Ella Williams was writing tender songs about freeways and driving long before a certain No. 1 hit about a driver’s license came along. Williams, a 24-year-old songwriter who records under the name Squirrel Flower, filled her debut, 2020’s I Was Born Swimming, with meditations on interstates, headlights, and ambiguous lovers who carry her inside when she’s fallen asleep on the road. The follow-up, Planet (i), features songs like “Iowa 146,” “Flames and Flat Tires,” and the uncharacteristically anthemic “Roadkill,” which uses backseat driving (“Slow down/Don’t want to risk the roadkill”) as a metaphor for the nagging weight of imposter syndrome. If automobile companies threw money at indie-rock songwriters the way fashion brands woo influencers, Williams would surely be on their list.
Born into a musical family in Massachusetts—her grandmother a singer, her grandfather the founder of a medieval ensemble—Williams was gifted with a bright, searching voice that she can roughen up when the song calls for it (“Hurt a Fly”) and a knack for imbuing small observations with cosmic weight. She has since lived in Iowa (where she attended college) and Chicago, which explains some of the road imagery, but she recorded Planet (i) in Bristol with English producer Ali Chant last fall; she had just recovered from the coronavirus and realized her antibodies made it relatively safe to travel.
On Planet (i), the road is a nexus of nostalgia and intimacy: “Iowa 146” uses a whisper-sing delivery and gorgeous, fingerpicked guitar melody to capture the sweetness of a night spent on top of a car with a love interest. But it’s also a site of disasters that haunt Williams’s imagination: the careening firestorms of “Flames and Flat Tires,” or the Missouri floods that inspired “Deluge in the South,” which has the openhearted, country-speckled quality of a Waxahatchee deep cut. Williams’ vivid songwriting and versatile voice bring both sides to life.
Planet (i) is bigger and bolder than Squirrel Flower’s previous work, augmenting Williams’ alternate tunings and folkie charm with grand gestures and abrupt tonal shifts. “Roadkill” deploys a key change at the climax, “To Be Forgotten” wrings drama out of a reverb-heavy drum track, and much of the album features airy backing vocals from family and friends. The spiky, acerbic “Hurt a Fly” is an instant highlight, and the rare song where Williams sings in character as someone else. “Took it too far again/Followed you home again,” she deadpans, cheekily impersonating toxic music-scene dudes but cloaking her voice in distortion, as though to create some distance from her own identity.
Like I Was Born Swimming, Planet (i) grows a bit listless towards the back half (“Desert Wildflowers”), and some of its song fragments don’t quite land. The most intriguing among them is “Big Beast,” which sounds like it’s emanating from an antique gramophone before its grainy folk melody crashes into an awkward sludge-metal climax. The payoff isn’t there. Naturally, though, it’s another road vignette, inspired by a time when Williams and her mother were driving around aimlessly and became captivated by a massive storm cloud. If life is a highway, Squirrel Flower wants to dissociate beside it all night long.
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