“There are days when you feel the triumphant, nothing can bring you down. And then there are days when you struggle,” says Allison Russell.
By Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but becoming acquainted with Joni Mitchell more than met the expectations of Allison Russell.
The Montreal-born Americana singer-songwriter, who released her second solo album, The Returner, on Friday and plays Venus Fest on Sept. 21, has appeared at two major public events with the Canadian songwriting legend: Mitchell’s surprise comeback performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 and Mitchell’s headlining show at the Gorge Amphitheatre earlier this year.
“She’s so great, so lovely,” said Russell earlier this summer.
“Despite the ongoing physical challenge of rehabilitating from an aneurysm; having survived polio (in her early years) and living with Morgellons, an autoimmune disorder which can be excruciatingly painful, (Joni) has come back from not just death, but from being told, ‘You won’t walk, you won’t talk,’ let alone shred the guitar and play a three-hour show at the Gorge.”
Russell, 40, who sang harmonies behind Mitchell with Annie Lennox and Sarah McLachlan during the June 10 show, said the headliner was in incredibly good spirits.
“She was happily laughing the whole time, adding funny ad-libs between songs and telling us all these incredible career stories,” Russell recalled. “She said that the last time she was at the Gorge, it was with Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. She was getting ready to go onstage and forgot the lyrics to one of Bob’s songs and invented new ones on the spot.”
For Russell, the Mitchell association is just one more blessing yielded by the success of her first solo album, 2021’s Grammy-nominated Outside Child, which was championed by nine-time Grammy winner Brandi Carlile, who helped Russell land a contract with Fantasy Records and establish other important industry contacts.
Coincidentally, Carlile had also forged a close friendship with Mitchell and was helping Mitchell convalesce by inviting younger female musicians to participate in informal “Joni Jams” at Mitchell’s L.A. home, an experience Russell described as “completely surreal, wondrous and beautiful.”
For Russell, who is working on a memoir, it’s a full circle association that she never dreamt would be possible.
“I’ve been listening to Joni since I was in utero; my mother is from Saskatoon, like Joni, and my grandfather taught art at the high school she went to,” Russell said. “She’s part of the soundtrack of my entire life.
“My mom was a teenager when she had me during a very troubled relationship and one of the beautiful places of connect for us has been through music. And I remember — before I could properly even walk — hiding under her piano and listening to her play along to Ladies of the Canyon and Clouds.”
Russell left home to live on the streets at 15 due to sexual abuse she suffered from her adoptive father, part of the inspiration behind Outside Child.
But she credits music as key to her survival, especially songs from revered female artists.
“That really hit me with Sinead O’Connor’s passing: how important she was not just to me as a developing artist and songwriter, but as a survivor myself of childhood sexual abuse, not by Catholic priests in my case, by my adoptive father who was a white supremacist expat American who claimed to be a Christian.
“People always want to talk about her ripping up the picture of the Pope on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ but that was just a punctuation,’” Russell continued. “What she did was sing Bob Marley’s ‘War’ on ‘SNL’ and adapt the lyrics to be about child abuse. And at the time when she sang that I was a child being abused in Montreal.
“It’s the same with Tracy Chapman’s song ‘Behind the Wall’ … those songs ripped through that brainwashed construct that my abuser had encased my mind in and it literally set my feet on the path of freedom. I don’t know that I would have found the courage to run at 15 if Sinead had not taken her stand; if Tracy Chapman didn’t sing ‘Behind the Wall’; if Ani DiFranco didn’t burst onto the scene with all of her self-affirming unapologetic strengths; if Tori (Amos) didn’t sing ‘Me and a Gun.’”
While Russell has publicly proclaimed Outside Child to be about the triumphant journey of breaking the cycle of abuse, and the power of community, connection and art, The Returner is neither a sequel nor a reclamation project.
“Any time I engage in healing, creative work, it’s a reclamation project in that sense. But I envision each record as a stand-alone. They don’t need to listen to or know anything about Outside Child or about me or my life to enjoy The Returner.”
Russell, who lives with her partner, Jeremy Lindsay (a.k.a. JT Nero), and their daughter just outside Nashville but identifies as queer, said The Returner marked the first time she, Nero and his brother, Drew Lindsay, have co-written and co-produced an album together.
It includes appearances from long-time Prince side women Wendy (Melvoin) and Lisa (Coleman), Carlile, Brandy Clark, Hozier and a group of 16 women aged 22 to 62 she calls “the rainbow coalition,” which includes Larissa Maestro and SistaStrings.
“It’s really solo in name only, because I’m surrounded by an incredible circle of active collaborators,” Russell said.
The new album begins with a couple of joyful, rhythmic songs in “Springtime” and the title track but falls into darker territory with “Demons” and “Eve Was Black,” the latter a take on racism.
Russell said the topical swerve reflects that you never quite shake your demons when it comes to trauma.
“There are days when you feel the triumphant, nothing can bring you down. And then there are days when you struggle … The song ‘Stay Right Here’ really leans into that aspect of it: that it’s a daily choice to stay here and to not let yourself be completely drowned by the voices of self-hatred or apathy, or internalized self-hatred and bigotry.
“In ‘Demons,’ I was standing on a corner, waiting on the school bus and a woman told me that I had such bad luck because I got ‘the bad hair and the bad skin.’ It was a Black woman that told me that, not a white woman.
“Even in Black communities, that anti-Blackness is still insidiously present, where it is better to have hair and lighter skin that’s closer to the European ideal. It’s the same with homophobia. There are plenty of people who have internalized homophobia as well, you know? It can play out in absolutely tragic ways.
“So it is very much about choosing to — and acknowledging — that it is a struggle. It is a struggle to stay grounded in love of community and self-love. Love is not passive, you know: it’s active and it’s messy and it’s fierce and it’s transformative, but it’s not easy passage.”
When Russell left home at 15 she split her waking hours between attending a M.I.N.D. (Moving in New Directions) high school and a McGill University café, sleeping in a university lounge and in the pews of Mary Queen of the World Cathedral during winter.
It was at M.I.N.D. that she met the person who would save her.
“It was when I fell in love with my first girlfriend, who I named ‘Persephone’ on Outside Child,” Russell said. “She let me into her basement window. It was the safety of being loved for the first time by another human being completely without violence or fear or duress or strings attached. It was my first experience of loving consensually. It was transformative. So that was a turning point, that was when I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to survive and I’m going to live through this.’”
Russell is thankful she never fell into repeated abuse, as some in her circumstances do.
“I, for whatever reason, had some kind of homing device where I found safe people … I also think music and art were always my lodestar and lifeline, and the communities that I met through them were nonabusive. And that changed my perception of what was possible for me and how people could treat each other.”