Biography
Squirrel Flower is the project of Ella O'Connor Williams, a songwriter and guitarist who came up playing around Boston. Her father is a professional musician, and she spent much of her childhood in a cooperative community with ties to Black Mountain College.[1]
She taught herself piano and guitar and played open mics around Boston before writing her own songs.[1] While at college in Grinnell, Iowa, she was given an electric guitar, which opened her up to reverb-heavy, ambient textures, and she began performing as Squirrel Flower.[1]
Williams grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, about twenty minutes outside Boston, and her father, Jesse Williams, a blues bassist, plays on her debut.[2] At around age five she had surgery on her leg and wore a full cast, and her father gave her her first guitar during that time.[2] She began releasing EPs in high school, drawing on British folk and on 2010s acts such as Bon Iver and Laura Marling.[2]
At Grinnell College she double-majored in gender, women, and sexuality studies and studio art, graduating in December 2018, and began using distortion and electric guitar in her second year.[2] Her debut album for Polyvinyl, I Was Born Swimming, arrived in January 2020.[3] Its lead single, "Red Shoulder," was a song about destabilization and dissociation.[3]
References
- Squirrel Flower finds clarity in solitude (The Fader) — Background on Williams's upbringing, Grinnell, Iowa, the Squirrel Flower name, and the recording sessions.
- Artist To Watch: Squirrel Flower (Stereogum) — Background on Williams's upbringing, the first recording session, the Rare Book Room sessions and the meaning of the album title.
- Squirrel Flower announces debut album I Was Born Swimming (The FADER) — Williams's own description of Red Shoulder as a song about destabilization and dissociation, and the purpose of the closing solo.