How art can heal deep wounds
Allison Russell’s music is all about resilience
MONTREAL — The story behind Allison Russell’s extraordinary debut solo album is partly about how out of horror comes great art. But maybe more notably, it’s also a tale of how art can heal deep wounds.
Outside Child, which was released in late May, is rooted in darkness, but the Montreal-born singer-songwriter’s album is garnering such acclaim in large part because these songs are about hope and light, about the resilience that comes in the face of the toughest of obstacles.
Russell was born to a Montreal woman who told the father that she had given her child up for adoption. The father was Grenadian. In reality, Russell was taken by child protective services here because her mother couldn’t cope. She had severe postpartum depression that triggered a full psychotic break.
“Part of her psychosis was that she believed I was a demon,” Russell said from her home in Nashville.
Russell was in foster care from just under two until she was almost five. Her mother then became involved with a much older American man who became Russell’s adoptive father and abused her for years — “a white supremacist American expat,” she said.
“That was a pretty miserable decade — that was five until 15, when I ran away,” said Russell. “The first 15 years were not great. That’s where the story of Outside Child begins, but the album isn’t about that abuse. None of us get to choose our childhood circumstances, and those were mine. But the album is about breaking that cycle and getting free of it.
“It was physical and sexual and psychological (abuse). It’s an interesting thing: your body can eventually heal. Obviously the physical and sexual abuse were awful, but in some ways the psychological abuse was the most severe, the hardest one to recover from. The psychological wounds are the ones you have to manage for the rest of your life ... You get into a habit of self-hatred. You’ve been taught to think you’re worthless for the first 15 years of your life, and it’s been shown to you in every possible way. Physical subjugation, sexual subjugation.”
Those wounds kickstarted Outside Child. Russell has been part of the U.S. roots scene for years, best known as part of the rootsy duo Birds of Chicago with her husband, JT Nero. She is also a member of Our Native Daughters, a banjo group that also includes Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah and Leyla Mccalla. But Russell, 39, felt it was time to do her first solo album to work through the pain of her childhood experiences.
The first song she wrote was also the heaviest: 4th Day Prayer. She started out with the lines: “These are the best years of your life / If I’d believed it, I’d have died.”
“People say to young folks, to teenagers, ‘Oh, these are the best years of your life,’” said Russell. “Like to appreciate this now, ‘cause it only gets worse. Well, if I’d actually believed that, I would have killed myself. But I had an inkling that wasn’t true, and the reason I had an inkling that wasn’t true was because of art.”
The lyrics of 4th Day Prayer start with this visceral verse:
“I was the Queen of Westmount Park / It was all mine after dark / Old willow tree, it was my throne / Till I, till I went home / Father used me like a wife / Mother turned the blindest eye / Stole my body, spirit, pride / He did, he did each night.”
But the force of the music on Outside Child underlines that there’s always hope. It’s an eclectic collection that goes from old-school soul to folky songs that sound like 19thcentury Scottish ballads to gospel-tinged fare.
It’s also an homage to the city she grew up in. The first song on the album is titled Montreal, and it’s a bilingual poem to the city she still loves so dearly. There’s actually a fair bit of French lyrics scattered through the album.
“Montreal was my cradle and mother in a way my own mother couldn’t be,” said Russell. “I was fed by the arts and culture continually surrounding me there. I think of how important the jazz fest was in my life. That I got to go see Oscar Peterson for free. I remember Repercussion Theatre, and it was so magical. You’d go from scene to scene in the park. It sustained me and it allowed me to imagine something beyond the misery I was living. I was able to escape into books and literature when my physical reality was unbearable. I could escape in my own imagination and be guided into other people’s imagination.
“Music felt like that, too. It was transporting, and I needed to be transported from that reality in order to survive. My mother was a beautiful piano player. We had such a fraught and violent relationship, but my only relief was crawling underneath the piano, listening to her play, because I knew if she saw me, she’d start screaming. But if she didn’t see me, I could just listen. Though she couldn’t express love for me in any kind of appropriate, protective, motherly way, I could hear her loving spirit when she played, even though she couldn’t show that to me. That’s the first time I understood the magic of music.”
Russell sought refuge as a teenager in the classic albums of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, and you can feel the influence of both artists on Outside Child. A more surprising influence is the old-school Scottish ballads — something that came from her maternal grandmother, who sang these songs to her as a kid.
“These were stories and songs that were handed down over centuries,” said Russell. “Those songs were deeply influential to me. I identified with them. There’s a line in Nightflyer where I say, ‘I’m a violent lullaby.’ These Scottish lullabies were incredibly dark and violent, and I could relate to them because I was living an incredibly dark and violent childhood. Unfortunately, many humans over history have lived dark and violent childhoods.”