Ella Williams, who performs under the name Squirrel Flower, began her debut album with a surrender to one of the great American highways; ever since she’s been penning road songs that unfold with the precision of a AAA TourBook. She’s spent time in the Boston DIY circuit and on the flatlands of Iowa, and these days, she calls Chicago home when she’s not touring—which isn’t very often. Her fourth album, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, is another stop on her rock ’n’ roll roadtrip. Armed with her authoritative alto and keen eye for emotional realism, she navigates the push and pull between settling down and trucking toward what lies just beyond the horizon.
Say a Prayer maintains the tender-tough heartland rock of Williams’ 2023 release Tomorrow’s Fire, and scenery from that record lingers in the periphery: the “alleyways of last year” that bore witness to a crash-and-burn romance are setpieces in the Orphean tragedy “Helicopters”; the canyons through which Williams’ voice echoed emerge in snapshots from cross-country drives on “Highway Woman.” On Tomorrow’s Fire, Williams sang of plants tossing their seeds onto the ground before dying; now, she wonders, “In five years, what will be growing?/Can I water the concrete?”
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Like that last record, Say a Prayer, opens with a malaise-ridden lament that wades through a soup of reverb. Both records are Alex Farrar productions, and both bear his hallmarks: hissy room tone, distortion that makes springy melodies bounce off themselves, electric guitars that cut through the mix like hot knives or rusty chainsaws, loud-quiet contrasts between understated verses and the spark-throwing choruses they build toward. “Foot Thick Ice,” with its fake-out intro and single syllables dragged through sludge at the earsplitting hook, could pass as a B-side from another Farrar production, Wednesday’s Twin Plagues.
But Farrar’s production also highlights Williams’ greatest asset: her stunning voice, centering its elasticity and expressiveness while being unafraid to let it get a little dirty. The scuzziness of “Sick Tooth,” which borders on pop-punk, makes clarion cuts like “Not Me” and “Surfing USA” sound even more serene in contrast. The latter trades the Beach Boys’ Golden Coast for the Great Lakes, where Williams’ mythic quest to outrun heartbreak—only to break her own heart along the way—finds her in Indiana with “fish in the stars/Birds on the tide.” The ballad returns to Say a Prayer’s central question, perhaps the one Williams has been asking with every entry in her catalog: Which ailments of the heart can’t the open road heal?
The specter of domestic stability remains a comforting temptation and a stifling force in Williams’ songwriting. Loneliness begets freedom and vice versa. “She’ll never be yours and yours alone,” she warns of the titular “Highway Woman.” Williams’ vocals melt like candlewax down the center of the mix and over some delicate acoustic guitar in Ladies of the Canyon fashion—fitting for a song about an adventurer who is, like her predecessor, “so busy being free.” The tracks that sit on either side of “Highway Woman” challenge its commitment to untetheredness. On “Helicopters,” Williams confesses, “When I’m not with you, I just pass the time”; when things take a twangier turn on “Reelin,” she vows to be married by 30 with a garden and a good credit score, at least until “bad things call me back again.”
