As Squirrel Flower, Ella O’Connor Williams has occasionally colored her music with a wanderer’s eye for geographic detail. On 2020’s I Was Born Swimming, she “gave up poetry and ran west on I-80,” referencing her relocation from her native Boston to her current home base of Chicago. 2021’s Planet (i) name-checked Iowa 146, a highway that runs through Grinnell, where Williams attended college. Location, lingering at the margins but seldom the main focus, has often occupied a peripheral role in Williams’ songs. Her latest record, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, changes that wholesale. This is music constantly in motion, a peripatetic pursuit whose endpoint lies within the voyage itself. Across these 11 songs, the scenery whizzes by at a steady pace, quick enough to not feel idle, slow enough to properly bask in each vista’s splendor. As a touring musician, Williams has firsthand experience of an itinerant lifestyle and the ever-shifting imagery that comes with the territory. Paired with its on-the-nose cover art of an open road, Say a Prayer has all the hallmarks of a storied, vivid travelogue. Toward the beginning of the album, “Cleveland” makes a case for living in its titular city’s suburb of Lakewood, but the narrator’s boyfriend doesn’t have any desire to live there. “A few degrees of separation / a few degrees of longitude / can make a lot of difference,” Williams sings. It’s ultimately a love song, co-written with her sibling Nate, about the Ohio city itself—and it’s one of the best songs she has ever written, an opinion that Williams herself shares. “Not Me” pulls its narrative from a dream that Williams had while staying in New Mexico, the state’s arid atmosphere providing a suitable backdrop for a fraught relationship: “Draw the curtains, open the door / Desert sun, never needed anyone / Try not to cross the line / Give you space, give you time.” Meanwhile, “Highway Woman” takes us to the “canyons of New Mexico,” the “factories of Indiana,” the “bunkers of California,” and the “harbors of New England” in the span of a single verse. That nomadic throughline is embedded into the creative process itself, too. Williams began writing the lyrics for “Reelin” on the back of an overdue Kansas Turnpike toll bill, and its 12-string guitars shimmer with a tonal beauty that evokes Johnny Marr’s playstyle. The mournful recorder melody and oscillating accordion complement Williams’ tale of blissful domesticity. She sings of it with the fantastical tenor of a lucid dream, as if “a husband and a garden and a plan” are just-out-of-reach impossibilities that she nonetheless yearns for. She doesn’t want to pop the bubble that transports her back to reality, instead reveling in an ideal world where she has “good intentions and good credit.” Musically, it never stays in one place for long either. There’s cohesion, but Williams broadens the Squirrel Flower template by dipping into an array of styles, aided by indie legend Alex Farrar, who recorded her and her band at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville. On “Cleveland,” she goes full-on shoegaze with in-the-red guitars and drums that smack with the urgent, blustery force of a stormwind. “Foot Thick Ice” begins its life as an ‘80s Sade jam before eventually morphing into a slowcore dirge and, soon thereafter, a ramshackle rock anthem à la Big Thief. Penultimate track “Surfing USA” sets its tale of escape from heartbreak over a viscous morass that splits the difference between Grouper and Knifeplay (and not the Beach Boys). But, like most travelogues, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going amounts to something beyond the various locales it comprises. It’s not exclusively about the settings but more about how those settings shape the people within them, both those who are just passing through and those who call it home. The final line on “Weightless, Untethered” echoes the thesis at the album’s heart: “Say a prayer to the gods of getting going / And say a prayer to the gods of standing still.” Williams repeats those last two words once more, as if to emphasize their importance. Even for a record geared toward constant motion, Williams knows that the most necessary part of constant travel is to take those moments of reprieve and slow down. The whole point of a well-traveled life is to take stock of your surroundings. You couldn’t compose a travelogue otherwise. [Polyvinyl] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.