A few weeks ago, Hayden Anhedönia fainted mid-show. The 25-year-old songwriter and musician, who in the past year and a half has found sudden fame under the stage name Ethel Cain, was performing at the Sydney Opera House. Halfway through the fan-favourite A House in Nebraska, she realised something was wrong. “Every time I belted, I felt a little bit dizzier,” she recalls. “Right as I was going into the second chorus, I was like: ‘Here we go.’” And then: lights out.
The Pittsburgh-based Anhedönia stresses that the incident was “nothing serious … I’m used to being alone in a quiet, isolated environment – I’m kind of a low-energy, low-vibration, low-stamina person to begin with – so let’s just say I’m very out of shape,” she says. But the incident sent a ripple through her huge fanbase, who had begun tweeting and posting footage shortly after it happened. “I kind of just sat in a room for six years making music, and then suddenly I was on the road all the time,” she says. “Usually I’m able to, like, grip the mic stand and kind of push through, but Sydney night two, it was like, ‘Nope, you flew too close to the sun with that one.’”
