Allison Russell: The Springtime of My Present Tense

“All performance for me is rooted in creative collaboration with others whom I find inspiring,” Allison Russell observes, as she considers the nature of her deeply personal yet welcoming artistic expression. “What drives me is the alchemy and mystery of coming together in a very deep circle of work because that’s what all music performance is. It’s communion—both verbal and sonic and nonverbal and non-sonic. Literally, our limbic systems link up with each other. It’s a remarkable thing—the idea of this music of the spheres. It’s something that resonates with me on a very deep metaphysical and spiritual level.”

This outlook does not apply solely to Russell’s spirited, often transcendent live shows. It also served as a catalyst for The Returner, her second record as a solo artist and the follow-up to 2021’s cathartic, triumphant Outside Child.

“Writing is one thing,” she says. “I’ve always compulsively written. That’s how I process everything, whether it’s joy, trauma or whatever is happening that day. I’ve always been a writer. But when we approach those songs in the studio, what happens is a conversation. Even if I tried to write out every note of a score, there’s always an element of improvisation on top of the structure of the song as given. That’s what I’m hooked on—the magic that you just can’t predict.”

She points to The Returner sessions as a particularly vivid manifestation of this dynamic—the result of an accelerated deadline brought on by a vinyl shortage.

“The bones of those songs were written,” she recalls. “But they were animated and made living by the women who transported and uplifted everything on this record. It was 16 women, 10 songs, six days and three chosen brothers. We made this art together. It’s that same thing, the circle of creative communion.”

Yet Russell is also attuned to the legacy of her forebearers, which means that the circle is never completely closed.

“We’re always standing on the shoulders of our predecessors,” she asserts. “We’re actually in creative collaboration with everyone that we’ve ever listened to. We’re never making anything out of some sort of vacuum. That is a source of strength, courage and conviction. It also provides an impulse to persist on the path that I feel compelled to walk, run, dance, sing and play on.”

***

 “The first song I wrote that I was proud of is called ‘Cold Hungry Blues,’” Russell discloses. “It wound up on the first Po’ Girl record, which was released 20 years ago this June, which is insane to think about.”

Russell formed Po’ Girl with The Be Good Tanyas’ Trish Klein after relocating from Montreal to Vancouver in the late ‘90s. Their eponymous 2003 debut spanned folk, blues and jazz at a time when that mix of sounds was far less common than it is today. Po’ Girl then released six additional records through 2010, with Russell contributing vocals, banjo, clarinet and guitar.

Her next major project was the Americana band Birds of Chicago with JT Nero. Birds of Chicago issued its own self-titled recording in 2012, followed by two more studio offerings over the ensuing six years (working with Joe Henry and Luther Dickinson), while maintaining a rousing live presence. The two principals also became partners outside the group, and Russell gave birth to their daughter Ida in 2014.

Russell’s career took another turn in 2019 with the formation of Our Native Daughters, an extraordinary project featuring four Black female banjo players: Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Russell. The quartet recorded a series of songs that reflected the experiences of Black women in America over the preceding few hundred years, sharing poignant accounts of slavery, racism and sexism.

While on tour with Our Native Daughters, Russell had something of an epiphany, which led to the creation of Outside Child. As she told Relix in 2021: “It actually started on the Our Native Daughters tour bus on the way to Newport Folk in 2019. I began writing ‘4th Day Prayer’ in a bunk. I knew that I had to step forward and tell this story in my own name for the first time in my life. After making the Songs of Our Native Daughters record, I understood that I was part of a whole continuum of intergenerational trauma—that my story, my abusive childhood, did not spring out of a vacuum. I felt really compelled to tell the story because we’re dealing not just with the pandemic of COVID, we’ve been dealing for much longer with the pandemics of bigotry and abuse and violence, and those pandemics flourish with our silence.”

Russell drew on her Montreal childhood for the songs on Outside Child. The musician’s single mother had struggled with undiagnosed schizophrenia and Russell spent some time in foster care. Although the two would share a roof again a few years later following her mom’s marriage, this led to an extended period of abuse by Russell’s white supremacist adoptive father. Ultimately, she ran away from home at age 15 but continued to attend her alternative high school, where she drew comfort and strength from the arts program.

While her home life had been grim, Russell approached the Outside Child narrative from the perspective of “survivor’s joy,” which also encompassed an appreciation for the community that had supported her during these dark times. As she explained, “Nobody experiences joy like a survivor experiences joy because you know how bad it can be and when it’s good, you really don’t take it for granted.”

Outside Child connected with listeners and garnered critical accolades. In addition to three Grammy nominations, it won Album of the Year at the Americana Awards and a Juno Award for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year.

Yet, even as she was completing Outside Child, Russell was already anticipating its successor. “I always knew that I wanted the first three records under my own name to live as a kind of a trilogy,” she says. “You don’t need to have listened to the one before—they each will stand alone. But for the nerds like me who want to do the deep dive, it will be fun to find the links.”

As she contemplated her second album, the acclaim for the initial release never seemed to abate. Still, the ongoing and elevated approbation didn’t distract her as she began work on the follow-up. “The Returner has grown out of the circle work we’ve been doing live over the last two years,” she expounds. “This is personal work that I am doing. So while I’m writing, there’s absolutely no way that I can think about who might listen to it. The only people I was thinking about during the writing process were the amazing group of artists who would be inhabiting the bones of these songs.”

That list of contributors includes members of her touring group: Elenna Canlas (keyboards), Joy Clark (guitar), Megan Coleman (drums), Ganessa James (bass), Larissa Maestro (cello), Meg McCormick (guitar), Elizabeth Pupo-Walker (percussion) and SistaStrings (Chauntee & Monique Ross on violin and cello, respectively). Most everyone contributed harmony vocals and handclaps.

Prince’s former bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman participated as well, adding guitar and keys. Russell raves: “Wendy and Lisa are our absolute music heroes, and they’ve become our big sisters now. We’re madly in love with them, and they’re a huge part of the sound of The Returner.”

That sound is a bit more upbeat this time around, with an insistent focus on rhythm, driven in part by how the material came together. “I really wanted to lean more into groove at the outset of the writing process,” Russell says. “Then we got a call from the label saying, ‘If you want vinyl next year, you’re going to have to deliver a master by the end of 2022.’ So that moved everything up by almost four months. Many of the songs had been started, but we went into a feverish period of demoing and finishing them. This was the first time that JT and I have worked with his biological brother, my chosen brother, Drew Lindsay. Together they have a production duo called Dim Star. It was our first time being a three-headed dragon, creatively working on something together. I’m a Luddite when it comes to things like Ableton, but Drew is adept. So we were able to have this expansive sonic palette, and I loved the freedom of that.”

“The way I like to write these days, I’m often in motion,” she continues. “We have a rescue pup named Millie and, when I’m home in Nashville, I will take her for long walks in our green belt. So we would conference and build tracks, then I would walk for miles with Millie. I was communing with the mycelial network of the forest, and marveling in the wonder of being able to walk, breathe, sing, run and talk in this beautiful piece of what feels like untouched nature.”

When the moment finally arrived to enter the studio, Russell also drew on her prior experiences.

“We’re really good at recording on tight budgets in very little time,” she attests. “We learned that from Joe Henry when he produced a record for Birds of Chicago called Real Midnight. We did that record in five days, and he taught us how to work like that in the studio. It only works if you cast the room well—if you have a circle of trusted collaborators to work with so you don’t have to micromanage or waste a lot of words explaining things. We basically did the Neil Young Crazy Horse method, where we recorded each song three times. We generally took the second take, and then we would build an overdub such as the string section in that same room live together.”

The 19 musicians tracked The Returner in Los Angeles at Henson Recording Studios. The facility was built by Charlie Chaplin in 1917 for film production, then became home to A&M in 1966. Joni Mitchell recorded a number of albums there, including Blue, Court and Spark and Ladies of the Canyon. Russell also points out that it was home to Carole King’s Tapestry and that “Tina Turner and the gang” recorded the “We Are the World” session there as well.

“There’s tons of history and mojo in those walls,” she says.

The studio’s current association with the Jim Henson Company also holds meaning for Russell. “It’s presided over by Kermit the Frog, which is absolutely thrilling to me because I play banjo because of Kermit the Frog. This was long before I knew anything about my own African ancestry, the diaspora, the connection of the banjo to the diaspora and the fact that it is America’s African instrument. But I knew that Kermit the Frog sang ‘Rainbow Connection’ and played the banjo, so I wanted to do that, too. We don’t know who we’re going to reach, when that’s going to happen and how it will affect them. Jim Henson didn’t know that I would become a banjo player because of Kermit the Frog singing ‘Rainbow Connection,’ but I did.”

When asked whether she’s had the opportunity to perform with Kermit, Russell notes that has yet to occur. “I’m so jealous of Jim James, who got to do it at Newport,” she says genially. “But I am waiting for that call. I am waiting for the day I get to sing with Kermit and The Muppets. That will be a real career highlight.”

Still, Russell has experienced her own memorable moments at Newport Folk, which have some bearing on this record. In 2022, she participated in Joni Mitchell’s surprise set and subsequently hailed her as “Our Lady Returner.”

“Just being onstage with Joni was such an inspiring, holy experience,” she declares. “I’m grateful to Brandi Carlile for so many things, but I’m deeply grateful that she invited me into the magic circle of the Joni Jam. I’ve been able to commune with Joni on several occasions now because Brandi has so generously invited me to be part of that. It turns out Joni loves woodwinds and she enjoys me playing clarinet. She also loves jazz standards, so when we did ‘Young at Heart’ at the Gorge, she demanded a clarinet solo, and when Joni asks you to do something, you just do it.

“But the first time I got to commune with her onstage was at Newport during the surprise Joni Jam last year. Here’s this woman who has come back from death, not once, but three times—who has been told she’ll never walk or talk again, let alone sing and perform. So to be able to witness and support that was so deeply moving. I wrote a poem after Newport and one after the Gorge. In the one that I wrote after Newport, I call her ‘Our Lady Returner’ because that’s what she is. You cannot keep that woman down. She has more grit, grace, determination and fierce will than any human I’ve ever met. She’s extraordinary.”

Russell takes a moment to acknowledge Carlile once again, as she considers some of the people whose support has facilitated this particular moment.

“Basically, every good thing that has come to me in this industry has been via the auspices of other artists who have become chosen family. The fact that anyone’s ever heard Outside Child is because Brandi Carlile connected me with Margi Cheske at Fantasy Records. We met Lisa Coleman because of Joe Henry, and we know Joe because Rhiannon Giddens introduced us and then he produced a record for Birds of Chicago. I couldn’t have taken a step without everything that’s gone before. It just wouldn’t have happened.”

Russell at Newport Folk Festival’s Folk On in 2021 (photo: Dean Budnick)

The Returner’s liner notes reference an additional individual who impacted the music on the record. The credits read: “For Ida Maeve always—we wrote you some ‘bangers’ as you requested.”

“She’s always had her own taste,” Russell says of her daughter’s deep engagement with music, which began when Ida was traveling with her parents as a tot. “She was on the road with her dad and I when we were doing Birds of Chicago for the first five years of her life. You can imagine this little child driving around with us in a van because we weren’t doing glamorous bus touring. One of her first musical obsessions was Primus, and she would be like, ‘That’s my music!’ Then she would shout out if she didn’t like something—‘That’s not my music!’ If she liked something, we would hear it over and over again. She was obsessed with that song ‘King Kunta’ from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.”

Russell then shares an account of a conversation that took place during the recording of Tanya Tucker’s latest album, Sweet Western Sound. “We were all in LA at the time because we were doing a gig, and we went to the studio. Brandi was producing the record and my partner, JT, contributed a really beautiful song called ‘City of Gold.’ While we were at the studio, Catherine [Shepherd, Brandi’s wife] was with our girls at the hotel where we were staying. At one point, Eli [one of Brandi and Catherine’s daughters] asked Ida, ‘Where’s your mom?’ Catherine explained, ‘She’s with your mommy. They’re at the studio. They do the same work.’ Then Ida piped up, ‘Oh, no, my mom’s not like your mom. My mom just sings sad songs about her sad past.’ Catherine, who was trying not to laugh, said, ‘But Ida, your mom has such a beautiful voice.’ And Ida said, ‘Yeah, my mom does have a really great voice, but let’s face it, she even makes ‘Jingle Bells’ sound sad.’”

“So this is my daughter’s assessment,” an amused Russell concedes. “Then, at one point, she sat down with her dad and I, and was like, ‘Why can’t you ever write a banger?’ So we made sure we wrote a few for her on this record.”

As with Outside Child, there are some weighty themes on The Returner, but the songs were assembled from the bottom up with a rhythm-heavy lift.

“What I really wanted with The Returner was for anyone to take that journey, whether English was their first language or not, whether they could hear or not,” Russell indicates. “I have friends who don’t have hearing, but who enjoy listening to music, pressing themselves against the speaker and feeling the vibrations. I was thinking about the way that we are brought together as a community, the way that we reduce harm, and the way that we find each other and recognize each other as one family on a lot of different levels.”

The Returner opens with “Springtime,” which sets the tone for what’s to follow. In the moments before Russell’s inviting vocals, a few laughs lightly punctuate the track.

“That’s how it was in the studio,” Russell states. “We were having that much fun and it was captured. So we felt the need to have that be the context for the whole recorded journey.”

This theme is reinforced as Russell sings the initial verse of the song, which describes unburdening oneself of trauma.

So long farewell adieu adieu

to that tunnel I went through

and my reward, my recompense?

the springtime of my present tense

the springtime of my present tense

Well I used to think that I was doomed

to die young to be consumed 

all lullabies were violent 

those winters of my discontent

so long farewell adieu adieu…

As the critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes in an essay that accompanies The Returner, “And from there, light floods in.”

Still, this is not to say that the record is altogether free from shadows.

For instance, Russell describes the potent “Eve Was Black” as “an open letter to my abuser, who’s a white supremacist man born in the ‘30s in a sundown town. It’s really to anyone suffering from the ideological disease of white supremacy or any kind of supremacy; although, I’m specifically addressing white supremacy in this song.”

However, this track also reflects Russell’s curative path. “I had so much internalized self-hatred and bias that it’s long been a daily struggle to decolonize my own mind,” she reveals. “But art has been a massive part of that, along with the community that I’ve met through it. Music in and of itself is literally healing vibrations.”

The origins of the song reinforce this idea. Russell explains, “‘Eve Was Black’ began its life as a collaboration with a choreographer named Kevin Thomas, who runs an incredible ballet out of Memphis—a very inclusive ballet called the Collage Dance Company. He was a guest composer at the Nashville Ballet and ‘Eve Was Black’ started its life as music for that ballet and then evolved from there.”

Russell recently shared a description of her song “Stay Right Here” via social media that also encapsulates the spirit of the album:

“‘Stay Right Here’ is about resisting the siren songs of self-hatred, apathy & oblivion. It’s about fighting the nihilistic forces of bigotry, fear & fascism. Right here, right now. The good fight, good trouble, it’s a Freedom Song. It’s about leaning into the fierce Survivor’s Joy & the POWER of our world wide rainbow coalition to reduce harm for all our children, for our planet, for all those yet to come. We are more than seeds—we’re the soil & the water—the good ancestors. Every one of us, equal under the sun—we shall not be overcome. Our Circle is STRONG.”

Despite all that she has experienced—or perhaps as a result of all that she has experienced—Russell remains unflaggingly optimistic about the future. Her music is imbued with the precept that societal change is never out of reach if we only listen to our better angels’ exhortations to join hands. She deftly infuses this ethos into her songs. Plus, you can dance to them.

The Returner ends with “Requiem,” which embodies the album’s overarching ideas.

“There was nowhere else on the record it could live. It’s also the only song on the record that has any guests—Brandy Clark, Brandi Carlile and Hozier appear as part of the love choir. I didn’t want to have anyone outside of our Rainbow Coalition recording circle enter the narrative until the very end because that points to the collaborative way that we all need to move forward. It’s a lament, of course, on the one hand, but it’s also hope for the future.”

“It’s very much grounded in some of the sorrow and tragedy of being a mother and of being a school child at this time in America,” she remarks. “I’ve been able to break the cycles of abuse in our home. For me, where home might’ve been scary, when I went to school, it was a sanctuary. But my daughter wakes up from nightmares that she’s going to be shot to death at school. They have had active shooter drills in her school where they don’t tell the children that it’s a drill, and they think it’s real. At the first one, her friend fainted, hit her head and there was blood. My daughter assumed she had been shot. The madness of gun violence is getting worse, and the lack of any kind of legislative response in America has got to change. So leaving with that song felt right, like, ‘Next steps, let’s do something about this.’”

Those next steps are a form of the collective action that Russell embraces in its many forms, throughout her art and life.

“I feel a sense of deep gratitude and also responsibility so that each generation is hopefully making things better for the next,” she maintains. “The hope is to leave things better than we found them. Iris Dement has a beautiful song on her new record. ‘Workin’ on a world I’ll never see’ is the notion that it’s not about what you can extract and selfishly consume. The notion is we are all connected, we are all responsible for the next generations of humanity. And not just humanity—but all the life on the planet that humanity affects. I feel an intense urgency and responsibility to push forward the ideal of a beloved community and to keep working toward that. By beloved community, I mean we acknowledge one another’s intrinsic equality, and we treat each other accordingly. It’s that simple.”

***

Live music has always held deep significance for Russell.

“Attending a concert is healing on so many levels,” she offers. “It’s not just entertainment—it can be just that, but it never really is just that—because of what happens to our physiology, our biology, our neurology, our neuropathways, the serotonin levels in our brains, the oxytocin levels in our brains. It is transformative to be in that creative communion together. I’m hooked on that. It is exponentially beneficial and healing.”

As she thinks back to her days growing up in Montreal, although she endured anguish and ordeals at home, she experienced the live-music space as a salve and, at times, a full-on salvation.

Russell recalls, “In high school, I started going to a lot of punk shows and ska shows with my friends. I remember going to the see the band Me Mom and Morgentaler at some little dive-y bar. It was the most electric, thrilling experience, where you felt like all your limbic systems have linked up and you’re almost telepathic with one another—everybody’s laughing at the same time and everybody’s crying at the same time. I remember feeling so connected to what they were talking about. The songs were so fantastic and they had these amazing inventive explorations. The songs weren’t exactly the way they were on the record. They were improvising in the moment and riding the energy of all of us together. It was really beautiful, moving and exciting.”

“I was also very lucky because in Montreal, we have the Jazz Fest,” she adds. “So I got to see Oscar Peterson do a free show in the park, a similar kind of completely transcendent communion in a different way—in broad daylight in the sunny park in the middle of the afternoon. You heard freedom in his left hand on the black keys. He was incredible and the way that we all felt synched into it was also incredible. I was exposed to so much extraordinary artistry that was accessible to me, even as a child living below the poverty line. We had free public art, and it was transformative to what I thought was possible for me.”

These experiences set a bar high for Russell, whose live performances similarly aspire to attain that altitude and alchemy.

In 2021, she curated the Once and Future Sounds collaborative set that closed out the opening weekend of Newport Folk Festival’s six-day, COVID-driven Folk On event. She welcomed poet Caroline Randall Williams, along with Chaka Khan, Yola, Amythyst Kiah, Celisse, Joy Oladokun, Kam Franklin, Sunny War and many others whose “vision, presence and oeuvre is a fulfillment and expansion of the promise of the foundational Folk mother, Odetta and the anti-bigotry origin (and Herstory) of Newport Folk.”

This marked the first time that a preponderance of Black women voices came together to headline a collaborative performance at the festival. It also was a momentous occasion for Russell’s own music.

“That was my debut as a solo artist, too,” she remembers. “It was a pretty heavy entrance to the scene. I’m very grateful to Newport, to Carmel Holt, to Jay Sweet for extending that opportunity. That was the beginning of everything, including the way I choose to present my band on the road. There are no men in the band. It’s not because I don’t love men, and we have men come up as special guests sometimes, but there’s such an intense imbalance in the world. It is completely unremarkable to see band after band that is comprised only of cisgender, heterosexual white men. That is the norm. But that’s only a percentage of the world’s population, and it’s leaving a lot of stories out.

“So the reason I choose to not have men onstage with me isn’t out of rejection of manhood in any way. It’s just for balance. Until the brilliant women and non-binary folks that I play with are no longer seen as remarkable, I feel compelled to keep doing it.”

Allison Russell leads a purposeful life. She finds meaning in amity and aspirational thinking that yields action rather than apathy. She’s an uncommon artist who derives and delivers joy by being in common cause.

“The only thing that I can do is be as honest to the muse as I can possibly be, and as honest to my close circle of collaborators, while doing my work to the best of my ability,” she affirms. “I was never the person who wanted to sit alone on a stage with my banjo or guitar. I always wanted to be in creative communion with other artists who inspire Dean Budnick me to make music.”