Family Tree (Intro)

The record opens the way a sermon does, slow and certain, with the daughter already inside the dread she will spend the album trying to escape. Before there is a plot there is a bloodline: a family, a faith, and a violence handed down like a name. The intro sets all three ringing at once.

It states the album’s governing image early, the cross, the inheritance, the sense of a fate decided before she was old enough to refuse it. Everything that follows is this overture paying out, and the closing songs will circle straight back to the note it strikes here.