Squirrel Flower on Lake Swimming, Boycotting SXSW, and Patrick Swayze

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's offering: Squirrel Flower's Ella Williams enters the two-timers club today, feel free to pop a freakin' bottle on her behalf. She last came around these parts for 2023's excellent Tomorrow's Fire, and just recently I got her on the horn again for her also-excellent new record Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going (hey, don't mind if I do!), which has some of my favorite songs yet from her. When you've been doing this as long as I have, you tend to return to interview subjects every few years just because you like checking in with them in general, and Ella is certainly in that category; since I profiled her for the FADER way back in 2020, it's been a pure pleasure to come back around every few years and chop it up. So the resulting convo is relaxed and informative, and I hope you have as much of a good time reading it as we did having it. Check it out:

How's Chicago doing?
Chicago's good. Last week was one of the busiest weeks of my life, honestly. I'm subletting a place for the summer and then going on a long tour, and I don't know where I'll end up after that.

Yeah, you did double duty playing Lolla and the Ethel Cain aftershow, right?
Yeah. We had to get to Lollapalooza at eight in the morning, and then we were at the Metro until 2:40 a.m. It was one of the longest days of work I've ever done.

That sounds extremely exhausting. In general, it seems like you've been hitting the road more than ever. How's that been for you?
It's great. I feel very lucky to be able to tour in many different ways. A lot of the tours I've been doing are solo and in between album cycles, and being able to have variety when it comes to what a tour can be makes it a lot more sustainable. If I'm touring for four months over half a year, and half of that is full-band touring as a headliner and half of that is solo touring or opening for somebody—those two types of touring scratch very different itches for me. I don't know if there are a lot of artists that feel like they can do that, so I feel pretty lucky to be able to keep it interesting on the road. It makes it a lot easier to stay present and not fall into the routine of it too much.

When it comes to blowing off steam, what's your preferred leisure activities?
I like to swim and hike. If it's nice out, you know, that's the most important thing for me—being around nature when I'm touring. But I also really enjoy seeing friends that live in different places, which is something that's really grounding and nurturing for me when I'm touring. If you're on a long tour and you're staying in hotels every night, it can feel really destabilizing. You don't have a sense of where you are or how time is passing. Being able to really anchor myself in a place through hanging out and spending time with people that I know there, being part of a community for a day that isn't necessarily but tangentially my own—that's how I blow off steam

On the Beths tour this past June, I went swimming 10 different days. Every time I'd meet back up with them, they'd be like, "What did you do on your off day?" I'd be like, "I went swimming again, and they were like, "Goddamn it. We're stuck on this bus and you're out there." I love swimming every day.

What's the best place that you've swum at on tour?
A few come to mind. I really love rivers. There was one river in Boulder Canyon, Colorado on tour in the summer of 2024, while I was opening for Pedro the Lion. I was playing solo and traveling with my best friend, and it was the summer solstice. We went up into Boulder Canyon, parked the car, and went to this beautiful river. It was so freaking cold, and it was steep coming down this mountain. We just basked in the sun on these rocks and dove into the water. There was this older man who was tubing, and he'd fly down the river and wave to us—and then 10 minutes later, he'd somehow be back at the top and flying down the river again. We became friends with him. It was like one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. There are these huge mountains in the distance, and beautiful tall trees.

There was another place on the summer solstice this year. I was in Greenfield, Massachusetts on tour. We didn't play Green River Fest, but the Beths and Spoon did, and I was on tour with both of them, so I decided to go, hang out and see them and other friends who were playing there. I ended up at this river in Greenfield that was really beautiful. Oh, there was also this lake in outside of Durham, North Carolina, Jordan Lake. That was a highlight, too. I mean, there are just so many.

I love this new record. I was actually saying to myself a few weeks before it arrived in my inbox, "I wonder when we're going to get a new record from Ella." This is the longest time you've taken between records to date. Tell me about how it came together across that period of time.
This was the first time that I was interested in intentionally taking time. Every other record, I made in a week or two. I had the songs, I wanted to record them and put them out. There was an urgency to releasing and recording them. For this one, there was definitely a sense of urgency, but it was different. I felt like I really needed to take the time to make the exact thing that I wanted to make.

After Tomorrow's Fire, it was just crazy for me. I was touring more than I ever had before and was largely [tour managing] myself, and also managing myself. There was definitely some burnout related to that. I really felt the need to reevaluate things and, not take a step back from music, but just figure out a slightly different way to approach things and figure out what my ideal relationship with releasing music was. So after the last tour I did for Tomorrow's Fire, which was July of 2024, I didn't tour until May of 2025. During that time, I spent a lot of time alone thinking, and I also spent a lot of time with people, as well as traveling—but not in a tour context, which opened the world up to me in a different way.

For so long, I'd traveled in the context of touring and was only in a place for a night. It didn't allow me enough time to actually nurture connections that I had with people around the country. So I took that year to find different parts of myself. I didn't have the same urgency to release music right away, and I'm really glad I did that, because this record feels definitely more me than anything I've ever made. I was so intentional with taking the time to rework things, and at the end of that year, I had something like 30 or 40 songs and narrowed it down to what I was thinking about including on the record.

In May of 2025, I went up to Wisconsin with some friends, and we set up a mobile recording studio in the engineer's dad's house in the middle of nowhere and tracked a lot of songs live in the living room. I took those recordings to Drop of Sun in Asheville in October of 2025, and from there we reworked certain songs and added overdubs, and the record ended up being a collage of all those recordings.

Talk to me a little bit about the evolution of your sound across your discography thus far.
For this record, my main goal was to present my voice in a way that hadn't been presented before—to make a voice-forward record. I realized the songs were done when I felt like my voice was treated in the right way. With the last record, that wasn't my goal—I wanted to push the limits of how loud my sound could get. Planet (i) was more about creating this textural journey.

I don't understand bands that don't change their sound over time. When I go into making a new record, I'm not intentionally thinking, "How can I make this sound different to keep things interesting?" It's something that happens naturally as I age and my tastes change. I was more interested in presenting something that, when you listen to it, you're not hearing the studio, but the essence of what it is.

You co-wrote "Cleveland" with your sibling Nate.
My two siblings are definitely my best friends. We actually have a family band called Uncommon Rat, and that song was originally an Uncommon Rat song. I was like, "Nate, please, this song is way too good. Can I use it for my record?" That song actually came out of a conversation that Nate and I were having about Cleveland and the Rust Belt as this future climate haven, and feeling like a lot of people are going to end up there in the next 10 years. We were chatting about it, we both decided to play music on our own for a bit, and then we came back together and I was like, "Dude, I have a song idea." And Nate was like, "I have a song idea." Nate had written the chorus lyric, and I'd written the beginnings of the first verse,. It was unplanned, and we wrote the song on the spot. I write with other people a lot, but never for Squirrel Flower. This project has always been sacred to me, and I'm very protective over it. It just felt right, and I'm so close with my siblings that it doesn't feel like a co-written song. It just feels like a song in my repertoire.

There's a lot of power-washing going on in the "Sick Tooth" video.
That video was by Nate, too. They're an art handler and also do random manual labor. They were power-washing someone's house for a job when I sent them the rough mixes to get their opinion, and they were like, "This music is perfect for this task." I gave them free reign to borrow a GoPro and make a video, and it's perfect.

I recently got laid off from my job.
I saw your tweet about that. I'm sorry about that.

It's okay, man. It was honestly a blessing in disguise. I had a feeling it was gonna happen for a while, and I'd been saying to my wife, "Maybe I'll buy a power washer and wash people's sidewalks." That seems like a good way to make some cash.
Dude, yes. Honestly, I think about this a lot in the context of music being like my main job right now, and kind of my only skill. It feels like we're in such a fucking dire place right now with jobs and money. Everybody's really struggling in that regard, and it's smart to do work that can't be replaced by a machine—and I guess something like manual labor is that. Also, music is that. I guess you could say, "AI songs are happening," but I don't really pay any mind to that. I'm not threatened by it at all. I don't think that will actually ever replace musicians in any sense.

Yeah, I think it's important for people to remember that, the AI job replacement thing—it's not actually happening yet, at all.
Yeah, they're trying to do this manufactured consent thing with it. It's not really working. I was actually thinking about this while being at Lollapalooza. No shade to that festival, we had a really nice time and everybody working [there] was really lovely—but I barely knew any of the artists on that lineup. I think a lot of them are pop musicians who have come out of nowhere from the TikTok and Spotify algorithm. I saw some moments of different sets, and I was thinking about how maybe those songs were written by AI. That kind of world is so far from any sort of world I'm living in, as well as the world that I want to be in. So, if it's happening, it's happening in a place that is already very tarnished.

Speaking more about festivals, the boycott that you spearheaded with regards to South by Southwest resulted in some level of change from them. I have a lot of respect for anyone who has principles and actually stands by them, because it's so rare. Did you receive any backlash from people in the industry about that? There's always people who really don't want to do anything—and a lot of the time, they're in the music industry.
I will say, I didn't really tell anybody that I was doing it. I told my agent, who's the best person ever. He's the only person I told, because he helped to book those shows—and he was like, "I respect your decision. Let me figure this out. I got you." I didn't tell my label, I was self-managing at the time. If I'd asked more people—my team or whatever—I probably would've been very kindly and subtly discouraged from doing it. But because I was going rogue, it wasn't even a question for me. After the fact, I received massive amounts of support from my record label, my press people, and my team that I did have.

Any sort of backlash is unbeknownst to me. I mean, I have heard stories. I have a friend who used to work at a very large venue in Chicago, and told me that they were like in a meeting with the venue owners around that time, and some of the high-up people were like, "This is so stupid. It's like never going to change anything, blah, blah, blah." If there are people who were saying that who felt that way—opportunities that I didn't get because of it—I honestly don't really care. At a certain point, you have to realize that you're a human being, and where you draw the line with things—and playing a festival that is literally advancing and platforming weapons manufacturers that are working towards committing a genocide is a pretty easy line for me to draw, and it's pretty easy for me to feel 100% okay with any minor backlash that occurs after that.

We live in a time where, every day as an artist, we're being asked to compromise our values and push our own boundaries in terms of artistic and political integrity. It's something that I 'm contending with on the day-to-day. The SXSW was a relatively easy decision, because it was so clearly amoral, and even in the first place, SXSW is a crock of shit. The reason to go to SXSW is to do unofficial showcases and hang out with other bands. I don't think people are playing official SXSW showcases and getting signed from that anymore—but if they are, they're fucking terrible. So it was a pretty easy decision to make. I didn't expect it to be such a public thing. I didn't expect the press to happen, and I didn't expect my Instagram to be linked on Fox News. That was definitely not easy, and actually quite scary—but it was still worth it, because it's nothing compared to what Palestinian organizers face every day. It felt like the least I could do as an artist, with what little platform I have, to stand up for something and accept any risk that comes along with that.

One of the things that I had to reevaluate in my year that I took off from touring was how I can ensure that my music is not divorced from the context and setting of the world that we live in, as well as my own political beliefs—how I can have my shows be more than just isolated artistic experiences that bring people out of the world. I don't think that art is supposed to make people completely escape from reality. It's really important that my shows feel like they're not existing in a vacuum. I raise money at most of my shows for like mutual aid and for Palestine, and it feels like that's the only way for me to be an artist right now.

You like watching movies?
Honestly, dude, I've been on a Patrick Swayze kick. A couple weeks ago, the wildfire smoke from Canada was really bad in Chicago, so I wasn't really going outside for a few days. I watched Point Break for the first time, and I was like, "Jesus Christ, this movie's so good." Then I searched "Movies like Point Break" and ended up on this Reddit thread and found out about Road House, which I'd never heard of or seen before.

I also watched Road House somewhat recently and was shocked at how good it was.
It's so good, oh my God. I love how it takes place in Missouri, but it's so obviously filmed in California. At one point, there's a freeway sign for Los Angeles in the background. Then I watched Dirty Dancing for the first time, and I watched The Outsiders. He had a considerable body of work, all things considered. I also went to the theaters with my friends Gus and Greg to see Sherman's March.

I also saw that in theaters recently. What'd you think?
I loved it. Ross McElwee was there doing a Q&A, and we actually left during it because he was very soft-spoken and we couldn't hear him. But he was just walking around the theater during the movie. I really, really liked it.