Squirrel Flower Finds Her Flame

This past summer was an important one for me: The latest season of The Righteous Gemstones came out and a new Squirrel Flower album was announced. Those two interests became interconnected, albeit not intentionally. In the former, there’s a religious militia called the Brothers of Tomorrow’s Fires (led by Steve Zahn, thank goodness); Ella Williams’ new LP under her longtime, beloved moniker is called Tomorrow’s Fire. Williams has never seen The Righteous Gemstones (she’s much more tuned in with Survivor), but it’s not the first time one of her records has shared a name with another important cultural landmark. When she announced her 2021 record Planet (I), Doja Cat announced her own record called Planet Her one week later—both of which were set to release on the same day. That interconnectivity of wavelengths between two people who’ve never met mirrors where Tomorrow’s Fire’s title comes from: a novel Williams’ great-grandfather Jay wrote in 1964, a name he borrowed from that of a poem by Medieval French poet Rutebeauf.

Tomorrow’s Fire, to the immediate eye and ear, rings in like some sort of foreboding, apocalyptic idea, which would make sense, given that Planet (I) was a conceptual exploration of what awaits us on the other side of an inhospitable, desecrated Earth—but that title is so much more than that, as it’s a reference to Williams’ family and the sense of hope she feels in the community around her. There was worry there for her, that folks would latch onto a false narrative around the album’s message and the ancestral, generational symbolism and importance would get lost in the noise of a release cycle. Rutebeauf’s poem and Jay’s book both detail how strange and challenging it can be to live an artist’s life, how creatives depend on tomorrow’s fire to keep themselves warm and to see things through. “It just resonated with me so much,” Williams says. “Especially over the past two years where I’ve been really making the leap into full-time music. I still cater weddings when I’m not on tour, but I don’t have a Plan B. I think, over the past couple of years, I’ve really realized that and come to terms with it. And I read this book and just felt so connected to it and I wanted to honor that.”

Williams started Squirrel Flower when she was a double-major (studio art and gender studies) at Grinnell College in Iowa, one of only a few-dozen need-blind institutions left in the country. She was there for a semester but found herself lacking direction and chose to take the spring semester off while considering dropping out. “I went to my parents’ house and I was taking classes at a community college, and that’s when I tapped into going to shows in Boston and I got more involved in the DIY scene on the East Coast,” Williams says. She called herself Squirrel Flower, a name from her childhood, and recorded her first album, Early Winter Songs from Middle America, at Rear Window Studios and went on her first tour in the summer of 2015. The songs had all been written back in Iowa, and she’d eventually return there to carry out the rest of her classes—driving to Des Moines and Iowa City on weekends and doing small tours around those cities. Down the line, she’d start doing video performance pieces with a camcorder, where she would film herself in a housewife dress cleaning off train tracks, aiming to capture a pastoral scene that comments on domesiticity and power—which would influence the “Full Time Job” music video she put out this summer.

The work Williams has done as Squirrel Flower cannot be understated. Tomorrow’s Fire is a revelatory record on par with any of the best shit you’ve heard this year—and you can clip that. No one is touching her songwriting right now, and the hyperbole is warranted. Paste ordained “Alley Light” as the Song of the Summer for a reason. And what’s most thrilling is that her stardom has risen by word of mouth and constant, impressive gigging. Since her last record, Williams has hit the road with Soccer Mommy, Whitney, Wednesday and Horse Jumper of Love. In the midst of promoting the announcement of Tomorrow’s Fire, she even opened a slate of sets for Hurray for the Riff Raff. It feels like a vivid emblem of what so many folks have been craving, this example of someone who wasn’t knighted with a “band to watch” designation and has clawed, slowly and consistently, upwards at a treasure trove of interest and fandom. It’s organic and beautiful and quite rare to, after damn near a decade of albums, singles and EPs, see one of the best active artists finally get their due. “It’s easy to release something and, if it doesn’t instantly reach 1,000,000 peoples’ ears, it’s like, ‘Oh, well, I guess on to the next thing,’” Williams says. “But it’s so important to remember, as an artist, that you make this music and it exists and people can find it at any time.”

And that much is true. My pick for Song of the Year in 2022, the duet between Squirrel Flower and Grapetooth called “Shining,” ended up being just the beginning of what was to come for Williams. And you have to know, I loved I Was Born Swimming and Planet (I) when they came out, but Squirrel Flower still felt like a well-kept secret then—even though she was a part of Polyvinyl’s impressive roster. It was easy to gatekeep those records, because they were released into a pandemic when touring was inactive (or, in the case of Planet (I), hadn’t yet fully resumed again). But, when Tomorrow’s Fire was announced, everyone in my social media orbit was (rightfully) freaking out about it.

It’s hard to locate the epicenter of the excitement, but I imagine a big part of that has to do with the fact that Squirrel Flower is a key piece in a budding and bold new momentum that rock ‘n’ roll has picked up—what with bands like Wednesday, Truth Club and Slow Pulp putting out some of the most important projects of the year thus far. Squirrel Flower is right there in that conversation; I might even argue Williams has put together a record that outpaces all of the hype. And she can feel it, too, though she claims to not have the analytical power or perspective to pinpoint where the unquantifiable magic is coming from in a scene she’s a part of. But she can feel it just like the rest of us. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know that there’s something there,” Williams explains. “Recently, I saw [filmmaker] Jim Jarmusch speak, and he kept saying ‘People ask me to analyze what my films are about, and I have no idea. I make them because I can’t explain them. My language is film.’ There’s a lot of bands just turning what we thought indie rock was on its head right now, and it’s really exciting.”

Tomorrow’s Fire actually begins in 2015, as Williams re-recorded the song “I Don’t Use a Trash Can” from Early Winter Songs from Middle America and made it the opening chapter of this new turn in her career. She’d started playing that song again on the road as a way of grounding herself and having a reminder of where she came from, musically. “I ended up just feeling really inspired playing it,” she says. “I knew I wanted to re-record it for the new album, to nod to my history and my past musical self—which is also my present musical self. It’s all very intertwined and in conversation with itself. It doesn’t feel right to start [Tomorrow’s Fire] any other way.” The track is an introduction to where the rest of the album is going. It’s not a departure for Williams but, instead, a sonic evolution, a lesson in playfulness and emphasizes how hindsight can arrive with different opinions on construction. She’s interested in the idea of “covering herself,” and she enjoys doing it because it serves as an acknowledgement that, when you record a song, it exists as a moment in time. “There’s something beautiful about that,” Williams adds. “But there’s also a lot of freedom in acknowledging that you can change the way you perform a song and the meaning of it can change to you.”

Williams isn’t the type of musician who writes and demos on the road. Because she tour manages herself, she’s not left with much else to give creatively in-between sets. The first song that she came up with for Tomorrow’s Fire was “What Kind of Dream Is This?” when she was doing an artist residency in California in May 2022. She’d just finished up an extensive and exhaustive stretch of touring and had been feeling stagnant, only to feel jolted out of the rut by writing alone in a cabin on top of a mountain. The rest of Tomorrow’s Fire came together throughout the summer and into the fall, as she wrote and recorded the entire album in succinct, nearby periods during the residency in California, her living space in Chicago and her parents’ home in Massachusetts.

The emotive purposefulness that makes these 10 songs sing are reflective of what Williams and her peers were going through together, both financially and socially, around that time. She, her lover and her sibling were all living in an old skater warehouse in Chicago at the time, getting as loud as they wanted whenever they wanted—because they had no neighbors—and getting by on whatever means they could. The space became essential to her for the construction of Tomorrow’s Fire. “The people around me in my community, we didn’t really have jobs and we were all in this stressful period, feeling a lot of desperation—and it was coming through a lot musically,” Williams notes. “We would just play music all day and night, and it felt like the world was falling apart in many ways. It feels that way all the time now, but, during this specific period of time, we were all just very supportive of each other and getting through it by making music together.”

The studio band that Williams assembled to fill out Tomorrow’s Fire is legitimately ridiculous. The songs feature contributions from Bon Iver’s Matt McCaughan, Angel Olsen’s bandmate Seth Kauffman, Wednesday’s Jake “MJ” Lenderman and The War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley, and their presence on this album changed the stakes of what Squirrel Flower could become—and such an important, DNA-changing amalgam of shredders wasn’t even immediately on Williams’ mind. “I wasn’t thinking, like, ‘Holy shit, these people are legendary,’ because they were so nice and so down to earth and they seemed so genuinely excited to be there making music with me,” she says. The changing dynamic became first noticeable when the band recorded “When a Plant is Dying” live in a room together. “The energy in the room was fucking insane,” Williams adds. “It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. Part of having these incredible, legendary players is having their personalities come through in their parts. I do a lot of the instruments on my records myself, but then, at a certain point, it’s like, ‘Okay, what can be added here? Who else’s voice can come in and say things that I couldn’t?’”

Williams also worked with producer Alex Farrar on Tomorrow’s Fire, continuing to add to just how many great rock records he’s put his imprint on in 2023—joining Rat Saw God, All of This Will End and Running From the Chase. She got linked with him via Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman in October 2021, who recommended she reach out to him whenever the time came to record her next album. She filed that reference away for nearly a year before finally hitting Farrar up. “I went down [to Drop of Sun Studios] and it was such a natural collaboration between the two of us,” Williams says. “It was a really exciting time in the studio for me, because I felt this renewed confidence as a producer and I knew, so clearly, what I wanted. And Alex was able to just take it over the edge. We were on the same fucking page for the whole thing, and we also just became really good friends through the process of making the record—which, I think, shows up in the music.” The heaviness of the album is palpable and massive, likely a byproduct of Farrar’s self-proclaimed metalhead roots and propensity for big, bold and visceral guitar work.

Tomorrow’s Fire is not a surface-level record. There are double-entendres and portraits of labor, mental health and gender reflections so deftly placed all across this thing—and they’re often portrayed in tandem with vivid imagery of surroundings. You can trace that approach back to Williams’ affection for Mary Oliver, a poet she’s been a fan of since she was a kid—and she is especially pulled into her style of using nature as a vessel for life. It’s something ingrained in her deeply, and it was spurred by her mom’s love for Oliver’s work. Of course, her great-grandfather’s prolific writing career feeds immensely, and immediately, into her own. “A lot of his shit was pretty communist-leaning, which is always inspiring,” Williams says. “As someone in that realm, it’s cool to get political inspiration or just read his point of view about the world and feel like it’s so in line with my own.” Before she went into the studio to record Tomorrow’s Fire, she read Kim Gordon’s autobiography Girl in a Band and was moved by the former Sonic Youth bassist’s confidence and disinterest in compromising. “I think it really influenced the way that I approached recording, energetically,” she adds. “It’s easy to second-guess myself, but it’s very powerful when you don’t.”

There are moments on Tomorrow’s Fire where Williams is clearly wrestling with the pushes and pulls (mostly pushes) of not just being a touring musician who also has to maintain a job to keep a roof over her head, but of being a cog in a machine of dead-end employment that is plagued by stagnant minimum wage inflation and actively diminished passion. Lines like “There must be more to life than being on time, these days it takes a sunrise to remember you’re alive” and “Doing my best is a full-time job, but it doesn’t pay the rent” really stick out with every listen, and Williams calls back to the community of musicians she found herself in in Chicago, how they were working crummy, lifeless office jobs because they were the only places hiring at the time. “People who were so creative and vibrant, I would see them and they would just seem so fucking beat down by the work they were doing and that they were forced to do to pay the rent,” Williams explains. “Watching the people around me grow older, I think we’re all in this constant struggle of trying to live alternative lifestyles and figure out how to do that in a world where it’s so fucking hard to exist.”

For Williams, she’s never going to stop talking about how hard it is to be a musician who has to find a means to live comfortably on the road and in-between album cycles. But she also understands that, at the end of the day, it’s better than any of the alternatives. “Musicians and artists and creatives and alternative people alike have always struggled,” she says. “It’s not something you enter into because you think it will be easy. I think that’s the root of the idea of ‘Tomorrow’s Fire’ and the book and the poem. You enter this life because you don’t have any other choice, and you put everything into it. You know that it’s going to be a struggle, and that’s part of the beauty of it. And that comes through in the music.” Williams has always seen her destiny as a path of struggle. It could be alleviated, if the U.S. government took a page out of Canada’s book and subsidized tours. At the end of the day, making music as Squirrel Flower is a job and Williams is a worker in a country that doesn’t value work or the people doing it.

It should come as no surprise then that the best song on Tomorrow’s Fire, “Alley Light,” is a flickering pastoral built on the same songwriting land first broken by Bruce Springsteen on a record like Born To Run. Lines like “She says she wants to go far outta town in my beat-up car. Will she find another man who can take her there when my drive burns out?” feel exponentially Boss-like, as she tries to capture truths about life and about people in semi-fictional towns in stories that feel familiar and captivating. On “Alley Light” (and much of Tomorrow’s Fire), she is navigating concepts of power and breaking down what it means to novelize gender in relationships and how we choose to present them in art—this time through the perspective of “a man you knew, a man you love or a man you don’t know.” The way Springsteen surveys the world around him is not unlike Williams’; there’s a certain type of industrial romance and plainspoken realism afoot, and it’s a powerful thing to witness. She really got into him when she was at Grinnell and discovered Tunnel of Love and Nebraska—the latter having changed things completely for Williams who, at the time, was also making spacious, minimalistic folk music that was heavily inspired by the Midwestern landscape. There’s a resonance there, too, in how Springsteen manipulates the boundaries of autobiographical texts and fictional storytelling, a gray area that Williams makes an effort to blur as well.

I feel such a strong affinity for Midwestern bands, for the diverse spectrum of brilliance soundtracking my backyard. I mean, if you survey the crowd of Middle American records put out this year alone—Ratboys’ The Window, Free Range’s Practice, Slow Pulp’s Yard or Sweeping Promises’ Good Living Is Coming For You—is any region in the country really doing it like us? But no matter how palpable and accurate that truth is, the Midwest is still greatly, and begrudgingly, overlooked as a place of culture. Williams is not from here, at least not by birth; she’s a transplant who came to Iowa in 2014 for college and, except for a small bit of time she spent back at her parents’ in New England, has been here ever since. But Squirrel Flower is, thankfully, a Midwestern band making the most Midwestern rock ‘n’ roll you could ever want. The coasts and their shit-talking tumbles down as the Heartland endures on Tomorrow’s Fire. “I remember when I first moved out to Iowa, people were like, ‘Why are you going there?’ I went for college and I went because I got a free ride and decided to take the risk to go to rural Iowa,” Williams continues. “And, at first, it was a really challenging transition for me. But, then, the place opened itself up and revealed its magic to me. If I hadn’t moved there, I don’t think I would be making the music that I make.”

I remember taking a trip through Chicago, Minneapolis and Iowa City four years ago, when I was looking at grad schools to go to for a writing MFA. I remember sprawling across a highway somewhere between Green Bay and South Bend, looking onwards at the blank horizon and thinking about how the stillness—the warmth of hushed motion—couldn’t possibly exist anyplace else. There’s some of that in every Squirrel Flower song: alt-pop riffs cutting into the refraction of some fleeting sunshine; droopy, sludgy guitars unraveling at a pace metered by angelic, economical harmonies. I’ve been thinking a lot about the quote that spurred Williams’ grandfather to title his novel Tomorrow’s Fire. “Tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner / Tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight,” Rutebeuf wrote. It’s a proclamation of getting to the next day; a manifesto that outmuscles static and grief.

And we are met by that truth again at the end of the closing track “Finally Rain,” when Williams sings: “If this is what it means to be alive, we won’t grow up, grow up, grow up, my love, my love, my love.” The song fulfills the prophecy of Tomorrow’s Fire’s thesis statement, that it is possible to cut through the noise of nihilism with hard-earned hope. After putting out an album about our planet being ravaged and stripping us down to nothing, Ella Williams turning Squirrel Flower into a beacon of promise—a eudaemonic talisman guiding us along into an earned dose of grace—is nothing short of a brilliant pivot. And she’s loud and precious about wanting all of it. The record is bolstered by a desire to stay afloat in a space rid of heaviness and inequitable destinies; the constellations of mutual affection and daydreams of fair and plentiful livelihoods don’t hang in the balance here—they are the balance. The fire in question is not a suggestion that something has been, or will be, destroyed; it’s a declaration that who we are meant to be will rise to the surface once again, that we will live to see another cycle.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.