Bad Bunny is now canon in the Ethel Cain cinematic universe. Well, sort of. The revelation comes from architect-turned-stage designer Oli Colman, who designed the stage for Cain’s Coachella performances over the past two weekends, as well as working on the production team for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance earlier this year. While putting together Cain’s Southern Gothic-inspired set, Colman realised they needed some grass – and it turned out that Bad Bunny had ample left over. Now, the very same grass that graced the most-viewed Super Bowl performance of all time is set to travel the world with Cain on her ongoing Here Lies Ethel Cain tour. 

This is just one of the many small details that went into building Cain’s immersive new performance environment, which also included a scythe-cum-microphone stand and multiple easter eggs referencing the rich lore that surrounds her music. “It was a real labour of love,” says London-born Colman, who has long been a fan of the singer. “It’s a specific world that Hayden has built, so she has a real nose and taste for what she likes. Nothing can go too far into the Halloween-y, it has to be the exact right aesthetic.”

According to Colman, this resulted in a junkyard set that leans closer to the sonic palette of Cain’s ambient industrial album Perverts, rather than her more mainstream alt-pop records Preacher’s Daughter and Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. “It’s a little graveyard of industry,” Colman explains, pointing to the rust-covered car parts and overgrown vines that litter the set, reflecting the deconstruction of modern American society in Cain’s music more widely. 

Below, Ethel Cain stage designer Oli Colman further unpacks her new performance environment, unveiled for the first time at Coachella and following her on her ongoing tour. 

What sort of inspirations did you draw on for Ethel Cain’s new stage? 

Coleman: To begin with, it was a lot of looking at the architecture of the American South. I designed a Southern chapel, but Hayden wants to do the unexpected, so that religious stuff was too on the nose for Ethel Cain. It became something more deconstructed, like, ‘What if we were to pull all that apart?’ It became a sort of junkyard which leans more into the Perverts aspect of her and where she was at in the storytelling, which is more industrial, darker and moody. We looked at car parts, and then thought about Hayden’s interest in nuclear power stations. Things that offset the lushness of the old American South.

One thing that caught my eye was all the plants. Are these geographically accurate for the southern states? 

Coleman: It’s a play of the two: where Hayden is from, which is the panhandle of Florida, and then the fictional character of Ethel Cain, who’s from 90s Alabama. She was very specific. She wanted cattails, she wanted wire grass to create that sort of swampy, hot, humid world of the American south, she wanted the kudzu vines that were growing up the chain link fence, and the Spanish moss that was growing off the power lines. It’s all very specific to that part of the world.

Ethel Cain is obviously renowned for her lore. Did she share much of this with you as you were working together?

Coleman: She actually didn’t; it was a lot of me reading it myself. I was told beforehand that she had a strong interest in power lines, and that was one of the original things I put in the first deck of ideas. The previous leg of the Willoughby Tucker tour had a microphone stand that was a power line, so, when it came around to this one, and we had the power lines to hang the Spanish moss, we were like, ‘We can’t have a microphone stand as a power line too!’ That’s when it became a scythe, which very much came from Hayden. It was linked to the Coachella billboard – ‘Go see Ethel Cain or the devil will get you!’ It was her Freddy Mercury moment because she could pick it up and carry it around the stage. 

What sort of ideas went into designing the scythe?

Coleman: It’s funny because, when you type ‘scythe’ into Google, there’s a wide variety in what they can look like. It could be a big, metal Warhammer-ish scythe, or it could be more of a Father Time-style big, silver-black thing that kills people. We were going for something that’s more of a farming implement, a weathered, old scythe. Hayden wanted the blade at the bottom and the microphone at the top so she could pull it out.

Back to the grass. I’ve heard that this was the same grass from the Bad Bunny Super Bowl. Was that right? 

Coleman: Yeah, so I was on the Super Bowl’s production design team, and I knew the guy, Cory Lennon, who did all of the grass in the Super Bowl. He had a huge stock of it. To get fire-retardant plants is actually quite expensive, so I just hit him up like, ‘Would you be willing to sell us a big batch of your grass?’ Everyone’s a winner because we’re being more economical, reusing stuff that was potentially going to waste. 

For Ethel’s stage, though, it couldn’t be the lush, tropical green of Puerto Rico, so we burnt the edges and painted it yellow so it looked a little more dried out. 

Wasn’t there some logistics about the grass itself during the Super Bowl that led to performers being hired as grass?

Coleman: Yeah, the Super Bowl is like a Rubik’s Cube, it’s a puzzle you’ve got to solve. It was about how long it takes to get everything out. There’s a limited number of carts that could come out [to set up Bad Bunny’s stage], but we needed more grass, so we turned people into grass.

Are there any other details that you think people might have missed?

Coleman: Yes! There’s a car bumper plate that has an Alabama license plate hidden in the grass. There’s also an easter egg to the fans: Hayden’s shoes were hanging over the electricity pylons, which are the same ones she wore for her Coachella appearance last time. Also hidden in the grass was the jacket that she wore – the red jacket that said Cain on it. 

More widely, the contrast between Justin Bieber’s minimalist Coachella stage and Sabrina Carpenter’s more maximalist production sparked some heated debate last week. Did you have any thoughts on that?

Colman: I think there’s a place for both. I enjoyed both performances. Obviously, I love it when there’s a full, huge production. My friend Parker did Karol G’s stage, which was out of this world with a huge Flintstones cave on stage. But then I also think it takes a certain kind of person to stand on a minimal stage, like the Kanye West-style blob which Justin Bieber did. It’s just a different approach, right? I don’t want to comment on the misogyny of, you know, if a female artist were to do the same, would she have gotten away with it? That’s a good question.