DEFIANTLY SOLO

SOUL SURVIVOR

Allison Russell mines the past to find a brighter future.

By Brett Leigh Dicks

It was while huddled into a bunk bed on the Our Native Daughters tour bus that the seeds for Allison Russell’s first solo album – Outside Child - were planted. Russell scribbled down lyrics and song ideas while trying to not wake her sleeping daughter as the bus rolled through the night. When Russell returned home to Nashville, she had a four-day window to turn those ideas into something tangible. After rounding up a collection of friends and entering the recording studio little did Russell realize just how tangible the results would be. With the recent release of Outside Child on Concord Records, Russell has been thrust into the musical stratosphere. The album’s release has been a whirlwind for the Nashville-based Canadian including appearances on late night television, a New York Times feature, and Variety predicting the record as album of the year. Having garnered critical acclaim within the North American folk and Americana scene through her bands Po’ Girl and Birds of Chicago, it was the success of Songs of Our Native Daughters - Russell’s 2019 collaboration with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Leyla McCalla - that broadened the awareness of the Nashvillebased Canadian and paved the way for all that was to come. As Russell leads you through the beautifully courageous journey that is Outside Child you quickly realize you’re privy to something very special. While some of the subject matter is harrowing, the album is equally empathetic, consoling, and uplifting. Brett Leigh Dicks recently caught up with the erstwhile Canadian to talk about following in the footsteps of Our Native Daughters, the catharsis of art, and how to be a good ancestor.

Even for someone who has been privy to your career since the beginning, this album seemed to come out of nowhere. How and when did Outside Child come about?

The songs had been gestating my whole life but I started getting them down while lying in my bunk next to my daughter on the Our Native Daughters tour bus, scribbling things down and trying not to wake her. I then had this little window right after AmericanaFest, between the Our Native Daughters tour and a Birds of Chicago tour, where there were four days available at Sound Emporium, my favourite studio here in Nashville. I had just found out I got a Canada Council recording grant and our community of Canadian and American friends were here and available. None of these songs had been played anywhere before. We got together in the middle of the room to work out the song and then recorded it. Every song was three takes and we usually took the second. I didn’t tell anyone what to play. It was truly an in the moment communion and we just happened to capture that.

You have written songs and made records for Po’ Girl, Birds of Chicago, and Our Native Daughters. What was it like to finally make a record for Allison Russell?

When we started recording the album, I was still in a state of denial about the fact I was even making a solo record because that was such a scary concept to me. To tell my own story in my own words under my own name is something I haven’t felt ready to do before. I went in and recorded and then was back out on the road with Birds of Chicago again and thought, ‘Oh well, I will do something with that sometime.’ And then COVID happened and I had all this time to reflect and ponder. I realized I felt strongly about putting this record out into the world for a number of reasons, not the least I’m a mom now and feel a responsibility to use whatever gifts and tools I have at my ready to try and make things a little better, not just for my daughter but for the generations to come. I want to try and be a good ancestor. This record is also about breaking the silence on cycles of abuse so I began to feel quite evangelical about putting this record out.

You had quite a support cast for this album too, everyone from JT Nero through to Erin Rae and Brandi Carlile …

My community of artist friends rallied around it. Brandi Carlile actually championed the record and sent it to Margi Cheske, the president of Fantasy Records. >>>

>>> Brandi said to me they would get it and they did. I got a call from them the next day. And JT is a huge part of this record too. The grant came through just as we were back in Nashville and some of our dear musical family were in town – Ruth Moody, Yola, Erin Rae, Jamie Dick, and the McCrary Sisters. And Dan Knobler is such a beautiful soulful human as well as being a producer and musician. We had reached out to him about producing a Birds record and then this body of work came together and he fell in love with the material. Dan brought in some folks as well like Joe Pisapia who ended up being such an integral part of this record. It’s a solo record but in name only because it was such a community effort to bring these songs to life.

It is a deeply personal album that traverses some very harrowing subject matter, including various abuses. But that’s balanced with a beautiful measure of resilience and optimism. Did you find writing the album a cathartic experience?

As I was writing the songs, I wasn’t thinking about sharing them so it was something of a cathartic experience. It was a laying to rest of some of the past. The album isn’t really about abuse. That’s unfortunately the circumstances of my childhood that I’m choosing to speak about. If we don’t speak about these things then the cycles continue. What the album is about for me is life on the other side of that. The album is an arc and I hope people can hear that journey. It’s not about being trapped in abuse. It’s about transcending it. It’s about resilience. It’s about community. It’s about the power of art to transcend and heal trauma and forge connections between people. And, for me anyway, it’s a way to find some forgiveness

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and peace and a way to let the past be the past.

The album is as much about the future as it is the past so I’m wondering how has becoming a mother informed your story?

For me the most triumphant line I have ever written is “I am the mother of the evening star, I am the love that conquers all.” That’s about my daughter – she’s my evening star. Becoming a parent has changed me profoundly - the intensity of the love and the depth of the fear I feel. But it also makes you understand that we’re part of this continuum of humanity and our job is not to fuck things up so badly that our children won’t have a planet left. I feel that very strongly. I need to do whatever is in my power to make the world slightly better than I found it and I know that sounds grandiose but I don’t mean it in a grandiose way. I just mean that we all have our own sphere of influence.

A lot of people are coming to your music through this new album. But your musical evolution has been building for some time now. It must be very reaffirming to have the momentum you are currently experiencing and to be sharing some of that with old friends …

It has been gradual and by degrees. The roots of Our Native Daughters friendship began in 2006 at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival when I was there with my baby band Po’ Girl and Rhiannon was there with her baby band Carolina Chocolate Drops. We all stayed in the same student dorm and shared the same bathroom and got together and jammed late into the night. That started a wonderful friendship. Rhiannon and I have worked together over the years on different projects but when she invited me to come and record Songs of Our Native Daughters none of us thought it would get much attention or turn into a band. It was actually quite a shock – a wonderful shock. There is a fallacy that in main stream entertainment, and certainly in the music world, that few people want to hear women and even fewer still want to hear black women. So here were four black women – playing banjos no less – and everybody wanted to hear it! Who could have guessed?

Songs of Our Native Daughters is such a beautiful album on so many levels. What does that record mean to you now?

It was such a beautiful experience to commune so closely with my sisters. We have done projects with each other but have never spent ten days together talking and writing and staying up til all hours trading stories about being working moms on the road, or the hilarious times we’ve been mistaken for each other at festivals, or saying things we couldn’t say because we were the tokens in the room. That was a real joy, and aside from our friendship, they are also three artists I admire greatly. I had been experiencing writer’s block since my daughter was born. We made that record in 2018 when she was four and it was my first time being away from her. We were writing the songs the night before and recording them the next day and that really helped the floodgates open for me. There were all these things I was feeling but between touring and nursing and doing interviews didn’t have time to process. I lost my songwriting voice for a few years, but Our Native Daughters opened the floodgates. And they haven’t shut since.