“This is the only way forward for me,” said Ella Williams, who performs as Squirrel Flower. Williams was talking about creating and working as an artist, and that same drive can be heard on her latest record, “Tomorrow’s Fire,” released earlier in October on Polyvinyl. Written during a potent moment of creativity, “Tomorrow’s Fire” is a sharp evolution for an artist who is not afraid to experiment in genre and scope. But it took a bit of time to get to that completed record.
Williams described the time before writing the new record as an incubation phase.
“You have to roll with the tides of the creative process. It’s important to show up every day for something to happen and to have a practice, but it’s also important not to force it when you’re in the incubation phase and less in the creation phase,” Williams said.
Squirrel Flower songs typically begin as hundreds of voice notes, scraps of melodies and journals filled with potential lyrics. When she is ready to start fleshing out songs, Williams goes through her archives and begins piecing things together.
But she was having trouble turning this latest collection into full songs. An artist residency in the Sierra Nevadas eventually helped unlock this new music. “What Kind of Dream is This?,” the first track written during that residency, opened up the floodgates, and everything else came out quickly. She even booked studio time to record before she finished writing.
Most of the tracks were written between May and October of 2022 except for one song, the album’s opener, “I Don’t Use a Trash Can.” According to Williams, the song was the first one she wrote as Squirrel Flower at age 18. She often found solace playing it live on tour “as a way to ground myself, to connect with my past self, and sort of remember why I make music and reflect on how far I’ve come.” The track, which doesn’t follow a traditional song structure, also reminds Williams of how to pursue her art.
Before making “I Don’t Use a Trash Can,” she typically wrote acoustic folk music. Everything changed with “I Don’t Use a Trash Can.” As her first song crafted with a more experimental genre bent, it also serves as a reminder to keep experimenting and challenging herself as an artist.
“When I wrote the songs, when I was figuring out the production for them, they were telling me that it needed to be loud,” Williams recalled. “The songs themselves needed this treatment that was pushing them forward.”
That was easy to accomplish in Chicago. Williams moved to the city two and a half years ago, and says the city and its surroundings became a particular source of inspiration. Chicago has pushed her forward as an artist, providing opportunities for her to experiment. If her last album, “Planet (i),” was largely inspired by folk musicians such as Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams, this new record is all noise, in a good way.
Williams’ partner and younger sibling lived in a warehouse space with no neighbors, a PA system and a bevy of instruments. Daylong jam sessions, unrestrained and welcoming, became a source of inspiration. “This was just unbridled improvising,” she said. “That … sort of allowed me to take it up a notch.” Williams would crank up the distortion with her co-producer, using pedals and amps to make the sound as vast as possible.
This can be heard in tracks including “Canyon” and “When a Plant is Dying,” a propulsive wonder stacked with layers of vocals and guitars. The latter track is one of the most aggressive on the record, plowing into the listener’s psyche and gripping tightly. Some of the songs have a sort of quality of desperation to them, an urgency begging the listener to linger on each turn of phrase. “When a Plant is Dying” most clearly embodies this.
At one point, Williams sings, “There must be more to life/than being on time/These days it takes a sunrise/to remember you’re alive.” Easy listening, this is not. And yet, by the end, she makes a point to say she is throwing seeds and, “I am not dying.” Through the sludge, there is hope.
“It seems to be harder every year to make a living being an artist, being a musician. But on the other side of that is just immense joy, and a very special way of interacting with the world,” Williams said. “Showing up to the world and approaching it in an artistic, curious and open way is the only way forward when there are so many challenges.”
8 p.m. Jan. 19, 2024, at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave.; tickets $25 (ages 18+) at lh-st.com
Britt Julious is a freelance critic.
