Squirrel Flower Finds a Chicago Homecoming in ‘Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going’

Chicago collaborators helped shape Squirrel Flower’s road-worn new record

CHICAGO — Squirrel Flower’s latest album, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, emerged from a period of near-constant travel between 2024 and 2025, but Chicago singer-songwriter Ella O’Connor Williams says the record ultimately brought her closer to the city’s music community. The album moves through folk, rock, country and experimental sounds while documenting the isolation, instability and unexpected inspiration of life on tour.

Williams, 30, recorded much of the project with fellow Chicago musicians after years of making records away from home. The group included Clay Frankel of Twin Peaks, Dimitri Giannopoulos of Horse Jumper of Love and Sofia Jensen of Free Range. Their involvement marked a departure from Williams’ customary solo-oriented process and helped establish the album’s more communal character.

“I’d never recorded with people that lived here before,” Williams said. “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.”

Wisconsin sessions opened space for a more intimate sound

Half of the album was tracked live at Merry Meadow, a makeshift recording studio in Door County, Wisconsin. Williams worked there with co-producers Seth Engel and Jack Henry after a winter songwriting retreat in Green Lake, Wisconsin, encouraged her to approach the material with other players. She assembled a mobile recording setup in Door County in May 2025 and spent two weeks recording songs.

The sessions produced a notable sonic shift from the heavy distortion of Squirrel Flower’s 2023 album, Tomorrow’s Fire. Williams said producer Alex Farrar, whose credits include work with Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, encouraged her to prioritize the quieter and more spacious songs when they recorded the remainder of the album.

That restraint, Williams said, was central to finding the record’s identity. Rather than layering every musical idea into each arrangement, she and Farrar emphasized silence, movement and the natural texture of her voice. The approach is especially apparent on the closing track, “Weightless, Untethered,” which Farrar described to Williams as the most distinctly Squirrel Flower song on the record.

Williams said she also abandoned some of her usual studio discipline during the Wisconsin recordings. Instead of following a lengthy vocal warmup routine, she would begin recording early in the morning after coffee and cigarettes. She said the less controlled process made her singing feel larger and more emotionally direct.

Travel, toll bills and a return to folk music

The album’s travel imagery came directly from Williams’ touring life. “Reelin’” was prompted by an overdue Kansas Turnpike toll bill sent to her parents’ house because she did not have a permanent address. She turned the notice into a reflection on being unmoored, a recurring subject on a record shaped by highways, temporary rooms and changing landscapes.

Williams grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, and attended Grinnell College in Iowa. She said folk music first drew her in as a teenager because of its vulnerability, even as her interests later expanded into noise music. The new album reconnects with that earlier attraction to emotional risk, while retaining the adventurousness that has defined the Squirrel Flower project over its first decade.

The title came to Williams as she left a friend’s off-grid cabin in Vermont following an isolated period. She described it as a personal transition from solitude back into social life — an idea that mirrors the record’s movement from individual uncertainty toward creative connection.

Williams marked the 10th anniversary of Squirrel Flower last year and said she continues to look to her younger artistic self for direction. Her national fall tour was scheduled to conclude with a Nov. 20 hometown performance at Thalia Hall, a Chicago venue she said had long been a dream to headline. The planned show was positioned as a homecoming for an album built on the community she found close to home.