desirepathzine

[desirepathzine]

Scent Memory: Hove Parfumeur

I'm currently slated to take a train to New Orleans in two weeks. I have taken this train once before, last year, to spend a few days with my best friend and see the opening date of The Cure's North American tour. This year, we'll probably just hang out and enjoy the city. We're last on the list for Echo and the Bunnymen tickets. I love them, but if we don't go, there are worse places to be without concert tickets than New Orleans.

My best friend and I are unabashedly goth kids at heart. We love Bauhaus and Siouxsie, art and architecture, dead poets and their work, wandering graveyards together, crying on each other's shoulders. When we hung out with my younger sister for the first time, she dramatically tuned to me and said, "You're both just so", she put her hand to her forehead, "Melancholic!"

We wear it proudly.

I often talk about my perfume knowledge and memories with them. When we were planning our first trip to New Orlenas, we both stumbled upon the recommendation of one of America's oldest perfume houses, family run for four generations, now in a tiny shop on Chartres stree, Hove Parfumeur. My dear friend treated me to three dram vials of whatever I wished.

New Orleans is one of the only truly 'old' places in the United States (old is an extremely relative thing here), which is astounding considering the absolute gauntlet of challenges it has faced as an entity. I think Hove embodies that. Small, strong, distinct, and extremely hospitable, the little shop on Chartres street hosts a variety of scents that are all distinctly New Orleans. All of its facets represented in little vials.

Upon entering, the first thing I noticed were the stone floors. Much like everything in the quarter, there is no uniform pavement, watch your step. It's a beautiful space, with what I believe might be a rentable room on the second floor, someone was leaving to start their French Quarter afternoon as my friend and I arrived. All of the scents are pre-spritzed on testers for you to peruse, and they're available in a variety of different options: bubble baths, body powders (essential for dealing with being sweaty in the humid Louisiana climate). There are several historical recipes that have not been changed in years, evoking hoop skirts and southern belles, the raucous celebrations of Mardi Gras past, and paying homage to the voodoo roots ever present in New Orleans.

My three picks were as follows:

Kiss in the Dark is a lovely, light, spicy floral. It is the least egregiously spicy spice scent I've ever tried (and I love egregiously spicy). It is dark and feminine and lovely and its name suits it perfectly. Hove's website decribes it as "neither heavy nor light", which is remarkable for a perfume like this. I wore it almost immediately out the door. I also ended up pairing it with Le Labo's Rose 31 and it worked wonderfully.

Mantrap is a resinous spicy scent, also worthy of its name, I guess (I didn't trap any men with it, but I also didn't set that intention when I wore it). This vial travelled with me to California and worked well against all of the Baccarat Rouge and Mojave Ghost that clouds the elevators and sidewalks there. It feels a little dangerous, mayhaps a touch more edgy than many of Hove's other offerings. It has become my go-to goth nights scent, to perfume a night of dancing in heavy makeup and fishnets in a small room.

Flame is unusually described as "beautifully worn by dark redheads", which, I am. So I had to try this. It's heavy, bold, and extremely spice forward ( I guess I was really feeling the spices on this particular trip, but they are a usual suspect in my perfume lineup, so this was unsurprising). This was the scent that ended up on my neck during that beautiful Cure concert that we were in town to see. My favorite song by The Cure is their track for the ever iconic The Crow soundtrack, "Burn". It's a perfect scent for that song, and I was delighted when they played it that night. Delighted in that I burst into tears and had to be held up by my dearest friend, who completely understands how hard that song hits for me. "there wasn't anybody else I'd rather see that song with" they said. I did the same for them during "A Forest".

It's been a year and my vials are well loved. But what to do on a new journey, a different one? We know so much more about the city now, where we like to eat, what we like to do. What new scents will I take a peak at this time?

I love research, especially for travel. I love digging deep into something that fills my brain (hence why Desire Path even exists). So while bored at my dayjob I'll put together guides in Apple Maps, and pinpoint places that matter to me, why I want to do there, do deep research on restaurants I may not even try while in town, just laying down a grid of interest for my next adventure. Today I was looking through Hove's catalog, imagining what might scent the next trip. and here are some possibilities that I am very interested to test out when next I am on Chartres Street.

Valiant - what a word, what a thing to name a perfume! This is a near certain buy for me. Sandalwood and mandarin orange sound like a perfect combo for journeying through new parts of the city, and for keeping that brave flame I find when I travel going, longafter I return and go back to the day job. It also might be an nice contrast to my heavy spicy picks from last time. I think I'm going for more freshness and green this time around (which also helps keep spirits up in damp heat of New Orleans, there's a lot of forecasted rain for our time there).

Heliotrope - a note that is rare, and I have no idea why. Any vanilla and heliotrope fragrance has a permanent place on my perfume tray. So feminine, so lovely, so pretty. I look forward to sniffing Hove's take on this.

Rue Royale - just as Flame was suggested for dark redheads, Rue Royale is apparently suitable for fair brunettes, which tickles me. The only description, barring hair preference, for it on the website is 'dry and light' which I am always down to try. Again, probably nice for wandering the packed quarter.

Nude - I thought this might be a skin musk type of affair, something I usually love when travelling or going to concerts since it is less likely to bother anyone sitting around me, but it is described as a walk through a tropical garden with a hint of musk. The name is an aspiration, not a reality then. Love it.

Fascinator - this might be the southern belle fragrance that punk goth kid would love. It has that secret key to unlocking the southern gothic through scent: oakmoss. Seriously, if you need the withering belle energy, find your nearest oakmoss scent. It sounds rich and warm.

But who knows what will entice me when I'm finally back in such a unique place? That's the best part about perfume. Notes that I thought I understood will constantly reinvent themselves when put in the right position, viewed through a new context. It's a small magic happening all the time. And there is no better place to experience magic than New Orleans, fresh off the train, and with a friend who knows that too. I'm looking forward to it more than anything.

[desirepathzine]

Scent Memory: From the Garden by Maison Margiela Replica

Here is something different from me: I want to talk to you about perfumes. Perfume is pretty popular to talk about on the internet right now, but I want to offer something different than just "smell like a microtrend!" or "here's a dupe!" (dupes are fine, I have a few). I just want to talk about how I use scent to preserve and keep memories.

I'm in the process of being diagnosed with CPTSD. My memory is tricky because of this. I tend to lose the best things and hang onto things I would rather not remember, more intensely than others. Brains are funny things, and that's okay. I discovered earlier in my life that perfume was a powerful tool to connect me to things I want to keep in my brain.

Usually I pick a scent and take it out with me to a concert or an event or a trip so that I have a strong tie to that particular smell for that particular happening. But today's perfume selection actually managed to reverse engineer this for me.

From the Garden by Maison Margiela's ever-popular Replica line features notes of tomato leaf, green mandarin, geranium, and patchouli. The nose behind this scent is Olivier Cresp.

It smells like my paternal grandmother's yard. Exactly. A place that I haven't been to in sixteen years.

It's so rare that I am instantly transported by a scent like I was the first time I smelled From the Garden. I normally have to create a place to be transported to, assign a perfume to a band I love and wear that scent to their concert, something like that. At first sniff, I was immediately out in the small garden at her small house in rural Kentucky, where she grew tomatoes and had an apple tree, and a variety of flowers that I loved as a kid but can't name as an adult.

This grandma was a single mom who raised my dad and two siblings, and suddenly passed away when I was 12. By all means I should have had more time with her. I wish we had, my other grandparents were not particularly interested in being grandparents to my siblings and I.

Driving several hours from home to visit was always a big summer adventure, and getting to be out in the grass and wild landscape after being packed into the car was always a treat.

Tomato leaf is an underutilized smell in perfumery, and it's the one that I associate the most strongly with those childhood experiences (the tomatoes from those vines were so beautiful, big and juicy and we often had to resist the urge to snap off the ones that weren't ready). I was in the middle of a Sephora when I first caught a whiff of From the Garden and had to stand there in awe that here was truly an experience I missed, that I hadn't thought about in a while, in a bottle. It was surprising and lovely, and honestly, very touching. I purchased a travel size for my birthday this year and excitedly gave a sample spray on paper to my dad, who agreed: that was her house.

It's a shockingly lovely wear, the sweet tartness of the mandarin and the green freshness of the geranium helping to elevate the earthiness of the tomato leaf (I rarely get that patchouli note, it's a perfect blend with the top notes).

What a gift to be transported. I'm very thankful for that. A spell I didn't have to craft.

[desirepathzine]

The Summer of boygenius

There was one thing my little sister wanted to do for her birthday: go see her favorite band, boygenius. And she wanted me to take her.

I remember when she found out that they were reuniting. Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers are all fantastic musicians and writers on their own, and had recorded an EP a few years back, before Phoebe's extremely big breakout hit Punisher, which came to define many covid quarantines in 2020, and was nominated for several Grammys. But nobody really knew when all three would get back together for another record of poignant lyricism and folksy instrumentation. She told me "this is probably all I'm going to be talking about for a while, just so you know."

I know what it's like when your favorite band is out there in the world again. And I know how important it is to seize those opportunities to see them perform, with others around you there for the exact same thing. It's a big deal. And my little sister absolutely needed to experience boygenius. We both knew this.

Their album, 'the record', released, and it felt like a massive moment. I put off listening to it for a while until I knew that we'd be seeing the band, just because I wanted it to be very fresh, but my little sister did indeed listen to it all the time that spring and summer. Not Strong Enough, the lead single, was inescapable and so I became achingly familiar with that one. I of course loved it. I will always remember singing it with the windows open with my best friend in the passenger seat.

I actually popped it on in the car the other day on the way to work and forgot that the devastating "We're In Love", one of Lucy Dacus' contrubutions, is on 'the record' and had a category five crying event in the middle of traffic. Dacus is perhaps my favorite member of boygenius. They're all incredible in what they do, and it feels wrong to pick favorites. But Lucy is my favorite.

My little sister loves Phoebe, and because she loves Phoebe, she says Julian is her favorite.

Dates were announced, festival dates of all things. I had been to a festival once in the past few years but this looked to be a chiller take on the festival, only a few bands and only one stage. That was doable. The show was just a week and a half before my little sister's birthday, so it was her gift. Our parents asked who was taking her, like it was even a question.

My aforementioned visiting friend in the passenger seat had brought tattoo pens as a fun thing to do while we hung out together, the Inkbox ones. They forgot to send a few pieces of the full kit but we nonetheless doodled on each other as you do when you're just hanging out, watching TV. My sister requested a few silly tattoos for the show, and I agreed to do some for her, and she asked to do a few for me. She wanted a dog in a space suit, and a broken clock. I put TRUE BLUE across my knuckles like a sad biker.

We went to the ReSET festival date, in Nashville. It was held in a park that also contains the Parthenon, a replica of the Greek structure, and the festival was set up so that the edges of this massive monument seemed to contain the stage.

The first notable thing of the day, was that it was ungodly hot. The real feel temperature that day was 115 degrees. And I had sustained a pretty intense sunburn the day before, selling my wares at an open air market where my tent was really not doing it's job. This worried me, as many things worry me. My sister, a band camp veteran and frequent sunbather, did not let this absolute monstrosity of a temperature defeat her spirits. And for that I'm thankful.

We ate good cheap Japanese food and bought a big sunhat for me prior to walking over to the park. My little sister had impulsively taken her plushie of Bingo from the show Bluey in our clear plastic festival bag, and several attendees pointed out this emotional support Bingo, and took pictures with her. It was very cute.

The crowd was incredible. It truly felt like a celebration of friendship, of joy. Everyone was taking care of each other, getting water for people, sharing snacks. Clairo, one of the openers and an exceptionally talented person, paused a song to make sure someone who had passed out was removed safely (that heat!). We had found our spot near the sound booth, and the technicians were working with security to pass out ice and waters.

The Nashville boygenius date is somewhat notable for the fact that all of the bandmembers appeared in drag. In protest to the attempted banning of drag entertainers in Tennessee, everyone, down to the crew, were in some form of exaggerated gender performance. When the screen first showed the boys singing "Without You Without Them" backstage, there was audible shock and awe at seeing Phoebe in her Dolly Parton teased-to-God wig and Julian actually wearing makeup, instead of their usual Thom Browne designed school uniforms. Lucy, still suffering from a concussion incurred during an onstage dogpile on tour, quipped that she was 'serving cunt-cussion' as she primly took her seat with her tea and sunglasses.

The most surprising thing that impacted me was just seeing these friends absolutely shred on guitar together. As a girl guitar player, sometimes I forget how much I would have yearned to see three girls singing and playing together, with an all-girl backing band no less, even just a few years ago. It was a revelation. I cried, just seeing them have fun and celebrate their friendship. I know that the friendship bracelet trading really took off with the Taylor Swift tour that was also occurring that summer, but God did it feel designed fore the vibes of a boygenius show. People were showing up in handmade shirts they they made to match their friends, trading patches and pins and stickers and bracelets. It was also an undeniably queer friendly event, even beyond the fun drag names and costumes (Phoebe took great pleasure in announcing her moniker for the night was Queef Urban), taking place in a state that even now is becoming increasingly more hostile to queer joy. Julian Baker, who is from Memphis, was vocal in her disdain for this, raising a "FUCK BILL LEE", the current governor of Tennessee, yell from the crowd before launching into Anti-Curse. It was powerful.

The moment I will never forget is this: the sun was setting, beautifully, over the Parthenon, it was drawing later into the set (which had started early so as to avoid some incoming rain), and the boys sat down to perform "Ketchum, ID", one of my absolute favorites, and I had retreated towards the back of the soundbooth, where I could keep an eye on my little sister, but also avoid some of the claustrophobia of the crowd (I'm very much a sit in the back kind of person), and there were two teenage girls in front of me, who had been bopping along to the music for the whole show. During Ketchum, ID, these two girls started to slowdance together. It was adorable. I of course have no idea who they were, any aspect of their lives, etc. but just seeing them dance together in a space where none of that mattered, where they could just do that together, and no one batted an eye? It got me. I cried. Ketchum will get me to cry on a good day anyway, but it was a moment I will never forget. The happiness, the friendship, the lack of judgement in a place that can be extremely judgemental.

It's an image that has stayed with me, through several more concerts that year, and I can't help but think of it anytime I listen to a boygenius song. My little sister had the best day of her life, coming off of the heels of a rough breakup, and I was honored that she asked me to be a part of it. And I was happy to run water and snacks to her whenever she wanted, or to take silly pictures of her with her plushies. It was a day of friendship and joy, and I'm forever grateful to Phoebe, Julien, and Lucy for bringing that joy with them wherever they go.

[desirepathzine]

I am going to build a beautiful life for myself.

[desirepathzine]

In attempting to live a fuller life off of the internet, I've been reading a lot more poetry. It started as attempting to microdose reading more words on a page without feeling the obligation of finishing a book or dedicating a larger amount of time to what I know will be a thriller that will devour my whole day. having my forseeable future deciated to a book used to be one of the great joys in my life when I was a kid, setting aside days to read whatever I had found in my latest trip to BooksAMillion with my dad (Always BAM, their discount section was unrivaled in my younger years).

I'm an adult with a job and three side gigs now. Always the sdie gigs. Always the hustle. One of those gigs, the one that I have a degree in, is acting, which also requires a large amount of reading and comprehending text on a deep level. A specialty in Shakespeare has given me reader's burnout that I have never experienced. It hurts. Reading was such a huge part of my identity as a kid through my teens. I was part of my library's teen advisory board, creating programs and picking materials that would line the shelves. Suddenly i couldn't get myself to participate, didn't have the money to buy books, and often returned library finds without cracking the cover.

It all felt daunting. It still does sometimes.

I'd always had a minor interest in poetry but was somewhat bullied and teased out of it by family and fellow readers. And indeed, the average poetry book that can be found in the local target is not very artistically fulfilling, living in the age of the instagram poet with Procreate drawings in the margins that didn't really do anything for me. Couple that with a few amateur slam poetry competitions I attended and I brushed off the concept of being INTO poetry for many years.

Even as Shakespeare burned me out of reading, it gave me new insight into poetry. And then I decided to throw myself into it more in late 2023, after stumbling upon a poem I loved deeply as a teen, Wilfred Owen's Maunday Thrusday. It remains my favorite poem of all time, although I am finding more and more stiff competition in my studies.

This, along with wishing I could stop staring at screens before bed, led me into tasking myself with reading a few poems while I laid in bed waiting for sleep. I found a collection of Rilke poems while traveling the Midwest, a poet I only really knew for being tattooed on Lady Gaga, and put it on my bedside table in hopes it would take.

Miraculously, it did.

Rilke's Duino Elegies have captured my imagination more than some novels I've ready in my life. Full of angels and the ocean and the sky, gracefully swooping between grand statements and personal anecdotes. Modern and classic all at the same time.

A friend recommended Rumi if I liked Rilke so much, which is where I am now. Rumi's work perfectly suits my current approach, a little before bed, maybe read in the bathtub if I have a good bath bomb at the ready.

I have always loved mysticism and deep religious ties and Rumi is very transporting in this way. He is both full of simple immediacy and deep wonderful layers to delve deep into. It's about being in love, with solitude, with another, with yourself. How wonderful.

It assuages nightmares, it makes life sunnier, it's ownderufl.

As many people are looking to divest from 24/7 screentime, I truly believe poetry is one of the best ways to start that journey, to touch some more grass, so to speak. Find what you love, seek it out, keep it by your bed.

[desirepathzine]

A couple of months before the Covid 19 pandemic sent me home from college, I was unable tot listen to anything but Head Like A Hole by Nine Inch Nails. Walking to and from class, sittng by myself, pounding through the blackbox speakers at 1030 at night when I could just lay on the floor and listen.

I'd been on the fringes of trad goth music for some time (the on-repeat listening prior to Head Like A Hole was A Letter to Elise by The Cure), but something about the mechanized anger of industrial was breaking me open in a different way. Powerful, vulnerable, LOUD.

I had been familiar with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' soundtrack work. One of the most foundational films of my youth was The Social Network, David Fincher's 2010 piece about the founding of Facebook, a movie that on release felt cutting edge and has only grown in prescience, feeling like an apocalyptic prophecy from a time before the site became synonymous with conspiracy theories and election fraud. The score to The Social Networrk was like nothing I had ever heard before. I, a homeschooled, deeply neurotic, deeply Christian tween was not in an environment conducive to listening to Nine Inch Nails yet (my mother regularly admonished me for the 70s punk that filled my iTunes library). But those sounds, sometimes desolate, sometimes manic, always compelling, were on constant rotation for years. I wrote many school papers and stared out many car windows to The Social Network score over the years. And always just kind of put the band itself off for another time.

That time arrived. I was 21, and feeling more and more like a person with something to say, ready to graduate into a world that I was eager to be a part of. That did not happen. In March of 2020, I was sent home for a two week spring break that turned into a forever spring break.

With nothing holding me together, confined to a house I had not wished to return to, and in circumstances that literally comprised my worst nightmares (I have long been a hypochondriac who used to have real and actual panic attacks about the outbreak of a new virus), one of the only effective ways I had found to cope was throwing myself into the music of Nine Inch Nails.

NIN as a band seems remarkably suited to pandemic times. Songs like "Every Day Is Exactly the Same" and "We're In This Together" felt almost too on the nose in the everyday banal struggles of the early Covid era in America. But for me, the most catharsis came from the bombastic rage of their famous Woodstock 94 set.

Trent Reznor and co. took to the stage absolutely coated in mud, fighting weather and faulty equipment, and smashed through a set of their early work, becoming the talk of the festival, and setting a high watermark for the culturally explosive year of 1994, perhaps the only time in history a band like Nine Inch Nails could chart as high as they did. The set features a rabid performance of Happiness in Slavery, two songs that were featured in classic films from the year (their cover of Joy Division's Dead Souls as featured in The Crow, and Burn from Natural Born Killers), Trent saying fuck on PPV TV and being quite pleased with himself, a sound issue riddled performance of their Grammy award winning "Wish" in which Trent still manages to scream the infamous "fist fuck" line into the mic, a tech team scrambling to dodge Yamaha DX-7s, guitarist Robin Finck getting tripped up in guitar chords and eating shit during Down In It, and in general, the sort of controlled chaos that I most strongly associate with Nine Inch Nails. The first time I watched this set, I was spellbound. Pretty Hate Machine, NIN's first album, was absolutely made to be heard live. As soon as I heard Trent option up into a scream on Terrible Lie's last verse, I was sold forever. To say nothing of the whirring rage of Sin, which remains my favorite Nine Inch Nails song most days.

I watched this performance, at minimum, twice a week. I too felt like a small screaming Trent Reznor, covered in mud, rolling around on the stage. It was cathartic, captivating, and a good way to mosh it out between zoom classes to finish my degree and anxiously watching the Covid case counter march steadily upwards.

Shortly before all hell broke loose, Nine Inch Nails was announced as an inductee into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. Normally, this entails an induction ceremony with a performance by the bands. (The 2020 class would have been particularly strange, seeing as three of its most famous entrants had passed on, Marc Bolan of T-Rex, Whitney Houston, and The Notorious B I G) . But nonetheless, I was looking forward to it.

Just as I did not to have a graduation ceremony in December of 2020, there was no cathartic reunion of past members for Nine Inch Nails. Just as some guy I didn't even know read my name from a list on a livestream, so Nine Inch Nails was given a slickly produced video package and a pre-filmed introductory message from Iggy Pop (it would've been cool if Iggy Pop read my name at graduation though).

I felt a sort of kinship, however small, in this fact. Culminations of years of hard work and promised celebration postponed and reworked again and again and again.

In 2021, as the vaccines rolled out and events little by little started to reappear, the Rock Hall museum reopened, and installed an exhibit for the 2020 class. There, right next to a Depeche Mode display, was enshrined a tribute to the Woodstock 94 performance, lovingly rendered with mud and all.

I immediately knew I had to see it. After some discussion, I begged it off as a graduation trip a year in the making, and in June of 2021, after vaccination, during a dip in cases prior to the Delta variant arriving in the states, my dad and I took a roadtrip to Cleveland. My dad, not a NIN fan by any means but a music lover who knows the kind of impact a band can make on a person, graciously escorted me up the country and listened patiently as I infodumped about my favorite band and made him listen to a lot of goth music in the car.

The day we arrived at the museum, I calmly took in the multitude of sights at the Rock Hall, moseying through relics of music history and reading all the plaques, but I was abuzz. I knew what floor the new inductees exhibit was on, and I knew when we were approaching. I sprinted off the escalator and there was the alcove, there was the installation, and blasting loudly in the little room was "We're In This Together". I had made it. I cried.

That in and of itself would have been a good full circle moment, but unbelievably, the story gets better. I ended up in Cleveland again a year later, seeing a q and a with NIN at the Rock Hall, where members past and present got together to celebrate the band's legacy, and the next day got to see all of them perform together, some for the first time in years, at the Blossom Center in Ohio. Sitting in a small lecture room with the folks who had made such a strong impact on my life and kept me going through some of the roughest times I had ever known was incredible. They were older, wiser, and all extremely gracious and very funny.

They resurrected the NIN Woodstock installation for the occasion, but I was too busy getting coralled into a VIP line to go to the Q and A and catching my best Discord friend after they tripped down the escalator to hug me to go see it. I hope other folks got to see it and have their full circle moment. It's crazy to think that a mannequin in raggedy clothes covered in fake mud with a DX-7 could have had such a big impact on my life, but every time I see a picture from my trip, or just the image itself out in the wild, I am overcome with emotions.

And now, as I enter yet another era of my life where things are uncertain and hard, I hold my two road trips very dear. As ever, thanks Trent.

[desirepathzine]

Are you living? Did you tell your Valentine you loved them? Even if your Valentine was a beloved childhood plush? These are important questions. I commend you. Drink water and eat an apple. You'll feel better.

[desirepathzine]

The Desire Path Ins and Outs of 2024

IN

Full album listens

creative display of plushies

hanging art on the wall instead of just letting it sit on desks and window sills

trimming your hair

wizard print. Forever. Stars and celestial symbols are always in.

Tie-in novels. Buffy. Vampire the Masquerade. The Crimson Peak novelization. They're in.

USING THE LIBRARY now more than ever

obnoxious jewelry from the thrift store.

writing for no one

OUT

Doubt

Fear

Doom scrolling

Finishing bad books

Out of character fanfiction

Not dancing when out at the club

Blind buying perfume

May we all do our best this year.

#zine #art #list #ins and outs #happy new year #2024

[desirepathzine]

Is SAVED! by Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter a Christian album?

Yes? Sort of?

Hayter's musical career seems to always fling her at the foot of God. Her previous work as Lingua Ignota protrays God like a horrifying eldritch god of vengeance conjured by some ritual on All Bitches Die, a gleaming and gilded Catholic executioner on CALIGULA, and folkloric legend of the Pennsylvania landscape on SINNER GET READY. In 2022, Hayter announced she was retiring the Lingua Ignota moniker, and the associated back catalog, citing the emotional and physical pain of this powerful music, and the toll it was taking to write it, record it, and tour it.

As a vocalist and a performer, I have cannot fathom how Hayter completed even one of these Lingua Ignota shows. Her voice is a multi-faceted instrument of destruction, soaring high, screaming in pain, perfectly cracking with authentic imperfection, and I cannot imagine preforming the musically complicated and emotionally taxing music of Lingua to enraptured crowds watching your every move. I just missed my chance to see her while she was promoting SINNER GET READY (I mixed up the dates on my calendar and was ready to go the day after she had departed Nashville). While I was blissfully ignorant of missing the show, Hayter was haphazardly getting ordained in a hotel outside of Nashville in preparation for her next project.

In October of 2023, a few months after the very last Lingua Ignota shows in London, Kristin reintroduced herself to the world with that new title obtained in Tennessee, and released SAVED! as Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.

Some of the tracks might be familiar tunes, for a variety of reasons. There are several old school hymns that I recognized from my Baptist upbringing. But Hayter had started performing some of this material while promoting Sinner Get Ready, and at a self-styled tent revival service at the first inaugural Perpetual Flame Festival, which marked the end of Lingua performances in the States.

Per Hayter, SAVED! was borne of a genuine attempt to find salvation through old time religion. Whether it 'worked' is up for debate, both in the album's narrative and in Hayter's demure and vague interview answers about her salvation. She built a doomsday cult bunker in the basement of her home, as featured on the album's cover and where the majority of the visuals for the record were filmed. She fasted before recording, blasted clips of revival sermons, and engaged in glossolalia, aka speaking in tongues, as part of the record.

It's much more stripped back than any of the expansive and grand Lingua instrumentation, mostly just Hayter and her prepared piano that was also used in previous touring, the inner strings of the instrument laden with chains and various other doodads that clang and whirr when she plays the keys. The lushly layered vocals are used sparingly. Perhaps most interestingly (and that's high praise on an album that regularly utilizes speaking in tongues), Kristin and longtime producer Seth Manchester recorded on tape, and proceeded to intentionally sabotage these physical recordings, stomping and smashing them, creating imperfections to further give these pieces a time, a place, and an irreplaceable atmosphere.

All of this makes SAVED! feel like a tape you found in the woods of a long passed tent revival, full of charismatic performances, blissfully imperfect voices, songs running into one another as the spirit moves, and maybe a snake handler or two. There are showstopping pieces like IDUMEA (the only track to feature synth) and I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS, manic interludes of well-known hymns (PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND, NOTHING BUT THE BLOOD OF JESUS), interlaced with spine tingling interjections of tape damage and glossolalia.

Hayter's original works pair well with the much older hymns and traditionals. Album opener I'M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN sets the tone perfectly, a march towards that imagined tent, inspired by the jovial piousness of the Louvin Brothers, as is ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL.

I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU is perhaps the closest a portrayal of the mission statement of the album: a bedridden narrator is beset by demons, that spill blood and inflict sickness, but finds release and freedom in celestial salvation. It's some of my favorite writing from Hayter on the album and maybe the strongest vocal performance as well, a technical feat. It never allows itself to become too beautiful, the song is always on the edge of complete oblivion from the keening feedback that appears throughout. It sounds like your ears ringing after an explosion. journey. MAY THIS COMFORT AND PROTECT YOU is a wailing prayer of protection, but it is external towards the listener as opposed to the internal reflection of its sibling songs. It functions almost as a benediction to the sanest part of the album.

But easily my favorite track on this album is THE POOR WAYFARING STRANGER, a traditional song that Hayter had been performing in her piano sets on tour. It is dark, moody, and she sings the third and fourth verses that are not heard as often but contain some of the most stunning lyricism.

So how does it end, this strange and beautiful tent revival in the woods? The closing track is the hymn HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING? Hayter's piano is unbound, all objects removed from the strings, her voice is in a comfy key that doesn't put her into theatrical strain, surely within the album's narrative all has ended well. But partially through the song's length, Hayter speaking in tongue rises, more manic and guttural than anywhere else on the record, and it is her alone, no archival sound, no crowd noise. Just her. Even after the song sweetly finishes, she is screaming, crying, voice rising and falling. At one point she chokes, coughs, inhales deeply, and falls right back into her trance. The tongues continue for roughly two minutes after any music has stopped.

It's a shocking, beautiful, and captivating finale to an album of interesting choices, one that sticks with the listener. I sat in silence for I don't know how long upon hearing it for the first time. Kristin had performed SINGING on tour as well, a light and airy hymn amidst the fire and brimstone conjured in either of her two sets on any given SINNER GET READY date. Her ability to transform it into a haunting album closer is incredible (the same can be said for NOTHING BUT THE BLOOD OF JESUS, which she sang a capella over the recording of Jimmy Swaggart's infamous apology sermon during those same shows).

It's an insane album, full of fascinating production choices, performed to perfection. But such wild choices on the heels of such acclaimed work can polarize an audience. Lingua Ignota was always an uncategorizable project. Black metal and harsh industrial fans gravitated in particular towards All Bitches Die and CALIGULA, while recently Lingua's name will occasionally be tossed in with Ethel Cain, fans seeing similarities between Cain's screaming pain on Ptolomea and the rural gothicism of SINNER GET READY. Indeed, Anthony Fantano of theneedledrop, perhaps the most famous music critic on YouTube, gave his audience a heads up towards Hayter's music when he awarded SINNER GET READY an extremely rare 10/10, exposing the album to legions of folks who otherwise would have missed it. To many artists, this would be a sign to stay the path, follow a proven formula, keep chasing an angle that is clearly connecting with people. But I have a deep respect for Hayter's commitment to healing, to finding peace, and pursuing something that is still fascinating without being as taxing to her physical and mental health.

SAVED! is so unlike those other records, it's a bold move. But it's on purpose. This music is not directly tied to the worst events of Hayter's life, that she chronicled so unwaveringly in her previous work, admittedly to her personal and physical detriment. And she also comments often on SAVED! being maybe a transitory project, a sound and character that may not stick around for long, but was cathartic for her to release and work on. It was her first album that she recorded with some stability, living peacefully in New England, spending time with her horse.

Not everyone who enjoyed Lingua has jumped over to following the Reverend. A friend of mine who enjoyed SINNER GET READY said that SAVED! just falls close enough to what actually was used in their church's worship services to the point where it was mildly triggering for them, more than the death and destruction of previous Lingua entries. Which brings me to my original question: Is SAVED! a Christian album? It is earnestly sung (by an ordained minister nonetheless, although Hayter is quick to mention that she did it on a laptop and it took like eight minutes). Of course it is far too horrifying to play for the congregation of any given Christian church.

I like that there isn't a clear answer to these questions. Like the album's conclusion, there's no correct way to feel about it, no correct meaning to infer, just what you bring to the table. And even if it isn't a journey you take repeatedly, it is one worth taking at least once. Look into Kristin's Rorschach test and maybe you'll see something you love, or something that horrifies you. There is only one way to find out.

#zine #essay #music #new music #lingua ignota #reverend kristin michael hayterr #saved! #experimental music

[desirepathzine]

I made this song about staring at the ceiling and talking to God, and then I made a music video about what happens after that.

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Jeff Buckley Saved My Life in Orlando, Florida by Randi Eversole

In March of 2016, I was on a charter bus, headed towards Orlando, Florida. I was a senior in high school. The trip was with my Southern Baptist evangelical church choir. I did not want to be there.

The choir tour was a non-negotiable part of every year, a way for all of the concerned parents of young church goers to ship their kids off during spring break so they would spend it in service of the Lord and not mingling with all the other degenerates who were out of class. Ostensibly it was a week full of "volunteering" to some degree, singing at shelters and nursing homes, paying money to sing contemporary christian worship music in historic cathedrals. touring around whatever major city from the safety of the bus, so on. The trip was to a different scary big city every year. Prior to Orlando I had found myself in Chicago, the year before Chicago we'd done an actual tour, saving souls in Jacksonville/Florida, Savannah/Georgia, and Charleston/SC.

By the time we were halfway through Chicago, I had started to articulate issues I had with this mission, and indeed the Southern Baptist denomination of Christianity as a whole. By the time a senior trip to Orlrando, FL was announced, I saw it for what it was: an excuse to take a bunch of kids to Disney World under the banner of Christianity.

For the 12 hour bus ride to Orlando, I had prepped a few albums to listen to, as I usually did when headed somewhere new. I had discovered many favorite artists tucked away at the front of the bus (they usually made all the students sit in the back, but I was prone to motion sickness, so I always ended up at the front with all of the chaperones, who largely left me alone).

That year, my album picks had included Grace, Jeff Buckley's only album. I had of course been familiar, you couldn't sift through a single Tumblr playlist without coming into contact with Hallelujah. I vaguely knew somewhere that he had passed, that he was all of my favorite vocalist's favorite vocalist, that sort of thing.

For whatever reason, somewhere in Georgia, I decided now was the time to listen to Grace for the first time. And my download of the album had somehow not copied Mojo Pin, the album's first track, to my iPod so I indeed did start the record listening to the title track. I quickly fixed this mistake on returning home. Ancient problems from a different time, truly.

I did not listen to another record for the rest of the week.

Here was a friend, a person striving for authenticity, an artist coming into his power. All of the things I desperately craved both to be and to be around. It was a balm and a shield against all of the empty expressions of the music I was going to sing that week, the manipulative key changes and nonsensical lyrics. Here was something real and special.

So many lyrics were reaching through time to hold my hand, the beautiful melodies and vocal acrobatics elevating me, taking me away from the bus window view of the interstate, to somewhere I felt safe and seen.

I was alone in many ways that week, alienated from the religion I was raised in, alienated from my peers who maybe at one point had been my friends but had steadily pulled apart from me in the latter months of high school when it became clear we were not going to be compatible adults, bunking in a drafty Hyatt Place with roommates I really didn't know at all, who argued ceaselessly when we were supposed to be sleeping. I had been relegated to a pullout couch in an attempt to get some space.

As any anxious and isolated neurodivergent teen girl would in the circumstances, I went on a deep dive that first dark night in Orlando, far away from home and surrounded by strangers, into Jeff, his life, his work. I listened to interviews to keep the noise at bay. In my search, I found a picture of Jeff, holding a phone, on a portable bed, presumably talking to a journalist, doing press. I tracked down the location. It was a hotel somewhere in Orlando, Florida.

(photos by Merri Cyr)

It was like waving at someone in another dimension.

Two days into the tour I looked down at the t-shirts we all had to wear, a mish mash of Bible references and key words in the shape of a cross, printed on ugly mint green and coral orange t-shirts (the orange stained my bra for weeks, it was horrible). The choir was given a 'theme' every year for the tours, one inspirational word that was supposed to drive the spiritual growth of 9-12 graders. The year in Chicago had been the "restore" tour (which is extremely problematic the longer you dwell on it). "What's the tour name this year?" I blearily asked one of the chaperones. "Oh, it's the Grace tour. Make sure you use the hashtag."

The tour was the first time I encountered an actively hostile audience during any of the shows. Looking back that seems strange, but nonetheless. We often performed for unsheltered folks, who were forced to listen to us boisterously praise the Lord as they tried to get something to eat or were otherwise seeking support. The show in question took place in a parking lot where an extremely questionable Christian charity group set up once a week to attempt to convert anyone who needed a hot meal. Somewhere in the hour long set of worship music, teenagers banging on trash cans under the guise of performing STOMP (yes, like the off-Broadway thing, which no one even knew because it was such a dated concept by 2016), a capella chamber music (I did that too), and emotionally manipulative skits, one of the people in the crowd started to yell. I don't remember the exact verbatim statements, but it was along the lines of "Why are you singing when we need food, need shelter?"

That night, at the mandated debrief/devotional portion of the night before they finally let us all go to bed, many of my peers expressed that they had never thought of the work that way, as something that could be potentially a nuisance, bothersome, something people were forced to suffer through in order to have their basic needs met.

That was a question I had been asking myself for over a year at that point, ever since pretending to "restore" Chicago in 2015. Did anyone really find inspiration in a bunch of white middle class teenagers singing their little hearts out over Coldplay instrumentals? Did the sloppy manual labor we tried to do at various places for people in need really benefit anyone? Did tired building custodians go back in the day after and correct the naive mistakes of suburban teenagers who were not given any option other than to figure out ways to be helpful? Much ink has been spilled over the epidemic of teenage-centered volountourism from churches, sending unqualified children to do labor to get closer to God, etc. I was tired of treating people less fortunate than this community like pawns to achieve karma points. I was tired of singing bad music. I was tired of feeling like a ghost.

When we got back on the bus, or returned to the hotel, or had mildly unsupervised free time at venues, I would check back in with Jeff. I listened to So Real over and over again, its simplicity was spellbinding. One night they carted us to Disney Springs, the shopping district on Disney property, to burn off steam before getting ready for another day of presumably hard work. I was too tired to traipse around, half-heartedly tagging along with folks that seemed indifferent to my presence. I sat down with a shaved ice and watched a pair of living statues performing in the humid evening, bronze and vaguely Victorian looking, glimmering under the ambient theme park lights. I watched them work a crowd while I listened to So Real and briefly became lost in a story that to this day I cannot recall correctly, some short-lived idea about statues yearning to be real. I started crying, not helped by the schedule that left us overworked and under-rested, and a lack of access to protein and actual nutrients beyond pizza.

Every night, I thought of Jeff on a hotel bed, years ago, in the same place as me. Was he alone? Did his worldview, the questions he screamed out towards the end of Eternal Life, his propensity for diving into the biggest emotions, isolate him like they isolated me?

It's easy to fall in love with someone who has passed, it makes it easy to assign them traits you admire or romanticize their short life. I don't think I fell in love with Jeff in that way, although it is undeniable that he was beautiful. I didn't need lips to kiss, I needed a shoulder to cry on, and it felt like there was a beautiful friend helping me chart a course out of self-loathing and getting mired in philosophical mud.

The last night of the tour, before the Friday fun day when all pretense of work is thrown out to go to a theme park or explore safely curated areas of the city, it was expected that somebody, a youth pastor or the choir director or a well meaning chaperone, would give a sort of pious pep talk, asking us if we really believed all the things we were singing, or were we just having fun on a spring break trip? Anyone who is familiar with Cry Nights at evangelical summer camp knows this tactic. Overstimulate and exhaust young people with still developing brains, feed them a steady diet of sweets and carbohydrates, and then the claws of emotional manipulation will sink so much deeper. And then make them go sing a concert with exhausted voices and clogged sinuses from crying, where their emotions and convictions will run so high, that surely no one in the audience will go unmoved.

That last pep talk reared its ugly head before the last concert, as I presumed it would. But I didn't really listen, while the tears flowed around me. In my head, I was sitting across from Jeff Buckley at the pullout bed, quietly centering myself, trying to find peace in the midst of the chaos. We smiled at each other and said nothing in this vision.

I returned home, glad to be done with youth choir forever, vowing ot never go back to the church I had been raised in. (and also I finally listened to Mojo Pin since it didn't make it onto my iPod)

I was trying my best to give myself grace under strange and infuriating circumstances. Jeff taught me how. Being curious and sensitive is a strength, rage can fuel beauty, seeking authenticity is a worthy journey. That this situation was temporary and I would not have to live my life beholden to the whims of a religious institution that actively benefitted from my fears. Grace, real grace, given freely without the expectation of a transaction, is beautiful. I returned home, a week before my eighteenth birthday, and began the long process of figuring out what I actually believed, what I actually valued, and pursuing the things that filled me with joy at full speed, a road that I am still traveling.

#jeff buckley #exvangelical #i guess anyway #essay #zine #music zine #personal essay

[desirepathzine]

The end by Attic Resident

#art #digital art #zine

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Coral by Attic Resident

#art #digital art

[desirepathzine]

On the way:

Thoughts on the new Rev Hayter album

Art

Photos

Music

[desirepathzine]

LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH

NO ONE IS ENOUGH

THE HEART OF MAN IS UNBEARABLE TO HOLD

[desirepathzine]

[desirepathzine]

It is 2023. Ethel Cain releases a surprise one-off single, unrelated to the narrative cycle she is currently pursuing, called Famous Last Words (An Ode to Eaters). Many are confused as to where the song comes from, if it relates to her Preacher's Daughter storylines, a long-term storytelling venture that Cain intends to continue for possibly the next decade. Fans that keep up with Cain on Tumblr might know that she released the song shortly after seeing the movie that inspired its lyrics, Luca Gudagnino's Bones and All, and posted its link here.

Bones and All has seen a small re-evaluation since the release of Famous Last Words, mostly by Ethel Cain's small but ravenous fanbase. The film was largely neglected upon its 2022 release.

It was initially hard hard to tell what the movie even was, from a marketing standpoint. Was it a film adaptation of a book directed by Luca Gudagnino? There was precedent for that in the public consciousness, Gudagnino directed the acclaimed Call Me By Your Name. Was it a horror film about cannibalism? Also that, horror has been thriving in our pandemic era, some of the biggest box office draws of the past three years have been horror films with massive budgets and surprisingly large audiences. A romance with two young actors with star power on the rise? Also yes, the stan culture surrounding particularly Timothee Chalamet were anticipating the film, but were perhaps not prepared for its stomach churning sequences of vioence. Chalamet in particular was a star in two films that were hugely popular adaptations, Little Women and Dune, and Bones and All is not really anything like either of those films, although they're all excellent.

Reaction to the film on release was bewildered, at least outside of its first screenings outside of film festivals. Horror romance road trip movies are not something oft produced, especially not as sincerely as Bones and All. It didn't make its budget back at the box office and slipped out of theaters before it had a chance at making any award season waves that might have revived its reputation.

I have found very few films so suited to our current era. Against the backdrop of eighties Reagen-era decline, sprawling across the mid-west of the United States, cannibal outsiders struggle and survive, both together and apart.

The cannibalism in Bones and All is some sort of inherent trait, one that can physically be smelled by other 'eaters'. You have to eat. It is non-negotiable. It's a metaphor that can be interpreted several different ways: is it about sexuality? Familial cycles of violence? Is it about addiction? Moral decay behind the American facade of prosperity and strength? It can be all of these. It is all of these.

Similarly to Bones and All, Ethel Cain, the musical project of Hayden Anhedonia, deals in American decay, issues of identity and religion, and indeed, cannibalism. Her debut album, 2022's Preacher's Daughter tells the story of the titular Ethel Cain, a girl from a small Alabama town, who runs away from home after the flight of her lover and the death of her father, falling in with a stranger on a road tip to the west who eventually feeds her drugs, pimps her out, murders here, and cannibalizes her. It's stunningly self-assured for a debut, and the story already felt sprawling. Cain intends to release albums detailing the story of Ethel's mother and grandmother, and the dark secrets of the Cain family.

The small fanbase of Bones and All has major crossover with Cain's fans, even before the release of Famous Last Words. There are quite a few differences between these two stories. Bones and All doesn't explicitly deal with the religion as a central theme in the way that Cain's story covers, but they ask many of the same spiritual questions, and of course both have much to say using cannibalism.

It feels like these two pieces are bubbling just under the zeitgeist. Ethel Cain certainly became very popular on TikTok, following dates opening for Florence + The Machine, as well as being attached to the wildly growing exvangelical/religious deconstruction community that TikTok has uniquely fostered. Within a few months of Preacher's Daughter finally taking off (which was a few months after its quiet May release date), Bones and All was shown at the Venice Film Festival in September, and released widely in November. Shortly thereafter, fanedits began appearing on TikTok, taking nine-minute album standout Thoroughfare and syncing the clips to Bones and All.

Although there are certain themes and lyrics that fit so well with the film, for a single song in particular, Preacher's Daughter could very well become the Bones and All concept album. Thoroughfare is the track in which Ethel, far away from home but never far away from her past, is seen by Isaiah at the side of the road, and he offers her a ride in his truck. Isaiah is on a great American roadtrip to find the love of his life. The song details not only their journey to the coast, but also Ethel and Isaiah's strangers-to-lovers slowburn. This hits shockingly close to that of Bones and All, where Maren discovers Lee at a grocery store in Indiana, both recognizing each other as eaters. Lee asks where she's going, Maren says Minnesota, and she hops into his pickup truck to strike out together, and on the way, fall in love, head out west, spend time apart, and find each other again. The lyrics of Thoroughfare align so closely with this story that it's hard to believe one was made independently of the other.

The Isaiah in Thoroughfare may resemble Lee, but the Isaiah of the rest of the album is more reminiscent of the central antagonist of Bones and All, a sinister drifter named Sully, who meets Maren in her initial journey out into the world, and teaches her a few things about what it means to be an eater, but seems to have malicious intentions with her. After Maren flees from him, he begins stalking her across the country on her journey. Just when Maren and Lee might have found their place in the world, living peacefully in Ann Arbor, Sully breaks into their house, and attacks Maren as she returns home from work. Lee and Maren fight Sully off, killing and eating him, but Lee is critically injured in the fight, and asks Maren to eat him as he dies, and she does.

Isaiah and Sully both exploit the weakness of a young girl away from home for the first time, going to great lengths to dominate the chosen victim of their intentions, to the point of death. In Sully and Maren's final confrontation, he pins her to a bed, and we are unsure whether his next move is to eat her or to sexually assault her. It is deeply disturbing, and many viewers probably assume it will be both of these things. Likewise, in Preacher's Daughter, Isaiah dominates Ethel by feeding her drugs and pimping her out of the back of a strip club, eventually locking her in an attic, and after she makes an escape attempt, he shoots her in the woods, freezes her body, and later cannibalizes her. In fact, the entire rest of Preacher's Daughter following Thoroughfare details Isaiah's hold over Ethel, and her ascent to the afterlife where she looks back on what has happened to her.

Both Maren and Lee could be typified as an Ethel-like protagonist, two sides of the same coin. There's also similarity to be found in Lee's upbringing and Ethel's, both dealing with an abusive father that was complicit in cycles of violence, we later find out that Lee's father was also an eater, in addition to physically abusing Lee and his other family members. Lee ate his father to end the cycle of abuse.

There are also parallells between Maren and Ethel's matriarchal experiences with violence. While must has yet to be revealed about the Cain family women, Maren's cross country trip to find her mother ends in shocking fashion. Her mother, who voluntarily entered a mental institution, has eaten her own hands off to attempt to end her violence towards others. But because eaters must cannibalize to retain emotional and physical well-being, she is non-verbal and unwell when Maren finds her. She had written a letter while in better health, to be given to Maren if they ever found each other again, in which she expresses that Marne would be better off dead than existing in the world as an eater. There is an unending string of violence connecting childbirth and the raising of girls in a world that will never try to accomodate them between both Bones and All and Preacher's Daughter, a thread that specifically looks diffeernt than thee thread between a father and a son who are eaters. Indeed, Maren's final night in a normal world as a child is at a sleepover, a rite of passage of girlhood, that this violence given to her by her mother, ensures is her last.

It is remarkable that these two pieces, that recall aesthetic and emotional resonance so specific, could exist independently of one another, and come int the popular conscience at nearly the same time. Both sets of characters seem like they could exist in each other's stories.

Outside of the contents of their respective stories, public and critical reception to both of these pieces has seen some similarities unique to our position in post-pandemic 21st century. Critical reception to both Preacher's Daughter and Bones and All was very positive, glowing reviews for both, but the public audience was initially very small. Preacher's Daughter released in May but didn't gain TikTok traction on a wider scale until November/December of 2022, and Bones and All's wide release date in November was met with poor turnout, the movie quickly dropping to VOD services and out of theaters before award season campaigning might have been able to turn its public reception around.

But Bones and All gained a public reappraisal faster than many other films that have attained that status. Another recent movie that regained public exposure due to revaluation, Jennifer's Body, which weirdly is also about a man-eating woman, took a decade to have its moment in the sun. Bones and All was re-appraised within a year of its release, and is finding its cult fanbase much faster. Many who missed the film during its initial release have found it on streaming services and were surprised that they could have missed it.

This resurgence is not without a few drawbacks, ones that Preacher's Daughter is constantly plagued by in public discussion. When the public is confronted by a piece of art that has much to say, and is deeply sincere with those intentions, it is easy to divert those intense emotions by creating a culture of memes and jokes surrounding it. This has been oft-debated in relation to Ethel Cain's rise in popularity, this deeply felt album that deals with grave subject matter, not limited to parental sexual abuse, religious trauma, assault, and cycles of pain, is often reduced to Meemaw jokes and putting the album's signature ballad, A House in Nebraska, over any pictures of celebrities wearing vaguely old-fashioned looking clothes. A semi-joking campaign to get Preacher's Daughter released on vinyl turned into a silly meme-phrase often left in the comments of any Ethel Cain instagram post. Hayden herself has discussed this public reception in recent interviews, expressing some frustration with it, noting that people will occasionally heckle her with the jokes mid-performance at her shows or otherwise devalue something that she performs and produces very sincerely. In an attempt to discourage this behavior, she has since cut back on being a "relatable social media personality" and limited her interaction on her long active Tumblr account in particular.

Bones and All has received similar treatment on social media as part of its public resurgence. Many TikTok user's first exposure to the film was Lee's confession of eating his father being turned into a meme audio that users sync'd to jokey videos about something much more tame than patricide. And as with Ethel, the tinges of stan culture started to seep in, edits of Lee by Timothee Chalamet stan accounts filling any search for the film on media outlets.

None of these silly videos or thirst tweets are morally reprehensible, or even that bad, but it is interesting that when confronted with works that tell stories dealing with intense violence, both emotional and physical, a large portion of people responded with lighthearted jokes that de-escalate the emotions both creators might have hoped to achieve with their works.

It's also worth noting that Bones and All and Preacher's Daughter present an aesthetic that is hard to sell as aspirational. They both present a world in decline, rusty pickup trucks, the beauty and the desolation of wide open spaces (per Hayden, several Ethel Cain visual inspirations are inspired by Andrew Wyeth's gorgeous and lonely paintings), wood paneled walls like the kind in your grandma's basement, hunting camo, and a sort of working class sensibility that can easily be replicated, but is not so easily authentic by anyone who has never experienced living in a food desert. Much has been made of the resurgence of Southern Gothic, a storytelling mode that is inextricably tied to poverty and unpalatable characters. Preacher's Daughter is perhaps the most popular in the current crop of pieces that are focusing on the southern gothic, which perenially comes back into fashion during times of hardship and insecurity. Bones and All ties itself to many of southern gothic's tropes, and there is certianly an emphasis on poverty and those living on the fringes, even if regionally it's all over the place. In our current social media era, it is hard to separate aesthetic enjoyment from consumption. It's easy to find users giving Preacher's Daughter perfume recommendations, or thrift store hauls inspired by Maren and Lee's cobbled together wardrobes. And again, this isn't a necessarily a moral wrongdoing, just a reaction that is somewhat at odds with the stories and themes present in these particular works.

But ultimately, the cultural landscape is richer for having these pieces in them, and those that resonated with them cherish these stories deeply. It is serendipitous that Preacher's Daughter and Bones and All exist in a time where they can be enjoyed and studied in tandem. They are both stories so suited for our current era: violent, unsure, frightening, but yearning for beauty and those that can travel this landscape alongside one another.

#ethel cain #bones and all #famous last words #essay #literary essay #zine #fan zine #music #film