After experiencing horrific abuse as a child, Allison Russell began to heal herself through music. With her new album, In the Hour of Chaos, the singer-songwriter aims to heal others from the sharp teeth of the present moment. “I don’t know that anyone’s ever healed,” Russell said. “I think we’re all healing, and that’s good. That’s good enough for me. I don’t know that I’ll ever be healed, but I’m just trying to, you know, stay on the side of hope and life.”
Her latest album is once again soulful and uplifting, even if it doesn’t neatly fit into the folk category where Russell often gets lumped. Each track features Russell dueting with one or more singers, including Norah Jones, Joy Oladokun, Kara Jackson and Brittney Spencer. This summer she starts a North American tour.
On her first album, 2021’s Outside Child, Russell began to tell the story of her earliest years. Born in Montreal to a white, teenage mom who had schizophrenic episodes and a Black father from Grenada, Russell was put into foster care. Her mother later married a white supremacist from the US, and he became her adopted father, but began to sexually abuse her when she was just a grade schooler. He even held mock trials to train her not to testify against him. She did eventually go to the police, who found other women he had sexually abused and sent him to prison.
As a teen, she began to sneak out of the house, at times sleeping in the Mount Royal Cemetery at night, which felt safer to her than her home. In her early hit “Persephone”, she recounts sneaking into another young girl’s home at night where she found shelter and her first lesbian experience.
At 17, Allison Russell moved to Vancouver, befriended musicians there, and began to teach herself the banjo, she said, inspired in part by Kermit the Frog. She said the communion of playing with musicians in Vancouver—her “chosen family”—began her lifelong healing process, which was fortified by her desire to give comfort to others. In the title track of her second album, The Returner, Russell sings: “Of all the goodness and the love that the world’s gonna give to me / I’m a give it back ten times, people, are you ready? / If you think you’re alone, hold on, I’m coming.”
“But there is also,” she adds, “a physiological benefit to listening to music … there’s like a somatic sound interaction that is profound for our species.”
In 2006, she saw Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops in Vancouver, which opened her eyes to the African American legacy of the banjo. It was her 2019 partnership with Giddens and the critically acclaimed group Our Native Daughters that unlocked Russell’s writer’s block after she had had a daughter. She quickly penned “Quasheba, Quasheba” for them, which was based on an African ancestor who was enslaved and sent to Grenada. Finding her voice, Russell went on to write the songs for 2021’s Outside Child, which was recorded in only four days but garnered three Grammy nominations as well as Juno and Folk Alliance awards.
“I don’t think I am a solo artist; I think I am now an artist who works under my own name, and it took me a long time to do that,” Russell describes. “But the hilarity of that is that in stepping into my own story and my own name, I’ve actually just grown the coalition of artists that I get to collaborate with.”
Speaking about In the Hour of Chaos, Allison Russell notes that, “I really do think of this record as trying to overcome the distance and the fear and the kind of distortion of ourselves and of each other that has grown up out of the 24/7 online negativity bias … seeing the worst of the worst distortions of who we are.”
“We’re going through a crisis of a kind of an empathy deficit that has a body count”, she continues, “and the only way I think to shift that is to really get out in community and stop being so fearful of our neighbors and of ourselves.”
The opening track, “Rainbows”, seems like it could be Russell singing to her daughter at bedtime, but she said it is more universal. “I think it is for children, but it’s not just my kid, or anyone’s kid. It’s also our inner child. We’re all still children,” she notes. “I think the more that we can recognize that and have grace for it within ourselves and for each other, we’ll become much better adults and parents, co-parents on the planet.”
In “Cold April”, Russell’s deeply soulful voice leads a children’s chorus from her daughter’s school. The song’s breezy rhythms and hope-over-despair optimism point to a new “murmuration” of children who are moving in a new and better direction. “Even when you feel your whole soul is crumbling / You’re still gonna try and soothe somebody else / Yeah there’s not enough bullets not enough guns / They can kill the bird but not the bird song.”
“James Baldwin taught us this long ago: that all children are our children, and I really feel that profoundly,” Allison Russell says. “That’s become my guiding principle, and I measure myself every day. What little things am I doing every day to show up as a parent for the seven future generations on the planet? I want to be a good ancestor, if at all possible, and reduce harm instead of adding to it, if at all possible.”
“I think our youth right now are dealing with a real loss of faith in any of the adults in charge”, she continues. “And I don’t think they’re wrong about that. They have formed deep community with each other in ways that I think are going to be quite transformative over the next ten years. They have come in with superpowers of empathy that will, I hope, and I believe, counterbalance the massive empathy deficit that too many adults are impaired by at this point.”
Some of the most memorable songs on the album are about the intimacy and mutual support within a couple. On the slow-grooving “Chaos Theory”, the narrator sings of providing easy-going comfort to a partner. “I wanna feel you breathing next to me / We can watch something stupid on TV / Fingernails on your back up and down, up and down / Softly softly.”
In the folky next song, “My Love Is a Golden Lion”, the narrator again pledges their love when a partner is going through a difficult time. “I see myself from a bird’s eye / Driftwood on the tide, I’m lost / But then I see it’s you who’s stumbling / And all my strength comes roaring back to me / God help the fool who’d try to hurt you.”
“This album just kind of organically grew slowly,” she explains. “I never start with ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ I always sort of see what comes through, and then I follow the breadcrumbs till I figure out what it is.”
Russell said that the origins of the album’s songs came during long walks with her rescue pup, Millie, in her adopted hometown of Nashville. She jots down shards of lyrics in a notebook and sings melodies into a voice memo app as she goes through local greenery. “I need to write in order to function well in the world, and to show up for my child and for other people, and to not be a maniac”, she explains. “I am someone who just has to write and sing and play, or I am not my best self, and nobody should have to endure me.”
In addition to In the Hour of Chaos, Allison Russell has been writing a memoir, which is slated for release next year on Little Brown. “It grew out of the Outside Child album,” she notes. “It’s really about the way that I followed songs and art to choosing to be alive and be in community rather than violence and death and destruction … So there’s a lot of music to it, there’s a lot of poetry to it, there’s a little bit of magic surrealism to it, because one of the things that I discovered was the degree to which, particularly as a child, I lived in my imagination and not in the world.”
“It’s been maybe the most difficult artistic undertaking of my life, and I would never do it again,” she said, adding she might try writing fiction one day.