Things haven’t gotten easier for Squirrel Flower’s Ella O’Connor Williams, and that’s not a drawback. I spoke with Williams more than six years ago, when she was still emerging as an artist, before she released three albums on Polyvinyl Records and led a notable boycott at one of the industry’s biggest festivals. Since then, as a musician, her writing has sharpened, her voice has grown more dynamic, and her ambitions have broadened. Yet in terms of artistry, not much has shifted. And that’s a strength. Williams remains a fearless songwriter, chronicling the spaces and landscapes she travels through and returning the energy to her spirit in turn.
I’m not aiming to over-romanticize Williams. But some artists’ interviews feel as moving as the music they create. Williams sits in that rare category. Her new album, Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going, released today, is expansive and hushed at once. Across its 11 tracks, there are endless avenues that cultivate solitude; the thirst of concrete spaces and the longing for connection; the core tension between feeling invincible and recognizing human fragility as one stands before a horizon that seems to swallow the world.
Creating art, especially in a society that prizes optimization, can be a self-focused act. Say A Prayer, and our discussion about it, reveal Williams as an artist who serves something larger—the landscape that fuels her songs, the communities she supports while on tour, and even the songs themselves. “It almost feels like some divine message to myself from some other place, and that’s how that song felt,” she says at one point, explaining the meaning of the album’s keystone track “Highway Woman.”
When I ask if she has a creative routine, she answers with a cautious yes and no. She understands the benefit of continual creation, yet she can’t force songs into forms they resist. “You have to respect the song as an entity, as a sentient thing,” she notes. And that isn’t easy. Though Say A Prayer sounds as natural and uncontrived as a gust of wind, Williams details how strenuous the process was.
“We don’t fucking do it because it’s easy. We do it because it’s hard and it’s painful and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing to feel discomfort and to work through things,” she says, when our conversation veers into a tangent about artistic compulsion. She recalls a remark from Suno CEO Mikey Shulman who, in a podcast last year, suggested that “it’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” later hinting that ease—specifically AI-enabled ease—could be the remedy. Speaking with Williams, I’m reminded that joy, growth, and love don’t work that way either. Neither does the collision of tectonic plates that yields breathtaking terrain. There is value in struggle, especially when it produces music that sounds effortless.
Below, you’ll find an edited conversation about the tracks on Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going, about family roots, and about why Williams believes that service to art, not art alone, can alter the world.
A lot of your albums detail physical landscapes or what you see on the road. Do you have certain emotions that you associate with particular landscapes, or landscapes that spark you creatively more than others?
ELLA O’CONNOR WILLIAMS: The first landscape that truly struck me and made me want to translate it into sound was when I moved to Iowa. Coming from the East Coast, I’d never experienced such vastness, and at first it frightened me. The openness felt vertigo-inducing, like you could fall off the map because everything stretched to infinity. I studied in a fairly rural area, where the streets were incredibly wide, and you could stare down them and see forever. It scared me at first, and then I grew to love it deeply. When I first arrived, I felt compelled to capture how that sensation translated into music. That’s what sparked Squirrel Flower’s evolution. I wanted to create music that felt spacious and deliberate, to share with people back East what the Midwest feels like. That landscape became the initial soundscape I wanted to render.
I’ve always been drawn to rendering places through sound in a portrait-like way. “Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going,” the album’s title track, I wrote while I was in the middle of the desert in southern New Mexico, trying to capture that sense of looking outward, which made Iowa seem almost minuscule by comparison. I remember looking out over the desert—literally you could see five hundred miles—and witnessing a sequence of mountain ranges roll by. I felt time itself as if it were all happening at once: past, present, and future coexisting in that land. Sonically, when I wrote that title track, I aimed to convey what that felt like—the feeling of ancient rocks and perceiving things that are incredibly old and will endure for a long time, while at the same time feeling minute and fragile within it all.
I love that. The landscape itself shapes not just what you sing about, but how it sounds.
WILLIAMS: Absolutely. Take “Helicopters,” for instance—that track centers on the drive from Chicago through Northwest Indiana up to the dunes and Gary. It’s a corridor of industry and yet of beauty too. There’s a strange, sublime quality to it: you’re repelled by the factories, yet drawn to the stark beauty of the scene. I wanted to sonically capture that tension with crunchy guitar, raw edges, and a sense of unease.
What are your thoughts on album construction? Did you have a plan for shaping this collection after Tomorrow’s Fire?
WILLIAMS: I didn’t have a plan. The making of this record was, to be honest, a harrowing experience. I had all the songs but no clear sense of what the finished project would be until it was completed. I recorded about 30 songs, yet I still felt like I didn’t have a proper record. It could have gone in many directions sonically. In the end, I wanted a voice-forward record, one that presents my voice in a more natural, dimensional way, without picking up a studio’s coloration. I wanted it to feel like a performance delivered directly to the listener, the energy and intimacy of a live show translating into the recording.
I didn’t enter writing with a goal in mind. The songs revealed the album’s throughline; I write and write, and then discover the throughline afterward, rather than forcing the songs to fit a preconceived aim. That didn’t feel respectful to the songs themselves. You have to treat a song as an actual entity, a sentient thing.
In the past, I kept a distance from the personal material in my songs—perhaps because I was absorbing a lot of Joni Mitchell while writing. Hejira was a touchstone; she’s fearless and unafraid to be confessional. I don’t love the label “confessional,” since it’s sometimes used to box a woman musician into a narrow stereotype even though the sonic and technical craft matter, too. Mitchell shows both vulnerability and technical prowess, and that balance gave me permission to be more honest in my writing about love and my personal life without worrying that it would cheapen the rest of the music.
When you say this record is more intentionally vulnerable, what changed?
WILLIAMS: It’s less about how I wrote the songs and more about how I approached them emotionally. My music has always carried vulnerability, but I think I’ve foregrounded it more purposefully now. The vulnerability was there before; this time I leaned into it on purpose.
What do you hope listeners take away, if anything?
WILLIAMS: I’d love for people listening to the record to feel freer in how they live and love and navigate the world, because that was my own journey during the making of it. I didn’t box myself in at all. It would be wonderful if my music could help someone else realize they don’t need to be contained either—that they can be expansive and hold multiple, even opposing, identities at once. My hope is that listeners hear facets of themselves in my truth and recognize echoes of their own lives in my art.
How did you pare down from 30 songs?
WILLIAMS: I was speaking with a friend about this exact thing a year ago at a festival on Orcas Island in Washington. There, I asked a bandmate of Thomas Dollbaum, a New Orleans-based musician, what makes a good album. They replied that it’s about playfulness and stylistic variety. I thought about that and realized I agreed: cohesion can be overrated. If every track sounds too similar, it becomes less enjoyable to listen to. The challenge is to explore diverse sonic terrains while maintaining a throughline that remains distinctly mine.
“Fought A Hornet” stood out during the writing process as well. I was in Vermont, staying in a remote cabin for about a week, completely isolated—someone had to be in a fevered state to write that song. I didn’t see anyone for days, stoking the wood stove until the room turned hot, sipping red wine, and reading Rilke. My grandfather—no longer with us—had a classical nylon-string guitar with him, and I fiddled with a medieval guitar tuning until I wrote that piece. It felt like a tribute to him, a departure from my previous work in its medieval mood.
Something I found fascinating about the recording process is how much of the album was made with your family—your brothers and your dad appear on it.
WILLIAMS: Once I’d finished the demo, I sent it to them, and both my dad and older brother responded with genuine admiration. I think I shared only the guitar part for that track because I composed the guitar line first, which isn’t typical for me. My dad—also a musician—spent lockdown mornings playing Bach’s cello suites on his acoustic bass guitar, a vibe that’s deeply rooted in me, fueling exploration of different ways to play guitar. My family has been integral to the record’s process. Like every record I make, I rely on them for feedback and emotional support, because the creative journey is demanding and can feel overwhelming.
And it never gets easier. It’s strange to consider how you keep doing this despite the heavy lift.
WILLIAMS: We press on because we must. There’s a deep urge to create, even when it hurts. In response to that hypothetical AI executive suggesting music could be easy, we resist. We persevere because it’s hard and painful, and that’s not a flaw. Our society wants to minimize discomfort, often at the expense of our vitality and humanity. Taking the time to wrestle with hard questions and darker parts of yourself through art is not easy, but it’s necessary, and the payoff can be profound. The process for this record was tough, even without outside pressure, because I held high internal standards and ultimately achieved them, though it took a lot out of me. It was worth it for the sake of the art and the growth that comes from a difficult, authentic journey.
Was there a moment, a song, or an insight that signaled you’d crossed the threshold of the pressure?
WILLIAMS: “Highway Woman” became that turning point for me, later in the process. I needed to hear it for myself as I was making it. In hindsight, that song crystallizes the record and my life during its creation. Sometimes a piece arrives in one breath, effortless and pure, and the feeling I have when I’m writing is a sensation of being a conduit for something beyond myself. It feels almost divine, and I recognize it as one of the best things I’ve ever written—a fulcrum for the album.
Not far behind it were songs like “Not Me,” which also came together with ease, and “Weightless, Untethered.”
What are your thoughts on immortality through art?
WILLIAMS: I’ve been pondering this a lot. My great-grandfather was an author who wrote children’s books, novels, and a leftist theater anthology. I grew up reading his children’s literature, and about five years ago I started reading his novels, which I had never encountered before. Getting to know him through his writing felt like meeting a version of myself across generations. It’s a powerful sense of ancestral connection through the art he created long ago.
Recently I’ve thought about leaving something behind for future generations—whether I have kids or not—so that they might connect with me through my work. Creating something and releasing it into the world is a form of immortality: a fragment of your soul cast into the ether that remains as long as people listen. It’s a beautiful notion to consider what we produce and what our descendants might learn about us through our art, much as I learned from reading my great-grandfather’s books.
The idea of a highway woman—you’re touching on a road deity and a wild-woman archetype. Are you embracing or resisting that archetype?
WILLIAMS: Mostly embracing. The wild-woman image is tied to second-wave feminism and can feel outdated in some contexts, but it still holds truth and value. The song is meant for anyone who’s living in the wind, facing its challenges and its joys, and who refuses to be constrained by the present era. It’s for people who resist the boundaries placed on them by today’s world.
There’s a throughline in all your work about freedom, but you also rebel against being objectified or controlled. It doesn’t feel as dystopian as Planet (i), but you’re still pursuing a way of living that seems nearly impossible, as you noted.
WILLIAMS: It is possible, and it’s essential for me to live in a way that isn’t only self-indulgent but also serves others. Tours can feel self-centered, even though music can change the world—so what does that really mean if you’re just touring and burning tons of fuel, presenting shows that exist in a vacuum, with little thought to the broader political consequences of what you’re doing? Art can alter the world, but the world isn’t changed by art alone. We must be critical of how we carry out our work and how we present our art.
I’m reminded of a month-long do-it-yourself tour I organized last summer. I played farms and community centers outside typical venues and used those events to raise money for local mutual aid. I wasn’t sure it would work, but we tried. In practice, we performed in Asheville, a year after devastating floods, and we raised funds for flood relief because people were still rebuilding. We played in southern New Mexico the day a massive wildfire emerged in the Gila Wilderness, in a town where evacuees were present; we performed for about 20 attendees, many of whom had just evacuated friends, and we used the moment to provide a space for gathering, listening, and raising funds for wildfire relief. Then, in Los Angeles, during a time when ICE was actively terrorizing the city, friends attended after tear gas events, and we gathered at Debs Park to raise funds for immigration and bail efforts.
That experience showed me there’s a way for a musician’s life to be more than self-indulgent: it can be a vehicle for change and a stand against fascism and against the corporate direction of the music industry. We don’t have to simply accept what’s expected. Freedom also means taking risks, speaking out politically, and refusing to be mere cogs in a capitalist machine.
Every musician hopes to earn enough to survive, of course, but money hasn’t been the sole aim. It’s a means to stay alive and engaged in a meaningful, creative life. I know this isn’t a simple issue. The idea that music-making could be effortless—like that AI-driven fantasy—feels off to me. We’re all seeking a life that isn’t just about products, but about existence itself becoming easier.
It’s funny you mentioned that AI-perspective—art doesn’t have to be easy. The real aim is to make living itself easier, right?
WILLIAMS: I think what people call ease is a misperception. Even conveniences like Amazon deliveries, which seem to simplify life, are actually poisoning the planet and exploiting countless people, which doesn’t make life easier. It’s a mirage of ease that conceals the opposite reality.
Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going is out 8/21 via Polyvinyl.
