Kicking off this album is like entering a door you kind of just left open in your house to a room you haven’t been inside of in a while. Ella Williams, better known as Chicago’s gem, Squirrel Flower, picks up almost exactly where her last record Tomorrow’s Fire sets her down except the world around her has moved. The threads of this song are spun together by thunderous swells and spacious verses that crochet themselves into a record opening that feels like a held breath. It’s audacious, but comes across strongly and appropriately sets the mood Ella Williams wanted you to feel.

Arriving to her in a dream in New Mexico, “Not Me” gives you the albums most ungyarded heartland-rock moment and trusts the plainness of Williams’ voice to do the heavy lifting rather than burying it in production. Williams wrote more than thirty songs during the two years she spent crisscrossing the country’s back roads and biomes, and the record’s final product feels a lot like a travelogue even though it refuses to be one. It’s less “here’s what I saw” but more “here’s who I became in the seeing.”

The next postcard we pick up out of our metaphorical shoebox is a picture of a highway shoulder, and we see Ella with her brother Nate. “Cleveland,” is the first time she’s co-written a song with someone else, and this time she wrote it with Nate, and it takes the shape of a classic breakup-love-song and then quiets itself down when the narrator doesn’t choose the boy, but chooses the city. It’s a small twist, but a metaphor to showcase the permanent love affair between an artist and her own restlessness.

“Highway Woman” is what feels like this records thesis, the nucleus inside of the cell essentially. This track is like the postcard you’d frame instead of mail, because it means that much to you and sits somewhere between memoir and myth. Williams isn’t singing just to herself on this one, but to every person that’s ever measured their life in places, memories, and mile markers. The vocal take is the clearest she’s ever sounded on a record that I’ve heard in her discography, and it’s a telling touchstone in the overall theme of this record.

This record’s production mirrors nicely against the way it was written: brought to life in a makeshift Wisconsin studio with a crew of Chicago collaborators, the songs were painstakingly rebuilt in North Carolina with producer Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, OK Cowgirl, Indigo De Souza) at Drop of Sun Studios. Farrar’s reputation of the artists he’s worked with might have suggested this record would have been louder and more textured, prolific Indie rock but this product is the absolute opposite. In the process, Farrar actually ended up pushing Williams toward the quiet, and it paid off in every way.

Say A Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is the most delicate Squirrel Flower record, and it doesn’t feel small for even a second. The guest list that includes members of Horse Jumper of Love, Free Range, Twin Peaks, and Babywave, plus War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley and Angel Olsen collaborator Seth Kauffman, brings an intimacy that rounds out this record really well and it makes you feel like all your closest friends got together in one room and showed up when it mattered most to you.

By the time the record closes, the travelogue framing falls by the wayside and what’s left is closer to our original shoebox of memories. It’s collections from over a decade of Squirrel Flower records, boxed up and left somewhere dry, waiting to be opened again. That’s the album’s real accomplishment: it doesn’t resolve the tension between motion and stillness so much as it learns to live inside it. Every song here is a place Ella Williams has left, but held onto anyway.

Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is Squirrel Flower’s most fully realized record yet, it’s a collection that trades the raw thunder of Tomorrow’s Fire for something quieter, wiser, and no less powerful. It’s an album about the impossibility of staying anywhere for long, made by an artist who has finally figured out how to sit just long enough to write it all down. When you’re listening to this one, pack light, this one’s worth the drive.

Pre-order Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going by Squirrel Flower HERE