Squirrel Flower’s latest album, “Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going,” reads like a travelogue of vast American highways and fleeting encounters. Written during a relentless tour schedule between 2024 and 2025, these nomadic tracks by Chicago singer-songwriter Ella O’Connor Williams were born on the road — yet their sonic heart remains very much local.
Trading the heavy distortion of 2023’s “Tomorrow’s Fire” for an ethereal folk warmth, Williams tracked much of the new material live alongside a tight-knit collective of Chicago music mainstays, a group that includes Clay Frankel (Twin Peaks), Dimitri Giannopoulos (Horse Jumper of Love) and Sofia Jensen (Free Range).
Williams captured half of the album’s tracks live at Merry Meadow, a makeshift studio in Door County, Wis., alongside co-producers Seth Engel and Jack Henry. This community spirit gave her the freedom to shift styles and find a raw, newfound trust in her own voice.
“I’d never recorded with people that lived here before,” Williams, 30, admitted. “In all of my journeying, I was, like, ‘I should try making music with people who are right in front of me instead of going somewhere else.’ It was about accepting the fact that I was still living in Chicago, even though I was traveling all the time.”
The collaborative spark grew from a cold winter songwriting retreat in Green Lake, Wis., which inspired her to break away from her traditional solo process. In May 2025, she set up a mobile recording rig in Door County to track songs for two weeks.
While the album features rock, country, and experimental moments, Williams said that producer Alex Farrar — known for his work with Wednesday and MJ Lenderman and whom she recorded with for the rest of the album — persuaded her to lean into the quieter, more spacious folk tracks.
“It takes a lot of skill and restraint to make a record like that,” Williams said. “It is a challenging thing to lean into the silences and take things away instead of just laying every idea out there. Through doing that, he was encouraging me to lean into what makes my sound unique.”
That minimalist approach anchors the album’s closing song, “Weightless, Untethered.” After hearing Williams perform it, Farrar told her, “That’s the most Squirrel Flower thing I’ve ever heard.” Williams said the track’s rhythmic ebbs and flows set the tone for the entire record.
Williams, who grew up in Arlington, Mass. and attended Grinnell College in Iowa, has gravitated toward folk music since her early teens due to its extreme vulnerability, she said. Though her interests later shifted toward noise music, she returned to the genre’s raw and emotional risk-taking. Capturing that feeling live required letting go of perfection. During the Wisconsin sessions, she bypassed her strict one-hour vocal warmups.
“We would start recording at 10 in the morning,” Williams said. “I would drink two cups of coffee, smoke two cigarettes, and immediately record. Doing that helped me to just really not care as much and not exercise control over my voice, which allowed it to come out in a grander way.”
Life on the road directly shaped the record’s travel blueprint, heavily influenced by albums such as Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” Her song “Reelin’ ” uses an overdue Kansas Turnpike toll bill — sent to her parents’ house because she lacked a permanent address — as a metaphor for her nomadic existence.
“I saw that in the mail and was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so indicative of the state of my life right now, which is completely untethered,’” she said. “That’s why you have to write down everything you think of. Even a 10-second song idea can blossom.”
The album’s title struck her in a similar fashion while leaving a friend’s off-grid cabin in Vermont after a period of intense isolation. “When I was leaving, I was like, ‘Wow, I should say a prayer to the gods of getting going. I’m leaving this period of isolation and going into the social world again,’ ” Williams said.
Having celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Squirrel Flower project last year, Williams finds herself looking backward to move forward.
“I’m always thinking back to myself from 10 years ago when I first started the project and gaining inspiration,” she said. “It is a beautiful thing to maintain conversations with your past artistic selves and have that inform where you’re going.”
Williams will wrap up her national fall tour back where it all crystallized with a final show on Nov. 20 at Thalia Hall. Headlining that venue is a longtime dream for her, she said, and it’s the perfect homecoming for an album built on the power of community.