Cutting the tether to your worst experiences often feels impossible. This is particularly true in an era of prolonged isolation, at a time when the physical comfort of others is bound with the threat of illness. With thoughts a lone companion, it’s easy to navigate the passing days hardwired to the worst things that have ever happened to you, to plumb the depths of the past so often and so deeply that it’s difficult to resurface as a separate being with agency.
To reclaim your future from the past’s oppressors, from the unseen forces with bloodthirst for your failure, is both a triumph and a gift. This is why Allison Russell’s Outside Child is such an achievement. The singer-songwriter-multiinstrumentalist’s newest work is a high statement of craft and a clarion call for liberation, an exercise in tradition, innovation and strength that generously reminds us that we, too, may unwind from the coils of trauma.
It’s a necessary jolt through the framework of roots music that arrives at a time when the face of Nashville is changing. Russell is part of a vanguard of Black women who are making some of the best country, roots, and folk music today, like Valerie June, Yola, Adia Victoria, Rhiannon Giddens, and Brittney Spencer. But her debut solo album stands out for its powerful vulnerability, for its relaying of personal and intergenerational trauma as a means of accountability and emancipation. “It was this awakening, to reclaim a part of yourself that has been just about pain and shame and misery,” Russell told the New York Times last year. It’s a far cry from country radio’s hollow, red Solo cup populism, a work whose resonance is wide ranging, so much that it has topped year-end best of lists, and garnered numerous award nominations.
Russell was born and raised in Montreal, but has been a sustained presence in Nashville for the better part of a decade. She was a member of Canada-based groups Fear Of Drinking and Po’ Girl in her early career, each blending traditional forms like Celtic, jazz, country, and folk for new flavor and sound. In 2012, she formed Birds Of Chicago with her now-husband JT Nero, a Midwestern songwriter with strong ties to the region. The pair financed their first two studio albums via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, and built a road dog reputation, touring relentlessly, even through Russell’s pregnancy.
A pivotal moment came during the group’s performance at Americanafest in Nashville in 2018, when they captivated the audience and caught the attention of powerful critics like Ann Powers of NPR, who noted: “They come together in a way that makes you feel the dynamic of their artistic partnership and their earnest mission to inspire and uplift the audience.” The following year, Russell stepped out on her own, recording the Songs Of Our Native Daughters album for the Smithsonian Folkways label with Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Amythyst Kiah, each a fellow Black female banjo player. The process helped her work through a period of writer’s block, and she also began writing toward her first solo, the collection of songs that became Outside Child.
At the center of the album are Russell’s candid accounts of the sexual abuse she suffered by her adoptive father, and her escape to the streets of Montreal when she ran away at age 15. “Father used me like a wife / Mother turned the blindest eye / Stole my body, spirit, pride / He did, he did each night,” she sings on “4th Day Prayer,” over instrumentation that recalls the soul sound of Hi Records in Memphis. That’s not to say it’s an album about abuse. As Russell recalls her trauma, she also celebrates the people and places that helped her survive, and the joy that arrives with such liberation. “Left home, I was just a child / Slept in the graveyard, end of the Mile / When the sun came up and found my skin / I rose, I rose again,” she sings on the same song.
“Montreal,” which opens the album, is similarly a paean to the streets and free spaces that sheltered the songwriter, sung in English and French, while “Persephone” recalls a childhood friend Russell ran to in her darkest hours. “Tap, tap, tappin’ on your window screen / Gotta let me in Persephone / Got nowhere to go, but I had to get away from him,” she sings over a spirited country-rock arrangement threaded with pedal steel.
Though its subjects are weighty, its lyrics teetering on the precipice of devastation, the album never feels morose or hopeless, which is one of its many superpowers. Russell, the person, herself, teems with joy, her wide smile casting a light for all who need it. And there is the sense that in relaying her trauma, she acknowledges its place in her story, but also relegates it to her past. In broadcasting those experiences, she has also set them free.
Russell’s breakthrough and success also ushers in the sense that country music writ large, its fans and structures, longs for more substantive and diverse voices, that the bro-ing of the sound and industry is at least partially met with resistance, with a contempt for the executives who insult fans’ intelligence and depth. For this and many reasons, Russell’s diaristic album doubles as a universal reckoning. Soon, she will set more of her stories to the page, via a recent book deal with Flatiron. On January 27, she won two of the UK Americana Awards’ top honors, International Album of the Year and Artist of the Year.
Outside Child is also nominated for three Grammy Awards this year, for Best Americana Album, Roots Song, and Roots Performance, signaling that the Academy members who made the effort to vote in those categories understand this pivotal moment. But it actually won’t matter if Russell takes home any tiny gramophones this April, for she is already a triumph.
