Allisson Russell has spent her career collaborating – but for Outside Child, her first solo record, she is stepping boldly out in front, sharing her tales of healing.

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

For decades, Allison Russell has been a musical collaborator, lending emotional intelligence to several roots bands. Now, she's stepping forward as a solo artist to tell her own survival story. Jewly Hight WNXP visited Russell on her Nashville porch to find out how she got here. And just a warning, this story does mention abuse.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "4TH DAY PRAYER")

ALLISON RUSSELL: (Singing) These are the best years of your life. If I'd believed it, I'd have died. Something told me that they lied. Oh I, oh I survived.

JEWLY HIGHT, BYLINE: That's how Allison Russell introduces us to her youthful resilience on her first solo album "Outside Child."

RUSSELL: The record itself isn't really about abuse. It's about the journey out of that and breaking those cycles.

HIGHT: But to grasp the superhuman distance Russell has traveled on that journey requires a sense of the trauma she's put behind her. She was born in Montreal to a Grenadian student who'd already returned home and a Scottish Canadian teenage single mother who struggled with undiagnosed schizophrenia and lost her toddler to foster care. Russell's mom regained custody when she married a white man, who became her daughter's adoptive father and abuser.

RUSSELL: I was in bondage for a decade. The abuse started pretty soon after I went to live with them.

HIGHT: It ended only when 15-year-old Russell decided that being without a home would be more tolerable than staying in that one. The neighborhood noise enveloping our interview is a fitting soundtrack to her memories of seeking respite outdoors.

RUSSELL: There were lots of, you know, peaceful hidden spots near trees and mausoleums, and I would sleep there sometimes. And I would sleep - you know, go to, like, the oratory or the basilica and pretend to be praying and snooze in the pews.

HIGHT: Russell kept attending her arts-friendly alternative high school. She'd been drawn to and dreaming up melodies for historic myths, fables and poems since childhood.

RUSSELL: There was parents being horrible to their children through all of those songs and lullabies, and that helped me process what had happened to me.

HIGHT: What helped Russell even more was sharing the stage with kindred spirits in the folk scene.

RUSSELL: Music was the thing that made the unbearable voices of self-hatred that had been so deeply instilled within me - it made them stop.

HIGHT: At 18, she became a social worker. She played in bands on the side until she made one called Po' Girl her full-time focus in 2003. After that, Russell formed a partnership in music and life with fellow singer-songwriter JT Nero.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DIM STAR OF THE PALISADES")

BIRDS OF CHICAGO: (Singing) Twilight, midnight, then dawn. A billion stars, then there was one.

HIGHT: They were just a year into their soul-steeped folk rock band Birds of Chicago when their daughter, Ida, arrived. She's 7 now.

RUSSELL: How was your day?

IDA: It was amazingly great.

HIGHT: As soon as she became a parent, Russell found it hard to come up with songs.

RUSSELL: I didn't finish a song for three years. And I really felt like maybe I'm not a writer anymore. I'm just a - you know, I'm a mum now, or I'm a - that's where all the creative energy is going.

HIGHT: That had to change when Rhiannon Giddens invited her to join Our Native Daughters, a band of banjo-playing Black women. They were to make an album reimagining the musical expression of enslaved people and their descendants on deadline. Bandmate Amythyst Kiah watched Russell rise to the occasion.

AMYTHYST KIAH: I mean, like, seeing that sense of, like, empowerment, like, coming on for her, I thought was really incredible to watch.

HIGHT: Russell had learned a bit about her genealogy from a Grenadian aunt and wrote a tribute to her enslaved foremother, Quasheba, for the group.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "QUASHEBA, QUASHEBA")

OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS: (Singing) Quasheba, Quasheba. You're free now, you're free now. How does your spirit fly?

RUSSELL: What that project did for me was it kicked open the floodgates - having something to write to, getting so possessed by the history and understanding that I am my ancestors. I am carrying them forward. I survived what I survived because they survived what they survived.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "QUASHEBA, QUASHEBA")

OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS: (Singing) From the Golden Coast of Ghana to the bondage of Grenada, you kept the dream of hope alive.

HIGHT: Russell started writing autobiographically during the Our Native Daughters tour. And how she ultimately unfurls her album's narrative through meditation, myth and murder ballad is striking. It's by design that she's the hero at the center of it all.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE RUNNER")

RUSSELL: (Singing) I was up above me, I was standing right beside me, oh.

And I just think about the number of kids that don't get enough positive input to realize that that false narrative they're being told about themselves and their worthlessness - that it is false. And we all need to hear that it gets better. I mean, and that's why I realized I had to tell my own story.

HIGHT: For NPR News, I'm Jewly Hight in Nashville.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE RUNNER")

RUSSELL: (Singing) Then I heard that rock and roll outside the South Hill candy store... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: Genre: Folk  Allison Russell  Allison Russell  Allison Russell  Allison Russell  Allison Russell