Allison Russell Excavates the Pains of Her Past on Debut ‘Outside Child’

As Allison Russell began working on the Songs of Our Native Daughters, a retrieval of the histories and lost stories of black women of the diaspora with her project Our Native Daughters, she ended up excavating stories of her own family, recounting an abusive and traumatic childhood unraveled on debut Outside Child (Fantasy Records).

“There was a specific kind of spiritual and chronological journey back that I hoped could be felt by a listener in some way,” says Russell. “Of course, you can never be there once you put the songs out into the world. That’s the beauty. That’s the magic in alchemy people will take at will.”

Produced by Dan Knobler, Outside Child is an amalgamation of Russell’s musical family, featuring Erin Rae, Jamie Dick, Joe Pisapia, The McCrary Sisters, Ruth Moody, and Yola, along with her partner, and Birds of Chicago bandmate, JT Nero. Outside Child “is about resilience, survival, transcendence, the redemptive power of art, community, connection, and chosen family,” says the Nashville-based artist of her debut. “My music really comes from collaboration and community with other musicians,” says Russell, “and between the artists, and the audience.”

On Outside Child, the Montreal-bred artist faces her childhood of trauma and abuse. At times heartbreaking, hopefulness is strewn through the soulful drifts of French-infused “Montreal” and harmony driven “Nightflyer”—a song she recently performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with friends Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer—Russell reflects on the healing nature of motherhood, singing I am the mother of the evening star / I am the love that conquers all, while one the bluesier “The Runner,” featuring vocalist Yola, Russell recollects leaving home at 15, an abusive adoptive father, and how music saved her from self-harm. 

“I’ve never experienced anything quite like this,” shares Russell. “It almost felt like an out of body experience, narrating my own story, then trying to become the hero of my own story, in a sense, and give myself the same love and compassion, and forgiveness and understanding that I would give to any protagonist of a book, or a song, or a painting that I love. There was definitely a healing element to it, of just trying to be kind to myself in a way that I would be kind to any other human, which is something that I have struggled with a lot in my life, and probably always will.”

A more upbeat, country-tinged, “Persephone,” subtly conceals the devastating story of momentary reprieve from abuse. Blood on my shirt, two ripped buttons / Might’ve killed me that time, oh if I’d let him… got nowhere to go but I had to get away from him / My petals are bruised but I’m still a flower, sings Russell.

“Putting myself forward feels terrifying,” says Russell, who says it was difficult, yet necessary, to expose her background of extreme abuse. “It’s been a long time coming, but the genesis of this record, and why after so many years of being an artist and musician I felt the need to do this now has a lot to do with becoming a mother seven years ago.”

Partly a resurfacing of the pains and reckoning with a past, Outside Child shifts dialects and genres of soul and gospel, folk and blues, French and Brazilian, accessing all the varied, and once-buried, emotions and the artist’s future built upon motherhood, and rebirth as an artist. 

“Working on that project helped me situate my own story within the continuum of history within a whole spectrum, and the fact that what happened to me didn’t happen in a vacuum and it wasn’t the first time that had happened in my particular lineage,” says Russell. “There’s ancestral trauma that we’re all dealing with, as well as personal trauma, and these things have to be faced and talked about in order to heal so that we don’t visit them upon our children in the next generations.”

She adds, “That’s my impetus, and that’s where my urgency came from in writing my own story, in my own name, and in my own words, and putting that forward in this way.”

Moving through lost innocent, redemption, and survival, the song cycle of Outside Child is a chronological storybook of Russell’s life. “It starts in childhood, but it’s told from the point of view of who I am now—the most happy and empowered, loved, and loving I’ve ever been in my life,” says Russell. “The only reason I tell these stories now is because I have distance from that history. It’s about coming out of it and the transcendence of connecting with our own creativity, and finding the community that I found through art and music. There is life beyond abuse, and we don’t have to perpetuate these cycles.”

Community, the new family she has built with Nero and connected artists, has always been the saving grace for Russell.

“There’s this mythology in America that you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, all by yourself, and that’s simply not true,” says Russell. “So much of what happens to us depends upon the community that we find, and where that finds us. Do they uplift us, or do they reaffirm whatever horrible lies we were taught. If I believed my adopted father, then I’m a worthless person who’s not as human as any white person. If I believed him, and if I hadn’t reaffirmed this, then I would have believed that I was worthless.”

Russell hopes Outside Child serves as a recognizable voice for those who’ve had similar experiences, and to see that it does get better.

“These horrible statistics don’t represent us as humans,” she says. “They might represent what has happened but not who we are. We’re more than a statistic. There’s a whole story to each of us.”