A lot of your albums detail physical landscapes or what you see on the road. Do you have certain emotions that you associate with certain landscapes, or certain landscapes that are more inspiring creatively?
ELLA O'CONNOR WILLIAMS: The first time I was really struck by a landscape and wanted to capture it with music was when I moved to Iowa. Being from the East Coast, I'd never been in a place that felt so expansive, and it scared me at first. I felt I would get this sense of vertigo walking around. I could fall off the earth because everything was so spacious. I went to school in a pretty rural area, and the streets were so wide, and you look down them, and you see forever. It really scared me at first, and then I grew to really, really love it. I remember, when I first moved there, thinking that I need to capture how this makes me feel with sound. That’s how this project of Squirrel Flower developed. I wanted to make music that was really spacious and slow, and to show people back east what it felt like for me to be in the Midwest. That landscape is the first one I wanted to put into sound.
I always feel really drawn to painting portraits of places through my music. “Say A Prayer To The Gods Of Getting Going,” the title track, I wrote when I was in the middle of the desert in southern New Mexico, getting this feeling of looking out — it makes Iowa feel like nothing in terms of the expansiveness. I remember looking out in the desert, you can literally see 500 miles away, and you're seeing all of these different mountain ranges, one after the other. I remember being able to feel all of time at once, like past, present, and future in the land there. Sonically, when I wrote that title track, I was trying to capture how that felt, capture this feeling of ancient rocks, and looking at things that are so so old and will also be there for so long, feeling very much a part of it, but also very very small compared to it.
I love that. The landscape itself not only dictates what you're singing about, but also the way it sounds.
WILLIAMS: Very much so. With “Helicopters,” that song is very much about Northwest Indiana and the drive from Chicago to to the Dunes, to Gary, Indiana. That is such a drive of industry, but also beauty. There's this weird, sublime quality to it, like you're horrified by all of the factories, but it's also really beautiful. I wanted to capture that sonically through crunchy guitar and feedback and tension.
What are your thoughts on album construction? Did you have an idea of how you wanted to form this collection after Tomorrow's Fire?
WILLIAMS: I didn't have any idea. The process of this record for me was very harrowing, actually. It terrified me. I had all of the songs, but I had no idea what the final thing was going to be until it was finished. I had 30 songs recorded, but I felt like I didn't have a record. It could have gone so many different ways, stylistically. At the end of the day, I knew that I wanted to make a voice-forward record, and make a record that showcased the sound of my voice in a more natural and dimensional way. I wanted it to not sound like a studio. Sometimes you listen to music, and you can hear the studio sound. I wanted that to not exist. I wanted it to sound like a performance straight into the ears and the brain. Like seeing a live show, I wanted to capture that kind of energy and intimacy.
I didn't have a goal going into writing. The songs showed me what the album was about, which is always what happens. I write and I write and I write, and then I find the throughline after the fact, as opposed to having a goal and then writing songs to fit that goal. Which doesn't feel very respectful of the songs. You have to respect the song as an entity, as a sentient thing.
In the past I've always tried to keep a level of distance between me and the content matter of my songs. Maybe because I was listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell through the writing process. Hejira was the record I was listening to. She’s very unafraid and, I guess, confessional. Even though I kind of hate what that word has turned into because it's a dig almost — you know “a woman singer-songwriter confessional-like songstress.” It pisses me off when people say that sometimes because it feels loaded with misogyny, and it sometimes feels like the existence of confessional songwriting, that's all people can think about and feel from music, and they're not thinking about the sonic elements or technical elements. Something about Joni Mitchell that I love is it has both. She's embodying — she's making incredible music, but also opening her soul through it, and not shying away from that. I felt more emboldened to be honest in my writing, be simpler and clearer and write about my love life or my personal life, I guess, and not worry about that detracting from the validity of the rest of music.
When you say this record is more intentionally vulnerable, what changed?
WILLIAMS: It's less how I wrote the songs and more just how I was thinking about it, because my music has always been really vulnerable [laughs]. I think maybe in talking about it, I've tried to shy away from that fact. Yeah, I don't know. I think my previous music maybe was vulnerable, but not in an intentional way. This record was more intentional with the vulnerability.
What do you expect or would want listeners to take away, if anything?
WILLIAMS: I would love for people listening to the record to feel they can be more free in their living and loving and just going through the world, because that was my own journey through the process of making the record. I was not keeping myself in a box in any way. It would be a beautiful thing for my music to help someone else know that they also don't have to keep themselves in a box, and they can be expansive and be different things at once, and even contradictory things at the same time. The hope is that they can listen and find pieces of themselves in my truth and see reflections and echoes of themselves of their own lives in my art.
How did you narrow it down from the 30 songs?
WILLIAMS: I remember I was talking to a friend, actually exactly a year ago. I played this festival in Orcas Island in Washington, and there was this band. Do you know Thomas Dollbaum, New Orleans-based musician? I was talking to one of his bandmates about the record because at that point I was still kind of deep in the process, and I asked them, "What do you think makes a good record?” And they said something like, like playfulness and stylistic variety. And I was like, you know what? I feel the same way. I think cohesion is kind of overrated, or stylistic cohesion. If I listen to a record and every song sounds very similar to the next song, it all blends together in a way that is not really pleasant for me as a listener. The challenge is always exploring different sonic realms while still keeping the throughline of my sound.
“Fought A Hornet” was a standout in the writing process for me too. I was in Vermont staying in an off-grid cabin that my friend lives in, and they allowed me to stay there for a week or so. I didn't see anybody for a week. It was very very isolating — I had never experienced that level of isolation before. I would just stoke the wood stove and make it 115 degrees in there, and drink red wine and read Rilke. My grandfather, who's passed, I had his classical nylon string guitar with me, and one night I just searched medieval guitar tuning, and I found this guitar tuning, and I wrote that song. I think of that song as my homage to my grandfather a little bit, because he was an early musician. When I was writing that song, it felt medieval and very different from anything I'd done before. So I was in a feverish state when I wrote.
Something I thought was so cool reading about the recording process was that you also made a lot of the album with your family — your brothers and dad are featured.
WILLIAMS: As soon as I recorded the demo, I sent it to them, and I remember my dad and my older brother specifically were both like, "Wow, this is really beautiful." I think I only sent them the guitar part that I had written, because with that song I wrote the guitar part first, which isn't typically how I write. My dad, he's a musician too, and during lockdown, when I was living with my parents, I would wake up every day and my dad would be playing the Bach cello suites on his acoustic bass guitar. That kind of music is really really deep in me, and I wanted to explore different ways of playing guitar.
But yeah, my family was a huge part of the process of the record. Kind of every record I make, I'm sending them a lot of my demos and asking a lot of them in terms of opinions and emotional support because I turn into a menace. I don't know. The creative process is not easy. Of course there's massive reward but you have to crack yourself open and it's really hard.
And it never gets easier. It's weird to think about how you keep doing the same thing, even though it's really painstakingly difficult.
WILLIAMS: Well, it's because we have to. We're compelled to. There's a deep need to do it, even if it is painful and challenging. In the context of that random AI music exec who was like, ‘Now making music can be easy.’ 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 work through things. The state of society is so much about how we can feel the least amount of discomfort, and how can we make things as easy as possible? It's always at someone else's expense, of course, and it's at the expense of our own sense of being alive and being human.
Having to take time to work through something and having to reckon with the darker parts of your own self through creation, I welcome it. I welcome all of it. It is really challenging, and especially this record, the process was pretty hard for me. I didn't really have any external pressure, in terms of the amount of pressure I was putting on myself to make it perfect, but I had a lot of internal pressure to make it exactly how I had envisioned, and I did. I did end up doing that, but it took a lot out of me. It's worth it in service of the art and in service of having the experience of something being challenging and still doing it.
From:
https://stereogum.com/2508754/squirrel-flower-doesnt-want-to-make-it-easy/interviews/qa
