Last 12 months, she portrayed American novelist Flannery O’Connor within the movie Wildcat, directed by her father, Ethan Hawke. While researching the position, she was struck by a passage about O’Connor combating along with her guardian angel. It helped to encourage the idea of Chaos Angel, a personality created by Hawke, to personify, and assist heal, her inside monologue. “We all have that voice, but something can happen where that voice can get sick, something bad can happen to you,” Hawke says. “You can go through something difficult and, all of a sudden, your guardian angel, your inner voice isn’t trustworthy anymore and they lead you astray and they give you weird advice.” Hawke mythologized that this flawed narrator, her chaos angel, was having simply as troublesome a time navigating life as she was; that regardless of her finest intentions, she was paving a path of destruction in pursuit of affection. “She had been raised to be this perfect angel of love,” she explains. “Then she got into the world and it was hard to make love. She had to realize that the process of chaos is what makes change, and change makes love.”
Hawke has a fantastical means of explaining the lore behind the album’s titular character, crafting it like a fairy story or historic allegory. But it’s really far more private, partially extracted from an expertise she had as a baby coping with bouts of melancholy. On the opening observe of the report, “Black Ice,” Hawke samples a recording she discovered on her mom Uma Thurman’s pc of a therapeutic session she had with “three witchy ladies.” An eerie however mild voice creeps into the music, whispering to an 11-year-old Hawke: “You’ve become an angel in human form. Does that make sense when we put it that way?” It turned a core reminiscence for her, one which she grappled with for years after. “I was almost, like, how dare you tell me that that’s my job in life, that my spirit came down on this planet to make other people feel better,” Hawke recollects. “I held that burden for years as a kid, thinking that that was my job, to make everybody happy.” Ultimately the tune spirals right into a hypnotizing repetition of the mantra, “Give up / Be loved.” “It’s me trying to figure out how to take what you got as a child and use it as an adult for good,” Hawke says.
