Strangers by Ethel Cain and how it means more than just betrayal and cannibalism.
this isnt a movie post i apologise im just obsessed with this song
To start off with, this song is obviously mainly about cannibalism but I am going to be breaking down the lyrics and their extensive meaning! This is a very long post i apologise in advance :3. As a quick warning, the following topics will be discussed: Religious trauma, Cannibalism, very squeamish descriptions, abusive relationships and childhood trauma as a vague discussion. If these topics aren’t what you need to hear at the moment, please click out of the post! Take care of yourselves <3 ALSO ETHEL CAIN ISN’T A REAL PERSON IT IS AN ALTER EGO! now onto the post.
The intro of the song is a preacher’s sermon from her great grandmother’s funeral. In which he says “God is telling you and I there is death, for all of us
But then we find that the scriptures also tell us that we have a great promise, that there is a better place for those who believe in the lord Jesus Christ” acting as a premonition of her future that will be told throughout the song. The song itself is from an album titled Preacher’s Daughter released in 2022 within itself brings more meaning since she was raised in a christian household with an abusive preacher as a father that is very predatory. However, having the sermon act as a false comfort for those who believe in Christianity and God that they will be more at peace in death; given the cause of death and how her body was mistreated in death by having her flesh devoured with only bones left to tell a story that never will be told. Having the sermon from a real funeral at the start poses as a mockery of the belief and an allegory for no matter how peaceful your soul leaves your body, you will never be at peace and the trauma will stay with your soul even if your body doesn’t remain. In the song Sun Bleached Flies from the same album she sings “God loves you but not enough to save you” adding to my point how this is all to ridicule the idea that if you believe in Jesus and God, you will rest better than if you lost hope, like Ethel did.
The first verse starts by “In your basement I grow cold” signifying she is already dead. Her existence doesn’t end for her and she is left to reflect on what has killed her, she starts “thinking back to what I was always told, ‘Don’t talk to strangers or you might fall in love’” saying that she regrets falling in love as, presumably, her mother had warned her forever to not fall in love. I say she is assumably speaking to her mother since this entire song acts as a message to her mother from the afterlife, which i will delve into later on in this post.
The next line is “Freezer bride, your sweet divine” where she is still in love with him as she is saying that she is still his possession willingly; since she is speaking so positively. However, this could be taken as sarcasm and mocking him for what he did to her. He is also preserving her final state to take in and admire, since the use of the word ‘bride’ tells the listener that she felt beautiful when her life was taken from her and did it all for him only for it to be taken advantage of.
“You devour like smoked bovine hide”. This lyric means that he never truly viewed her as a person and just something to treat like an animal in life and death. The use of the word ‘devour’ connotes messiness and impulse showing how Isiah (the man she loved) had always wanted to cannibalise her and treat her like an animal without her being able to fight back.
“How funny, I never considered myself tough” is a heartbreaking line where she never found herself emotionally tough or resilient and ambitious but also the shock that her frozen body is tough to swallow by Isiah and finds it comedic that her death and difficulty to do the one thing he always wanted to do replicated her real life since she had grown obedient to him and he used that to his advantage.
“You’re so handsome walking over to me now”. Isiah is approaching her corpse and she still finds him attractive and cant process how he treated her and how it was bad since he trusted him so much that it seems unthought of to Ethel how he could dehumanise her in the way that he did. Almost unfathomable to her how she could have been treated this way when never once did she consider hurting him or purposely trying to upset him.
“I tried to be good, am I no good? Am i no good? Am i no good?” This could be viewed in several different ways. The first time she asks could be asking about her religion and speaking directly to God as she tried to be as good as possible and she is still not at peace despite believing in Him (showing Ethel’s hatred for Christianity and religion referencing the introduction of the song since it is stupidity to her that she isn’t at peace even though she devoted her life to a higher being that she still is ambiguous about His existence). The next meaning could be spoken to Isiah asking why wasn’t she good enough for him in their relationship to mean that she deserved to be treated with such apathy and almost begging for an answer to why he did it; on top of this, it could also be interpreted as how she tastes which she sings about later but that is more of a stretch. The final meaning could be communicating to her mother and how she feels like she is a disappointment to her, being a trans woman from a christian town, state, and home, but also since she went off with a man she had warned her about.
“With my memory restricted to a polaroid in evidence” The final moments of her life were gruesome and that the police had to take photos of her in that state he left her in, but also her items and everything she wore when she saw Isiah for the last time is now going to be stored in evidence until the foreseeable future that she won’t be able to see.
“I just wanted to be yours, can I be yours? Can i be yours? Just tell me I’m yours” Even after everything, she desires love and validation even if it is from the worst people and it feels almost self degrading, self deprecating, and destructive since she never got the love she needed in her early life from her parents but also from authority figures in her church. She also only shows Isiah a pure love that she still feels and only wants to be loved by him.
“If I’m turning in your stomach and I’m making you feel sick”. Usually the topic is about turning in your grave, except she doesn’t have a grave to turn in, Isiah’s stomach is her grave. And at the same time, she is concerned that he is going to get food poisoning and she never wanted to hurt him until this point when she didn’t have a choice but feels extensive guilt for it. As well as this, the fact that she states she is turning in her ‘grave’ she is very disapproving of her fate as she will never get to see her mother again and apologise to her for how she acted when she was alive and even how she will never be able to apologise or explain why she ran away or what happened to her.
The next verse is speaking directly about her mother before switching to the abuse she faced by Isiah. “When my mother sees me on the side of a milk carton in Winn Dixie’s dairy aisle, she’ll cry and wait up for me” Ethel will appear on the side of a milk carton missing, filling her mother with guilt but also with false hope that she is alive and waits up with the hope she will see her again but the truth is, she will most likely never know the real answer and get the closure she deserves; filling Ethel with even more guilt as she shouldn’t have gone with him and left her mother. This directly calls back to her asking if she’s good enough even if she caused a panic in her heart until she will rest in the grave that Ethel never got.
“We’ll make love in your attic all night. Euphoric in some strange delight. I’m happier here ‘cause he told me I should be” Isiah never gave her a choice and told her how to feel, so she never had a choice and at this point Ethel is reflecting on how he acted and treated her. Isiah only sees Ethel for her body and uses intercourse as a final act of gaining her trust before freezing her to keep her in this state forever. However, it could also be that this is an act of necrophilia and her body is all his, she can’t get any pleasure from this, nor can she say no to it but Ethel still sees herself as being loved and wanted and is ‘euphoric’ about it. The final part of this extract is how she was never respected by him when she was alive so why would she be when she has passed on to another life, only with the ability to haunt him for his choices he will never feel remorse for, only regret for how ill he gets.
“You’re so handsome when I’m all over your mouth” she is infatuated and besotted by him that she feels torn on how to feel, anger for how she is slowly realising that she was used but wanting to be wanted, but also how he is still her ideal partner.
“Am i making you feel sick?” this line is repeated eight times and progressively being sung in a more distraught way. Spiritually, she is asking if he feels any guilt for what he did, but also showing concern for how he feels and if the food poisoning is getting to him, also making her feel worse for hurting him and only causing negativity even in death. This could also be speaking directly to the listeners asking if they feel sick for how she was treated and the topics of the album as well [pedpholia, incest, forced prostitution, hallucinations from being drugged, cannibalism, etc.] and these topics being told to them with such force and emotion could cause anxiety and fear as well as repulsion and shock resulting in nausea. Audibly through this section of the song, she almost screams the lyrics as if she is terrified by what happened to her corpse and she is full of anger, anxiety, and sorrow, being unable to change what has happened to her; whilst the other harmony is monotone as if she has accepted the fate of her death and what Isiah did and how she cannot change what has happened. On top of this, the harmony where she is screaming and crying she sounds angry and not concerned but the monotone one repeats “am i making you feel” as if she shows concern for how he will feel and what will happen to him when he is found out.
The ending of the song is her speaking to her mother from her afterlife. I am going to put the entire lyric section here and analyse it as a whole.
“Found you just to tell you that i made it real far, and that i never blamed you for loving me the way that you did while you were torn apart. I would still wait with you there. Don’t think about it too hard or you’ll never sleep a wink at night again. Don’t worry ‘bout me and these green eyes. Mama just know that i love you (I do) and I’ll see you when you get here”
This entire section feels as if Ethel is saying what she never could to ease her mother since she wasn’t alive to tell her all this herself. Her mother feels guilt for how she was raised and when she was torn for how her father treated the both of them. On top of this, she visited her mother to say all of this even though she can’t hear her but its everything she needed to know from a maternal status wondering if she was good enough as a mother and a person, but now she will never know.
Finally, she tries to ease her mind by telling her not to worry because she is at peace, however we don’t know this for sure, especially given the mockery and comedic timing of her words and the introduction to the song. But she waits patiently and will wait for her mother no matter how long it takes and will be able to explain everything when she gets to the afterlife to be reunited with her daughter, the person she feels like she betrayed through childhood and adult life, but Ethel tries to say that she has no regrets about her childhood with her mother and their relationship but the same cannot be said about her father. Wherever Ethel’s soul rests, we can only pray that she is at peace and respected finally shown how worthy she is even though she was never shown that in life.