“If it’s meant to be, then it will be.”
There was a sudden chill in the air; the leaves began to change color, fall, and decay on the ground, and I couldn’t help but think of the body of Ethel Cain decaying in her boyfriend’s basement freezer.
There’s no need for alarm; Ethel Cain is not actually dead. She’s only dead on the album Preacher’s Daughter, created by Florida native Hayden Anhedönia, whose artistic persona is Ethel Cain. To put it plainly, there is no one doing what she is doing in music right now, so I wanted to share my thoughts about her most recent album, Preacher’s Daughter, specifically her song “Sun Bleached Flies.”
This nearly eight-minute track is the second to last track on the album, but it very much serves as the finale, with “Strangers” being more of an epilogue. For many people, like myself, who have struggled to find acceptance and forgiveness in their trauma and life struggles, “Sun Bleached Flies” is a stand-out track on the album.
I found Ethel Cain and her music came to me during a time in my life when I was holding a lot of anger. I heard the section of her screaming in “Ptolemaea” as a viral TikTok sound and was immediately intrigued because I’d never heard anything like that before. So, I decided to listen to the entire album. Needless to say, I was immediately captivated.
I spent a lot of that dreary winter with Preacher’s Daughter on repeat. The melancholy of “House in Nebraska,” “Hard Times,” and “Family Trees,” the anger of “Ptolemaea” and the beauty of “Televangelism” spoke to me in a way most music hasn’t before. It’s rare to find an artist whose music can capture the true depth of emotion you yourself are feeling.
As I grew more familiar with the album, one song in particular stood out as a favorite. “Sun Bleached Flies,” was written from Cain’s perspective in the afterlife, where she is able to finally find peace with her life and death.
“But I always knew that in the end, no one was coming to save me/So I just prayed and I keep praying and praying and praying.”
When I first started listening to this song, I clung to it like it was a prayer of its own. I was so desperate to one day accept the things that had happened to me, to stop demanding “Why me?” to the universe or a higher power. Much like Ethel Cain in the song, I realized no one was going to come save me.
However, unlike Ethel Cain in the song, I was very much alive and I was able to save myself. A popular line in the song is “God loves you, but not enough to save you,” and I believe that religion aside, this line is true. If you wait around for someone else to swoop in and save you from your problems, you’re going to spend your whole life waiting.
The difficult truth is this: even if you weren’t the one who put you into the situation you’re in, even if you did nothing to deserve the trauma you went through, which is absolutely true; the job to get yourself out of it is on your shoulders.
That’s not to say it won’t be easy. One of the biggest battles of my life has been acceptance, and it’s still something I have trouble with. Acceptance isn’t something you just find once, it’s something that you have to uncover again and again. I can speak from experience; it does get easier every time.
“I forgive it all as it comes back to me.”
After putting in the work in therapy and time passing (because time does heal the majority of wounds, as much as we don’t like to think it does), I was finally able to find acceptance. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it came to me, but all I can say is that things feel a lot lighter now.
I was finally able to hear “Sun Bleached Flies” live in August, when I attended Ethel Cain’s concert at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon. I was worried she wouldn’t play it, but thankfully she played it as the last song before the two encores. I finally got to feel all the acceptance I’d worked for in the same room as the artist whose song helped me reach that point, and it meant more to me than I could ever imagine.