Last year, she portrayed American novelist Flannery O’Connor in the film Wildcat, directed by her father, Ethan Hawke. While researching the role, she was struck by a passage about O’Connor fighting with her guardian angel. It helped to inspire the concept of Chaos Angel, a character created by Hawke, to personify, and help heal, her internal 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 just as difficult a time navigating life as she was; that despite her best intentions, she was paving a path of destruction in pursuit of love. “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 way of explaining the lore behind the album’s titular character, crafting it like a fairy tale or ancient allegory. But it’s actually much more personal, partially extracted from an experience she had as a child dealing with bouts of depression. On the opening track of the record, “Black Ice,” Hawke samples a recording she found on her mother Uma Thurman’s computer of a healing session she had with “three witchy ladies.” An eerie but gentle 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 became a core memory for her, one that 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 recalls. “I held that burden for years as a kid, thinking that that was my job, to make everybody happy.” Ultimately the song spirals 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.
