Photography Jason Nocito
Stylist Angelina Vitto
Style Director Heidi Bivens
Interview Nicolaia Rips
Hayden Anhedönia tells me plainly. From her Southern Gothic aesthetic to her artistic taste—pulled from everywhere, from Tumblr to the Bible—the artist, better known as Ethel Cain, also has a bit of bite.
In 2022, her debut album Preacher’s Daughter moved her from the fringe into the center of the indie pop universe. The album, a sweeping story about the life of a woman named Ethel Cain, is a ravenous work—commanding, pleading, and attentive.
If the line between character (Ethel) and artist (Hayden) feels smudged, that’s deliberate:
"I think that if I had all of my favorite art explained to me, I wouldn’t like it anymore," she considers. "A little mystery is good for the world. As I’ve gotten older, I just want to lean into it even more, blur the lines even further. Ethel Cain will always be the through line. She will always be the tentpole story, the eponymous character. But, you know, I grew up loving Lord of the Rings. I grew up loving The Legend of Zelda. I grew up loving these projects that have these big moments. But then there are the little offshoots. I think the best way to be an artist is to remember what makes you ‘you’ but not be afraid to change everything else around it."
Her newest project is an hour-and-a-half-long, nine-track EP (she jokes about calling it that) called Perverts. Punish, a track on her new EP, will be released on November 1st.
But on this call, we’re not talking about that. We’re here to talk about writing. For her HommeGirls cover story, Hayden wrote a piece of literary fiction, half-inspired by The Pilgrim’s Progress, a seminal work of Christian literature, and half-inspired by a philosophical framework she’s been developing around the 12 pillars of simulacrum.
As she tucks her light brown hair behind her ears, I notice her skin has been blacked out, covered in ink from fingertips to the wrist, with only the words GOD SENT visible on the knuckles. Much of Hayden’s work draws from her life in Tallahassee and her formative early experiences in the church.
“I want to hone my style, I want to capture the eloquence and the poetry of that kind of that bygone age of the late 1800s, into the early 1900s. It’s very calculated and it’s very well stated, but it’s also got bite to it, because a lot of the writers at that time were little shits”
Regarding her current connection to God, Hayden’s perspective is expansive:
"I think that every human being naturally experiences some form of transcendentalism. Whether it’s a named God, or something you devote your life to—literature, art, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll—everybody gives in to something. Even if it’s nihilism, even if it’s isolationism, no matter what it is, everybody has a God. They have something that gets them up in the morning. It may not have anything to do with religion, but I think everybody has something like a higher power."
Her text explores that relationship through a traveler’s tale—how does an individual navigate the chiaroscuro of the human experience?
“I think that if I had all of my favorite art explained to me, I don’t think I would like it anymore. A little mystery is good for the world.”
On our call, Hayden lists some of her favorite writers, aka the little shit rat pack—Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Donald Ray Pollock—and what she’s been reading: Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre.
I tell her to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. She tells me to read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison.
"I do not want to be primarily a musician forever. I want to be a filmmaker first and foremost. But I want to write my scripts. I want to write these films, and I would like to write books. I want to be a much better writer than I am," Hayden says.
I can’t think of a single writer who doesn’t feel the same way—like Hayden’s character’s journey through the darkness, it’s a rite of passage.
I ask her if she thinks she’s a little shit, and she laughs.
“You have to acknowledge that you’re at least a little bit of a shit when you’re an artist.”
"I am 100% a little shit. It’s also something I’m very insecure about because I value people who are very level-headed and almost never seem to show emotion. I mean, every artist is an asshole. To devote your entire life to a story that you wrote and then think, ‘Well, everyone will care about what I wrote. Everybody will just hang on every word that I say’... like, you have to be an asshole. So, I don’t want to be a full-blown asshole and lean into it, but you have to acknowledge that you’re at least a little bit of a shit when you’re an artist."
The Consequence of Audience
By Hayden Anhedönia
As I went through the long, long wood, I felt nothing, and I was nothing, and I was at ease. The grey ash trees and their mottled plumage were as one, curving and branching to form a ceiling overhead. Vast corridors stretched off in all directions before me, behind me, all around me. O, what praise I could sing of that never-ending dusk fall I spent between those oaks! None came with me, none came upon me, for I was alone, and I was at ease. Yet came the day the trees broke, the corridor ended, and I was thrust upon the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark. There, I saw my first face and heard footsteps—few and far between—but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see. I had never noticed them in the woods, for I was at ease. Here, the taut skin seemed to stretch and sweat, almost glowing, as if exasperated by their own grip. For as I wandered the Great Dark, there was nothing but grey, barren rock as far as any eye could see. It made a passerby out of an observer. Yet, within the smothering toil of my apathy, I had heard the bell. A murmur of God between their slick, bent fingers ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My muscles groaned against the weight of the skin around them, aching to be set loose.
All at once, I saw, from where I stood, a great dome atop a hill on the horizon before me. Yes, I saw it there with my own two eyes! The white exterior peered at me through the mist, barely distinguishable from the dark sky behind it, as though all the world beyond was cut from the same slab, only slightly effaced. It was greater than life, greater than the wood, greater than all else that filled this dark, and my gullible delight was that it was all mine. One could follow me to it, but they could not follow me in. My hands stretched outwards with an audible cracking in the bone as I crept forward there.
I could not tell you the rest. I would not even attempt, for it would change no-thing. To know if I did go completely naked into the theater of the divine. If I did need for no-thing, want for no-thing. If I was then full to the brim, cylindrical pull slid through my gaping jaw into my endless throat. If I saw it there, shimmering through the veil like pearlescent oil over crystal water. If it heard me singing with every atom that formed me, through every orifice and wound I had, polytonal in my begging for it to complete me with the fifth. If it looked into me, saw how I needed to know what God knows and to be with him. If it spoke back to me in flat dissonance, “how couldn’t ye?”
It would be of no good to speak these things to you. In what way I was still returned to the ground, even if beneath it, intact with my puerile need to repeat my-self and my mistakes. Who would not climb the wall for a peer over the edge? The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool. I am as my hands are; twisting in on themselves and bursting at the seams. I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now. I am, I am, I am! But I will not tell you the visceral details, as you already know them. You all do.
"It’s happening to every-body."
