Allison Russellis reclaiming her life — and she’s doing it through music.
Russell, 39, who’s nominated for three Grammys next year, released her debut albumOutside Childin May.
On the soulful record, Russell writes poignantly about her traumatic upbringing and how she found healing. Now, says Russell, she’s sharing her story in hopes of helping other abuse survivors.
Russell tells PEOPLE her difficulties began during her childhood in Montreal, where she lived with her Scottish-Canadian mother and a “very violent, white supremacist” stepfather who was 26 years older than her mom. (Her biological father was a visiting student from Grenada who returned home before her mother knew she was pregnant. Russell didn’t meet him until she was 30.)
“He became my primary abuser — sexually, physically, psychologically, emotionally, for a decade at that point,” she says. “I was 5 when the abuse started, and I was 15 when I ran away from home. Because I knew at that point it was either run or die.”
Allison Russell.Marc Baptiste
At around 19 years old, Russell was living in Vancouver when she learned from her mother that her niece and nephew would be moving in with her parents. To protect them, she immediately flew back to file rape and assault charges against her adoptive father, according to theNew York Times.
After police tracked down other women he had assaulted, her stepfather pleaded guilty and received a three-year sentence with a chance at earlier parole, reports the outlet.
That feeling of life or death she felt as a young teenager returned when she chose to shareOutside Childwith the world, says Russell.
As the singer struggled with feelings of “helplessness” amid the COVID-19 lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests, she felt a calling to share her own story of survival through music.
“It was in 2020, and it was after themurder of Breonna Taylorthat I really started to think, ‘I have to get this record out in some way,'” she says. “Because these cycles of violence and abuse and bigotry are all connected, and they are not going to end until we all, in a critical mass, break our silence.”
She continues: “The only thing that I have to reduce the harm and to push back against those cycles of bigotry, abuse and violence is to use my words and use my melodies as best I can to create more empathy in the world.”
While this album sees her confront her harrowing past, it most importantly depicts the resilience and sense of community Russell has found as an adult.
“It is not about the abuse. It’s about the roadmap out. It’s about finding chosen family, finding community,” says Russell, who is mom to a 7-year-old daughter, Ida (with her husband JT Nero, born Jeremy Lindsay). “It’s about the redemptive power of love and art and music. And for me, motherhood.”
Russell opens the record with “Montreal,” an ode to her hometown as she sings, “I was your child, Montreal / You would not let me come to harm.” Meanwhile, in “4th Day Prayer,” Russell details the abuse she suffered from her stepfather as she sings: “Father used me like a wife / Mother turned the blindest eye / Stole my body, spirit, pride / He did, he did each night.”
Later, her strength is on display in “Joyful Motherf—ers” as she sings alongside her husband: “Oh my father, you were the thief of nothing / I’ll be a child in the garden, 10,000 years and counting.”
The next day, Russell was in Zoom meetings with her now-record label. Russell had DM’d the album to Carlile, 40, on Instagram, thinking there was no way she would see it.
She got a call three weeks later from the Grammy winner, who said her wife Catherine had had a “visceral, emotional reaction” to Russell’s music.
After finding healing from her childhood, Russell is focused on creating a safe space for other young people, including her daughter, in the hopes that no other children have to face similar experiences.
“I feel just a great and deep convictionthatis my work, to sing and write and talk about all of this,” she says. “It is very, very important to me that my daughter never has to carry the burdens of intergenerational abuse and trauma and violence that I’ve carried.”
Becoming a mother, she says, has been “transformative in every way.”
“It has been incredibly healing to be able to give her the love and the emotional support and safety and protection that I didn’t have as a child,” she says.
When asked if survivors have reached out to her after hearing her music, Russell says “many, many, many, many.”
She continues: “That is part of why I feel so passionately about getting really loud right now.”
Russell’s first memories of music go back to when she was a 3-year-old girl listening to her mother play the piano. While she says they had a “really fraught, really difficult” relationship, Russell recalls her mother being a “beautiful, beautiful pianist.”
Her grandmother “had a beautiful antique upright piano,” she says. “And I remember crawling underneath the piano and listening to my mom play and humming along with her. She couldn’t express love in any appropriate or direct way, but I could hear … in her music.”
As Russell grew older, she found herself getting lost in books and poems, ranging from Emily Dickinson to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, as a way of escaping her personal struggles. “I was just a nerdy child, and I needed to escape because my life was unbearable,” she says.
Her career as a musician, however, took off when she joined Po’ Girl in the early 2000s. Though she never sang about her past directly, she recalls writing songs like “Part Time Poppa,” “No Shame” and “Kathy” during this era — all songs that reference “parts” of her “own journey.”
“I never wanted to be a solo artist. Some of that has to do with the childhood that I had,” she says. “In order to survive, I had to make myself small and hide, and hiding within a collective of a band felt much safer to me than putting myself forward and under my own name.”
Together, they wroteSongs of Our Native Daughters, leaning into their experience as Black women today.
It was during this time period that Russell wrote “Quasheba, Quasheba” for the group and realized for the first time that her story was connected to her great-great-great-grandmother Quasheba. “I understood in the front of my mind, consciously, that what happened to me, my own story, my own history with abuse, didn’t occur in a vacuum. That it’s connected in an unbroken line of intergenerational violence and trauma and abuse.”
“The other side of the coin of that intergenerational abuse and trauma and violence is resilience. It’s our human birthright,” she says. “Strength, hope. There’s no way she survives all of that if she didn’t have those three things.”
source: people.com
