not only that but the way the songwriter uses songs to show how the abduction came to play is very powerful. Within their lyrics is insane, I love the way how you depict the one-sided experience, I think that holds very significant weight on the audience considering the fact that both sides of the story isn't represented here. Great points here!
ReplyDeleteThis was an excellent read! It has inspired me to do a structuralism piece on a song or two, it serves as a firm reminder that probably the source of media that engages with structuralism the MOST is music. I can think of so many instances were a song shows you something, tells you something, or moves you in a way that reaches far beyond surface level, but it hadn't hit me to look into one until this fine piece of writing. "experiencing the same thing as the character/writer" is EXACTLY the things I hit upon in my structuralism piece, and its what makes it my favorite lens we have studied so far. It is especially poignant here, as when we are hit with the reality that we too had let our guard down, it is a chilling realization. The writing kept a good pace throughout, and did a great job of connecting back to the text to introduce someone who may not be familiar with the concept of what structuralism is.
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