INTERVIEW: Allison Russell on second album 'The Returner': "I'm more than the sum of my scars, but also they tell my story and they’re nothing to be ashamed of."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Dana Trippe, Glam by Uzo, Hair by Alexander Armand, Styled by Mecca Cox
Canada’s Allison Russell may have released her debut album in 2021, but she has been an important voice on the Americana-folk-blues scene for over 20 years through her membership of multiple bands. Today she releases her extraordinary second album The Returner.
After the release of the 2021 album Outside Child, an award-winning, moving, cathartic and confronting album that told Russell’s story of survival, The Returner acts as the second chapter of her story and focuses on the joyful side of surviving - that of freedom, love and self-respect.
Genre-less, and seamlessly switching between multiple sounds and feelings, the album encompasses blues, disco-funk, soul, gospel and pop. Created with Russell’s all female band the Rainbow Coalition, it also features guest appearances by musical heavyweights Wendy & Lisa, Brandi Carlile, Brandy Clark, and Hozier.
“My goal with The Returner – sonically, poetically, and spiritually – is a radical reclamation of the present tense, a real time union of body, mind, and soul,” Russell says. “This album is a much deeper articulation of rhythm, groove, and syncopation. Groove as it heralds the self back into the body, groove as it celebrates sensual and sexual agency and flowering, groove as an urgent call to action and political activism. In just a word, it's funkier. But as is the history of anything funky, it’s never just a party. It is a multiverse of energies that merges the celebration and the battle cry. For while an embrace of the present tense is a celebration, it is equally an unquestioning leap into battle – cultural, political, environmental.”
Album opener ‘Springtime’, an invigorating jazz-gospel-soul delight sets the scene for Russell story well - “So long farewell adieu adieu / To that tunnel I went through” she sings surrounded by a gorgeous choir of female voices. Title track ‘The Returner’, with its slow burning country-folk sound, also celebrates the power of saying goodbye to the past: “Goodbye so long farewell all I’ve been.”
‘All Without Within’ is an album highlight and showcases Russell’s incredible versatility. With a smart, 1970s infused funk beat with injections of pure pop, it is the kind of track that could have easily sat in Prince’s discography in the 1980s.
‘Eve Was Black’ is a haunting, powerful track that - at just over six minutes - stays with you long after the last note fades. A blistering take down of racism, Russell’s voices simmers with barely restrained anger as she challenges the hypocrisy of those who have persecuted Black people throughout the history of humankind, when we can all trace ourselves back to one Black woman - Eve. “Eve was Black didn’t you know? / Is that why you hate my Black Skin so?”. It is an incredibly powerful statement and required listening.
Russell revisits upbeat pop again on second single ‘Stay Right Here’ which brings together disco and funk and wouldn’t sound out of place on at all on a crowded dancefloor, while ‘Rag Child’ merges discordant sounds - a plucked banjo, a woozy piano, subtle synths - and ties them up into a sonically fascinating song. Lyrically it sees Russell emerging from her trauma, knowing she is stronger thanks to everything she has gone through: “Someday you’ll be buried / You’ll return to the stars, but today’s not the one.”
The album ends on ‘Requiem’, a stunning soul-gospel track with little more than a gentle beat, guitar and piano over which Russell’s beautiful vocal soars as a choir featuring Brandi Carlile, Wendy & Lisa and Hozier amongst others, carries the track as it builds and builds before it fades into a lone guitar. It’s lyrics speak of renewal, ever-lasting love, courage and death - “The question is not if / It was always when” - and it is beautiful way to end the album.
The Returner is nothing short of a remarkable album and it is not hyperbole to say it is quite possibly one of 2023’s greatest albums. With songs that run the gamut of styles and genres, there is something for every mood. Russell and her music have the power to move you intensely and much of it feels almost spiritual. Complex, challenging, connective, homely and mesmerising, The Returner will capture your heart with just one listen. We recently sat down with Russell to chat more about the album’s creation.
Hi Allison! I just have to say I feel like I have tumbled into a wonderland when exploring your music career! There is so much incredible music I just want to consume it all!
There's a lot! It's so funny because people are like, ‘Oh, you're a debut artist’. Not exactly! It's like yes, I made my first solo record in 2021, but I made a tonne of records with different bands that I founded and toured with like a mad person for years prior to that. It's so funny, my Po’Girl bandmates and I realised that we were coming up on our 20 year anniversary in June, since the first Po’ Girl record came out, on a little label called Jericho beach records It's so funny, we're like, ‘are we going to celebrate that? What do we do?’
Before I even get into the album, I want to talk about your 2022 single ‘You’re Not Alone with Brand Carlile. As soon as I heard this song, I was like ‘this is the song that makes people want to get into music’. This is an avenue song.
Oh thank you. It's so timely that you ask about that because I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and we're dealing with a recent mass shooting at a school that's a couple of blocks away from my daughter's school. As you know, America has a real problem with facing gun violence and doing anything about it, there's a very terrible kind of gun fetishism that has been equated to freedom by our gun lobbyists really and that has just twisted all possibility of addressing things with bipartisan support and rationality the way that y'all did in Australia when a similar tragedy occurred. I actually wrote that a few years ago for a record that I made with with Our Native Daughters, but I wanted to rerecord it last year after the devastation of of the Robb Elementary School mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Shortly after that, my daughter’s school started doing a lot more active shooter drills and all the kids get traumatised just from those let alone going through an actual shooter getting into their school. I wanted to do something and I decided to rerecord ‘You're Not Alone’ and donate the proceeds to Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand and Students Demand who are wonderful organisations, lobbying hard to force our legislators to take some basic common sense actions such as banning assault weapons, AR-15s and the like that have no place outside of a battlefield. I asked Brandi and she immediately said yes. She has become a dear friend but has also been responsible for knocking open a lot of doors for me in this industry and why you've even heard of me is because of [debut album] Outside Child and and she was the one literally picked up the phone and advocated so fiercely over the phone to my now record label Fantasy Records.
That song means so much to me and I think the arts are so vitally important for everything, for social assembly, joyful assembly, of course the entertainment, but more deeply arts help us move through trauma. They help us feel empathy and build empathy and think laterally and reduce cortisol in our bodies. Music literally can boost serotonin and shift our biochemistry, it's incredibly powerful. There's fascinating studies recently about how our breathing starts regulating together when we're in a concert, there's kind of a mystical, spiritual level to what happens when we gather together for a live performance. I really think of it as creative communion and I think a lot more creative problem solving can come out of those kinds of joyful circles, or sometimes mourning circles, we get together and mourn and that’s important too.
Well your music is somehow more than music, it’s art because you’re a singer, a songwriter but you're also a poet and your lyrics hit you hard, but at the same time, they're delivered with such joy and swagger and acceptance even if you are singing the most painful song. You spoken about this as the joy from the other side.
What The Returner really digs into is survivor's joy. That feeling, that renaissance, that revival, that rebirth, where you feel all the beauty and the ecstasy of living even more deeply, because of the depths of the worst of it, and the despair and the horror and the pain of it that you came through.
You're a tiny woman, but you sound so loud and joyful and huge on it. Your first album Outside Child is a real beast, it's a beautiful beast, but it’s just incredibly intense.
It is a beast, and I've actually had several music journalists, and I appreciate their candour, telling me that they just didn't listen to it for months, because they read about it and thought, ‘Oh, God, no, I don't want to go down that dark hole’. And then when they did get to it, they realised actually, there's a lot of joy in that record. I can't change the circumstances of my childhood, but it is not about the abuse. It's about the journey out of it, and it's about finding that community and art and music itself in the way that music is medicine for all of us. For me in particular, it was a specific lifeline that I would not be here without. And I'm singing of that with joy and with gratitude. Yes, there's pain and sorrow in the past, but it's that survivor's joy that I was beginning to try to lean into. That's really what The Returner is. It's the present moment. It's reimbursement. It's literally coming back into your body after you've had to flee it because of misery, coming back and reclaiming it and reclaiming your own power and your own joy and the power of your circle. And revelling in life. Every day we get to still be alive and breathing really does, in many ways make us stronger, even though that is sort of trite, we don't recognise it so often, right? We feel our wounds and our scars and we think I'm damaged because of this scar instead of even stronger because of the scar. I'm more than the sum of my scars, but also they tell my story, and they’re nothing to be ashamed of.
That's what the album is, proud of surviving. As opposed to ‘I'm really grateful’ because no one wants to go through that.
No, no one wants to go through it. But the other truth of our human existence is we all experience trauma of differing sorts, right? My friend and I used to joke about this all the time, like it's not the trauma Olympics. Whatever you've experienced, trauma is trauma. We humans go through periods of loneliness and despair, feeling helpless or feeling apathetic, and then feeling joyful and feeling love and feeling connected. The human experience, the minutiae, and the particulars may be different, but we can relate to each other. And in that way, trauma becomes a mother of empathy and of connection and of us being able to reach out to each other and feel, embrace and celebrate our glorious differences as the riches that they are.
With The Returner there is a bit of a different swagger and I’m hearing so many influences here. Despite all the years you've been in this industry, do you still get this thought of ‘Oh, I'm changing lanes, is this going to be okay?’
You know, no, because I've been so obscure most of my career, it's only with Outside Child that this miraculous thing happened and anybody gave a shit! I didn't have that expectation in a greater, taste making music journalism winning awards way you know. Being noticed by the Recording Academy for the first time, literally the first black artist of any gender to win the Contemporary Roots Record of the Year at the Juno Awards last year, being given this recognition and these accolades and nominations was so completely unprecedented for me. It's opened these doors I didn’t even know there was a door there, right? So in a sense in a way that has relieved pressure, because I just sort of happily, scrappily went along doing my things It never occurred to me to worry about how would the art be received on a larger, critical ‘is she changing lanes?’ kind of scale.
Of course I always hope to make art and then open it up to public consumption, to let it be out there. Especially songs, they really cease to be yours and whoever listens to them and chooses to engage with them, it becomes whatever it is for them, and they may have a whole other interpretation. That's the alchemy, the magic of art to me. It's one thing for the person who's creating it, and it's another for the person who's engaging with it and and both are equally valid. Also subjectivity is a beauty and wonder to me as well. I absolutely understand that it's not going to be everybody's cup of tea, nor should it be. If we all liked the exact same things, it would be an unbearably, monotonous world.
I love the way you speak about it, everything is a joy. The Grammys and making it big and all of that are such a big deal and many artists almost treat it like it isn’t, like they are too cool for school.
Don't take it for granted you know? It makes me quite sad when artists forget what a big deal it was the first time they were nominated. And they talk trash, and they don't get engaged or involved. The Recording Academy is us. It's literally us, it's a peer review. Yes, there has been bias in the Academy because the membership was heavily white and male of a certain age, but we can change that. Literally each member is allowed to recommend two new members every year. It can be changed, but it means we have to get engaged and involved in it and open that door for more and more artists. Instead of getting annoyed if you didn't win enough, like Drake's always getting mad about not winning or something. He's had so many Grammys, and he's been nominated so many times - like you're an industry, you're 5% of the gross domestic product of the province of Ontario! You've done well from Grammy recognition. Mavis Staples didn't win a Grammy till she was 76 and she was so proud and happy to win that Grammy. This woman is not just a music icon and a cultural icon, she's a civil rights icon. She's in her 80s now and she's still marching for civil rights and human rights in America and she's still in her joy. If mother Mavis can be in her joy, we better be in ours
I can’t wait for the day that you tell off Drake!
I’ll gently hold his hands and be like, ‘you have so much power, use your power for good. Instead of looking inward all the time. Look outward. Think about who you can uplift and change things for!’ I think sometimes people forget when they have this massive platform, that they can be a vector of change.
The Returner is out now via Fantasy Records. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Allison Russell you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
