Squirrel Flower’s fourth studio album begins and ends with the title’s directive to Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, and, conversely, to “say a prayer to the gods of standing still.” The 11-track record circles those twin impulses: relishing changes in landscape and scratching an itch to settle down. Songwriter Ella O’Connor Williams reaches for distortion and woodwinds to sonically illustrate America’s stretches of open land, while dipping her pen deeper into highway living’s complications, and bumping up against Taylor Swift along the way with her single “Cleveland” – no exclamation point.
“Cleveland is having a moment,” Williams says, laughing at the added coincidence that Swift’s song debuted on the same day as Squirrel Flower’s tour kickoff performance, in the Ohio city itself. “The fact that we had a similar idea and she executed it in a way that is completely soulless is not a surprise to me.”
Tackling ideas of domesticity and a longing for mundane commitment are at the center of both tracks, but Williams’ ode pits that desire against the tastes of the protagonist’s love interest to create a lamenting song about self-resolution and choosing your own path.
“My whole life, I’ve always been engaging with the tension of the life that I feel like is most natural for me to lead, and the life that maybe I feel like I’m supposed to lead in terms of domesticity or commitment,” Williams muses.
“When I’m 30/ I’m gonna have a husband/ And a garden and a plan,” “Reelin’” promises. The nomadic songwriter says those are far from her life’s wishes, but while writing Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going and approaching her 30th birthday, Williams did begin to consider what her version of a slower lifestyle would look like. “My constant movement and constant going away from something, but not necessarily going to something, it kind of turned into a cage,” Williams says. “It almost wasn’t freeing anymore.”
When we chat over Zoom, she’s crashing at a friend’s apartment in Chicago for a week between tours, which she knows is a far throw from the yards and chores that feature in her song. Yet, “during the period [in which] I was writing this record, I wouldn’t spend time in any place for a week. I was so full of forward inertia and movement to a detriment.”
The album’s windswept arrangements, rocking with the gentle propulsion of moving along a current or vast open road, carry that sense of untethered wandering but also feel deeply rooted and self-assured, stabilized through tender writing and Williams’ folk-inflected vibrato.
“With the guitars and the feedback and the expansive distortion, I was trying to capture the feeling of being in the desert in the Southwest,” Williams says, tying connections between acoustic pastoral sounds and vast expanses of land. Where her early Midwest-evoking writing inspired minimalism, here Williams is getting noisy, and interweaving musical elements of her life that haven’t previously featured in Squirrel Flower.
Playing the recorder in an hours-long improvisational set at an abandoned military bunker in San Pedro, California – which made its way into a lyric on “Highway Woman” – inspired the multi-instrumentalist to incorporate accents of woodwinds and accordion into the guitar-forward record, following in the footsteps of her medieval music-playing grandfather and bassist dad. While wandering the country, staying in the homes of loved ones has kept the musician grounded throughout the years.
“I’m really close with my family, and they’re all incredible musicians, and they inspire me a lot,” says Williams. “Similar to wanting to bring woodwind and accordion into the project – that’s a very real part of my life, and I want to bring that into my project and have Squirrel Flower reflect what I do most of the time: play music with my family.”
Squirrel Flower brings Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going to 29th Street Ballroom on Oct. 30.
