Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You: the final chapter

By Web Editor Scarlett Huang

Singer-songwriter Ethel Cain has always disregarded genre constraints to create a unique, cinematic musical journey for her listeners. With her new album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, released on August 8, she crafts an unforgettable experience through her trademark unconventional album structure: long tracks, instrumental interludes, and impressive vocal expressions. 

Cain writes albums as not just standalone tracks, but as stories with plots, depth, and characters. In her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, Cain establishes a female protagonist reflecting Cain’s experiences as a queer teen growing up in a heavily religious Southern Baptist community, and her traumatic, wrought path to self discovery and maturity. The album primarily explores Cain’s relationship with Willoughby Tucker, a character introduced in Preacher’s Daughter’s  “A House in Nebraska,” an integral character from Cain’s past. He is referred to as Cain’s first and deepest love, but also the one who left her with the most regrets and loneliness. The album opens with “Janie,” setting the themes in Cain’s relationship with Tucker, with lines like “She was my girl first / I know you love her / But she was my girl first.” Cain’s soft, sultry voice expresses the desire and youthful obsession that she once felt for Willoughby Tucker, and draws listeners in by foreshadowing the inevitable failure of her relationship. Interspersed with instrumental tracks like “Willoughby’s Interlude,” and “Radio Towers,” Cain skillfully utilizes experimental sounds to build her narrative world. “Willoughby’s Theme,” for example, captures the terrifying, life changing feeling of falling in love for the first time. These instrumentals are a token of Cain’s, as she uses sounds like beeping hospital machines to convey the characters’ real life experiences.

Her lead single, “F**k Me Eyes” emulates a comparatively synth and pop vibe, in contrast to the slow and ambient songs in the album. Still, “F**k Me Eyes” has its intentional place in Cain’s story: lines like “The boys can’t get enough of her ‘honey, f**k me’ eyes” and “They never see her wiping her “f**k me” eyes” explores her identity as a transgender woman in a religious community.

Finally, in the shockingly long final track, “Waco, Texas” takes listeners on a fifteen minute musical tragedy that concludes Cain’s devastating youth. It illustrates the death of her childhood dreams and love for Willoughby Tucker, also touching on the myth of the American Dream. “I’ve been picking names for our children / wondering how we’re going to feed them,” comments on the classic doomed, American teenage love story, reflected perfectly in the last line of the album: “It’ll never be as good as I believe it is.” The music builds to a crescendo, then closes with a mellow piano, illustrating Tucker leaving Cain lonely and broken — a situation Cain understands but can’t accept.

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You puts to rest the character encapsulated since  Preacher’s Daughter, ending a chapter of Cain’s life. It tells the story of intense love, loss, loneliness, and failure through the eyes of a growing woman with a rural American childhood. While some say the  unfortunate endings to Cain’s stories do not make for a great story, this album proves the cinematic value of her work — blending harsh reality, the common American story, and artful arrangement to create a great cinema worth listening to.

Grade: A