Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going: the driving is the destination

Ella Williams has spent a decade writing songs that pin a feeling to a place and let it live there. Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, her fourth album for Polyvinyl and sixth overall, turns the method into the subject. Eleven songs about motion, written across two years of American highway. None of them hurry.

The bones are simple. Voice first, guitars behind, takes kept. Most of it was tracked live in a makeshift Door County studio with Chicago friends Seth Engel and Jack Henry co-producing, then finished in Asheville at Drop of Sun with Alex Farrar, the engineer behind recent Wednesday and MJ Lenderman records. Farrar usually gets hired to make bands sound bigger. Here he does the opposite, and the record is better for it: the quiet sits forward, the loud stays earned. “Reelin” rides twelve-string, recorder and accordion, and still feels like weather coming in.

“Cleveland” is the pop song, co-written with her sibling Nate. She picks the city over the boy, and it plays like the lightest three minutes here. “Not Me” came out of a dream in New Mexico and a Linda Ronstadt binge; you can hear both in how plainly she lets herself sing. The spine is “Highway Woman,” half autobiography and half myth, addressed to anyone who lives on the road and calls it a life. Her voice has never been recorded this close. The album earns that intimacy instead of leaning on it.

The complaints are small but real. Williams wrote more than thirty songs for this record and kept eleven, which should have meant no passengers. Two still ride along: “Sick Tooth” and “Fought a Hornet” circle moods the stronger tracks already own outright, and the back half idles once before the finish. A nine-song cut would have been meaner. It also would have been right.

Then “Weightless, Untethered” closes the record exactly the way its title promises, and the whole thing settles the way good travel does. You cannot say what changed. Something did. She calls what she makes witch rock, which sounds like a bit until the third listen, when it starts sounding like a fact. Play it in a moving car and don’t skip.

The tracklist

Hear it