Williams’ newest album, Say A Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, is her fourth studio album with Polyvinyl, her sixth in total, and is a testament to the belief in oneself that comes from years of ‘doing it afraid.’ “I’m not stressed,” she says, of the album’s upcoming release. “For the first time ever. I always get really stressed before my records come out, and I feel differently this time.” 

Her change in perspective comes since the release of her previous album, Tomorrow’s Fire (2023), its long touring cycle, and just over a year of travelling throughout the U.S. that she embarked on afterwards. 

Like every good road trip, Williams did a bit of everything. She attended an artist’s residency in New Mexico, and visited the dunes of Indiana. She added to her CD collection, notably Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971, and a live Townes Van Zandt album, as well as a Chic CD— “I’m a sucker for disco,” she says with a laugh. She read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses trilogy, and cites it as inspiration for the album, saying the books have “some of the most beautiful descriptions of natural landscapes I’ve ever experienced,” while also “discussing death and life and the meaning of it, and time and memory in such a profound way. It really struck me.” 

Most impressively, she also wrote and recorded the entirety of Say A Prayer within that year, all while doing the occasional tour. “When I wasn’t touring,” she admits, “I was kind of just running around like a mad woman.” 

Songs poured out of Williams as she travelled and pulled inspiration from everything from staring out at desert expanses and seeing in them “all of past, present, and future”, to “listening to Stevie Nicks and dancing around with a bunch of candles lit” during a storm. When she recalls these moments, she seems to be transported to them herself, as if experiencing them for the first time. Even in conversation, she gives the impression that she exists in every place, and every time, at once. 

“I wanted it to sound like it wasn’t completely obvious what year it was made,” Williams says of the new record, and references the influence of travelling through small towns and rural places; “There’s a lot of musical nostalgia in those settings,” she says. “You turn on the radio, and aside from the Christian rock… it’s classic rock, it’s classic folk, it’s music from the 70’s and 80’s.” Williams achieves this temporal ambiguity effortlessly. Guitar sounds swarm, and there’s a sort of buzzing, echoed quality to the sonic landscapes that are pieced together into a mosaic of memory, a meticulous collection of times and places that have shaped Williams profoundly. 

The “tension between movement and stasis” that Williams experiences dates back to early childhood, when she had a bone tumor in her leg. “It was non-cancerous,” she recalls, “but it was still pretty intense and serious. And because of that, I spent a lot of time in the hospital from ages 5 to 9.” She reveals that she doesn’t talk about this in interviews, because she hasn’t thought of it as being particularly relevant. She seems, as she says this, to be almost surprised to be bringing it up at all. “But when I’m actually thinking about it,” she says, “that’s when I first started writing poems and songs.” 

At times, during those four years of appointments, tests, and surgeries, she was moving from school, to home, to the hospital on a regular basis. At others, she was stuck, “bedridden with nothing to do for entire summers.” Both experiences came with their silver linings. Of the former, she admits: “I kind of… liked it? Like, obviously it was very traumatizing, but… I got to skip school and go to the hospital, and my mom would buy me a chocolate chip muffin from the bakery, and it was awesome.” On the other hand, staying in bed left her to lean into her imagination, and create stories. “I think I missed out on a lot of normal kid stuff during these years,” she says. “But in turn, it allowed me to develop the imagination, it allowed me to be an artist.” 

In a way, the creative processes she developed when she was made to oscillate between motion and stillness continue to be relevant to her work today. In fact, Williams’ year of travel came to a halt when she realized: “my inclination towards constant movement was sort of happening at the detriment of my health and my well-being… I couldn’t sit with things that I had to sit with”. Since then, she’s found a balance between moving and staying put. While she does not have a permanent residence in Chicago, she stays with friends and community in the city, and sometimes returns to stay with her parents. She’s still been touring—and has a large one coming up for her new album—but she says: “I’ve found a way to do it that feels a little more stabilizing, and not just like, going anywhere on a whim and taking my fifteen-passenger van on insanely long drives across the country for no real reason.”

At one point, Williams says: “I feel like I was more fearless as a kid than I am now. I’ll say that much,” And yet, Say A Prayer presents her at her most honest, and most vulnerable. “The album kind of paints this picture in my life of me deciding to stop compromising, and live life in the way that I wanted,” Williams explains. “I just hope,” she says, that Say A Prayer “can help [listeners] feel free, and just live their lives.”