SPOTLIGHT: ‘Like Sucking the Poison from a Snake Bite,’ Allison Russell Shares Her Story on ‘Outside Child’

EDITOR’S NOTE: Allison Russell is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for May 2021. Read more about her and her new album, Outside Child, out May 21 on Fantasy Records, all month long.

Allison Russell’s first solo album, Outside Child, soars on wings of resilience and redemption, but not before walking through the valley of the shadows of pain and abuse and desolate loneliness. The 11-song cycle circles outward in ever expanding arcs, rippling from the slow, dream-like “Montreal” through the bright, shuffling “The Hunter” to the album-closing celebration “Joyful Motherfuckers.” Although Russell bares the pain of the violent abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, she refuses to wallow in the pain or to be buried by it, and these songs are her exultant shout that such circumstances can be transcended.

Even though Russell says the album has been gestating over a lifetime, she never particularly wanted to do a solo album. “I was terrified of it, in fact,” she laughs. “I have always been more comfortable being part of a whole that is hopefully greater than the sum.”

In 2012, she and her partner, JT Nero, formed Birds of Chicago, in which Russell sang and played clarinet and banjo. While Russell co-wrote a few songs with Nero, or pianist Drew Lindsay, Nero wrote the bulk of the songs that appear on the band’s albums. Birds of Chicago released four highly acclaimed albums from 2013 to 2018. In January 2018, Rhiannon Giddens invited Russell to join her, Leyla McCalla, and Amythyst Kiah to form Our Native Daughters and to work on the project that eventually became Songs of Our Native Daughters, a 2019 album released on Smithsonian Folkways. On that album, the band explored slave songs, folk songs, and poems from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and created new work inspired by the stories of Black women’s struggles and hope.

Russell describes Outside Child as a “community effort” as well, crediting the community of artists that had a hand in the album’s making, including The McCrary Sisters, Ruth Moody, Joe Pisapia, Yola, Erin Rae, and members of Bird of Chicago, among others. But it’s an intensely autobiographical album, a group of songs that tell a story that Russell knew she had to share, not only to bring closure for herself but to also offer a gift that could help others with similar stories.

“This is my first solo album. It is acutely personal. It was hard for me to write, harder still to sing, play, and share,” she reflects. “Also, a relief. Like sucking the poison from a snake bite.”

For almost 10 years, until she ran away at 15, Russell’s stepfather emotionally and sexually abused her. “He was a white supremacist and a bigot, and it took me years to realize that his abuse of me was a form of enslavement,” Russell says. “My hope is that in spite of the autobiographical nature of this work — or perhaps because of it — these songs may resonate for some of the many, many others who have endured similar trespasses.”

Opening the Floodgates

As much as she yearned to tell her story, motherhood, constant touring, and other circumstances threatened to put it off indefinitely, she says.

“I had very, very intense writer’s block after I had Ida [the couple’s daughter], to the point where I thought maybe I’m not a writer anymore,” Russell recalls. Birds of Chicago was touring all through Russell’s pregnancy, and four weeks after their daughter was born, Russell returned to the road for a European tour. “I just stopped writing — I just lactated, sang songs, and played shows and learned how to be a better mom. Being a new mother is not for the faint of heart,” she laughs.

In 2017, Russell and Nero moved to Nashville, in part to “get off the hamster wheel” of constant touring and sleeping in the van or crashing at friends’ houses or hotels, but also to be part of a larger creative community. “We were in the lap of love,” Russell says.

During her work with Our Native Daughters the following year, the songs started pouring out of Russell. “We ended up writing a lot of original material and that cleared the writer’s block for me,” Russell recalls. “I wrote or co-wrote seven songs for this project, and I wrote more that didn’t end up on that album or on this new album,” she laughs.   “The floodgates have not shut,” she says, “and I can’t stop writing.”

She wrote the first song for Outside Child on the road with Our Native Daughters. “This entire album stared in July 2019 I was lying on the tour bus in a pee-soaked bunk next to my daughter; the bus driver would not stop for us, and I was trying hard not to wake up Leyla’s or Rhiannon’s daughters or our nannies as I was trying to find dry clothes for us,” she laughs. In those moments, she recalls, “I and my daughter were surrounded by this beautiful wolfpack of wild, wonderful women, and I was so lucky to be in this situation. I thought about every single woman before me who didn’t have this level of support like I had with my native daughters and with an incredibly loving partner and being equal in raising our daughter, writing together.”

The song that started to come to her in that moment was “4th Day of Prayer.” She remembered her teen years, when she was being raped and tortured every day. Meanwhile, her friends and others around her were saying these were the best years of her life. As she puts it in the song: “‘These are the best years of your life’ / If I’d believed it I’d have died / Something told me they had lied.”

Russell recorded the album with producer Dan Knobler over six days at Nashville’s Sound Emporium in October 2019, just after AmericanaFest. “Everybody was in town,” she says. “[I] hadn’t played these songs out. I was so twisted up about doing this that I was in denial about making a solo record. Being in the studio, though, was like singing these songs for the first time for my chosen family.”

The album opens with “Montreal,” an ethereal and poignant ode to the city where Russell grew up and that sheltered her when she sought solace and refuge in its parks and cathedrals. In press materials accompanying the single, she says: “I was a teenage runaway— I believe in many ways the City herself protected me. I wandered the Mountain at all hours and slept in the graveyard in the summertime. I haunted the Cathedrals and slept in the pews. Sometimes I stayed up all night playing chess with the old men in the 24 hr. cafes. I was very lucky to grow up there.”

The looping, swirling “Nightflyer” is the album’s thesis statement, Russell declares. “In a way it’s rooted in the pain of the past, but it’s clear that the protagonist — who’s me, of course — is not trapped in that situation anymore. It’s about breaking the cycle of abuse.” The chorus of the song proclaims, “I’m an angel of the morning too / The promise that the dawn will bring you.”

Much as “Nightflyer” draws its images from the Gnostic text The Thunder: Perfect Mind, Russell draws on mythology and fantasy for images in other songs on the album. “I am obsessed with mythology and with Joseph Campbell and the idea of an archetypal journey,” Russell says. “I once wrote a song called ‘No Shame’ — it was the first time I addressed my situation — and in it I say I hide inside of books. I started reading when I was 3 and took refuge in literature and fantasy; that’s how I dealt with the physical part of abuse. “The Hunters,” Russell points out, is an homage to shapeshifting and her escape into it during the years of abuse.

In the song “Hy-Brasil,” Russell draws on the ballad tradition from her Scottish heritage. The song is a tribute to Russell’s Scottish Canadian grandmother, Dr. Isobel Roger Robertson, whom Russell calls “the brightest light of my childhood.” “Hy-Brasil is a mysterious, possibly mythical, Atlantis-like legendary island west of Ireland appearing on maps from 1325 to the 1800s. In Irish myth, it was said to be either clouded in mist or underwater except for one day every seven years, when it became visible but still could not be reached.” In the song, Hy-Brasil becomes the home to which Russell’s soul travels as it escapes the abuse: “Though my brittle body was caught in his snare / My soul would learn how to travel where / The eyes of the rabbits were gleaming there / on the isle of Hy-Brasil.”

Support Through Songs

When she finished Outside Child, Russell felt “a sense of closure and relief; I felt like I expressed something I had to express. I know so many other people are feeling this. My hope is that this kind of work can help defang some of the violence and abuse that has been exacerbated by the pandemic and has existed through our entire existence. What can I do? I can write songs, I can throw songs at it,” she says.

“Art creates and builds and strengthens empathy,” Russell insists. “Outside Child is about art and community and family transcending the circumstances of abuse and violence. It does get better.”