A conversation with Allison Russell who continues to shine with The Returner

Some musicians I love simply because their music resonates with me in a huge way. It makes me feel something.

Other times, there are artists I love because not only does their music resonate with me but their entire existence on this planet does.

Allison Russell falls into the second category.

Her second solo album The Returner was released in September. I heard some of its songs at the Black Deer Americana Festival last June and a bunch more when she played to a sold-out crowd at Portland House of Music in Portland, Maine on Dec. 8.

Barack Obama just released his annual list of favorite music and “The Returner” is on it.

Also, Russell is up for FOUR GRAMMY AWARDS. (Best Americana Album, Best American Roots Song, Best Americana Performance and Best American Roots Performance). The countdown to Feb. 4 is SO ON!

Can Russell sing and play several instruments, including the clarinet, really well?

Indeed she can.

But she also writes songs that are so full of love and hope that even when she’s singing about the horrors of racism and abuse, they burst with rays of light so bright, inclusive and kind-hearted, I can’t help but feel a groundswell of love and connection wash over me. Plus, Russell also knows how to make people dance. I’m looking at you, “All Without Within.”

Before the Portland performance, Russell and I sat down for a chat. I knew that she loved Sinéad O’Connor the same way that I did so I mentioned it was Sinéad’s birthday. Later that night, Russell would take my breath away singing an O’Connor song. But hold that thought for a moment as I share our conversation.

The Returner has been out for a few months. How are you feeling?

I’m just thrilled that people are listening so generously and we’re really proud of the work. It’s  an auditory artifact of the circle work we’ve been doing and growing over the last couple of years since Outside Child came out so it makes me feel very happy and honored that folks are listening and seem to be connecting with the work.

Can you tell me about writing “Eve Was Black?”

I actually wrote it as a poem and submitted it to The New Yorker but it got rejected.

You got the last laugh, obviously.

It went through an evolution. Its first musical iteration was to accompany a ballet that was choregraphed by a fellow Canadian from Montreal, Kevin Thomas. He now runs a dance company in Memphis called Collage Dance. But we were doing a brief collaboration with Nashville Ballet and I decided to set that poem to music for that. Then I called my next door neighbors SistaStrings and asked them if they’d come put some strings on it. So the first iteration is just the three of us, me on banjo and them on strings and then when we were finishing the writing for The Returner I realized that Eve was part of that world and I really see the backbone of the album as three songs; “Eve Was Black”, “Demons” and “Snakelife” so I realized that that was its home. It went on a whole journey and started as a poem two years ago.

Do you have other songs that started a poems?

A few. It’s rare for me because usually poetry is poetry for me and I rarely feel the need to revisit it or try to put melody to it but that one wouldn’t go away. It stayed with me until it got realized into its current form.

Thank god because I can’t imagine the album without it. The epilogue that you wrote for The Returner. Tell me about writing that.

It’s part of a larger piece called “As Above Beneath,” and initially I was hoping during the Returner sessions (we recorded the whole record in six days, 16 women, ten songs, six days and our three chosen brothers  and I was hoping at the end of the sessions to do an improvised piece where the goddesses would just play and I would speak or chant or sing or whatever happened. We never got to it. I was much more brief with these liner notes. Each song  just has a haiku that’s attached to it and a prologue to sort of explain the intention but I wanted  to let the songs speak for themselves and let people take their own journeys. But it felt right to have a little piece of that poem which I wrote as we were going into those sessions and that felt very much a part of the ethos of what we were doing.

The studio you recorded the album in. I know the albums that were recorded there (Joni’s Blue and Carole’s Tapestry among many others). Did you feel their presence? I can’t even imagine…

Yes, very much. All of us I think felt the presence of the good ghosts in that room. And Wendy and Lisa have their own studio above Studio D where we recorded. They’ve been there for 16 years creating music and they loaned us a ton of their amazing gear including  the waterphone that I played on “Snakelife” which was just thrilling.

I was going to ask about that. I had to look up what that was! Did you have to learn how to play it?

Our first meeting when they were deciding if they wanted to do this with us, JT and I went over to their place about two months before the sessions when we happened to be in L.A. for some writing work and we hung out and we all just fell in love with each other. During that hang they let me play with all of their wonderful treasures in their studio and I became completely enchanted with the waterphone and couldn’t stop playing it. It’s so beautiful.

How did you originally connect with Wendy and Lisa?

Our beloved chosen brother Joe Henry who lives in Maine now. He’s a wonderful producer. He’s produced records you love like Joan Baez’s last record (Heaven Can Wait). For many years he and his wife Melanie were in L.A. His wife is the younger sister of Madonna and he used to manage Daniel Lanois and he’s worked a ton with T Bone Burnett. He produced Solomon Burke’s comeback that won the Grammy. Bettye Lavette’s comeback that won a Grammy. He’s done a ton. He’s a brilliant producer, he’s a brilliant writer too and he’s close friends with Wendy and Lisa so he introduced us.

The way that you look at things and write about things transcends so much. I mean I think about everything from my white girl privilege and beyond that, there’s so many lenses to look at it through. As a music fan…all of it. I don’t want to ask you where you get your strength because that’s horribly cliché, but what does it look like for you write a song like Eve Was Black? You invite people in, you don’t say fuck you, you say please come here.

I feel like it’s life, and I guess because of my personal history and the ways that I’ve survived which is only through the kindness of strangers who became family. I think a lot of it has to do with how I kind of came of age when I moved from Montreal to Vancouver. I started doing frontline work in a downtown Vancouver as a mental health worker, as a care worker for a non-profit society for low threshold housing meaning we weren’t telling people you don’t get a home if you fall back into your addiction. We weren’t telling people you don’t get a home unless you ascribe to a certain version of someone’s idea of what god was. It was unconditional love and care and understanding that all humans have basic needs that have to be met before any other healing work can happen. And we also opened the first ever safe injection site in North America, not just Canada but North America, called Insite. It was 2003. So at the same time that I was forming my first band called Po’ Girl, I was doing this frontline work. I did that work for seven years and the way that I approach everything is from the harm reduction model that I learned working there in the downtown eastside and so I’m really interested in outcomes and how we get to better outcomes for more people and being self-righteous about something, getting on a high horse about something, shaming people, none of it works. It just doesn’t work. It’s not gonna make any change, it’s just gonna drive division and anger and punitive or violent behaviors.

Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite writers. When Sinéad died I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t find my own words, and he wrote this piece that was so cut to the quick and what she endured to be a truth teller and a visionary and a prophet of our time. She’s part of my survival. If she hadn’t made her stand on SNL in ’92 and if Tracy Chapman hadn’t sung “Behind the Wall” and if Tori Amos hadn’t written “Me and a Gun”, if I hadn’t heard those women singing about hard things I wouldn’t have left my home and I would have died there. We have to be able to talk about everything.

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As for the Dec. 8 show. I sat right up front with some good friends and soaked up every second of songs from “The Returner” and “Outside Child.” Songs like “4th Day Prayer,” “Shadowlands” and “Springtime” that Russell and the three luminescent musicians with her played. “Eve Was Black” was a favorite moment.

Towards the end of the show, Russell turned her attention to the passing last summer of Sinéad O’Connor and how much Sinead and her music meant to her. Then she sang a most unexpected Sinéad song. One from the Gospel Oak EP and one that brought stinging but happy tears to my eyes.

Here’s “This is to Mother You,” captured by my friend Stephanie Hicks Homon.

Russell ended the show with “Persephone” from Outside Child which some of us sang along with. No one in that room wasn’t touched to the core by the entire evening.

Russell has a handful of U.S. dates in January and is headed to Mexico as part of Brandi Carlile’s Girls Just Wanna Weekend. Then it’s off to the United Kingdom for a string of shows and back to North America for Canadian dates before more U.S. ones kick off.

Allison Russell is not just a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. She’s a humanitarian, teacher and connector. She cares deeply about humanity.

So yeah, come for the music but stay for everything else.

Because from where I sit, the world needs more of Allison Russell.

Follow her everywhere. Buy her records. See her live.