Onboard a stormy flight in July 2019, Allison Russell started thinking back to one of the most turbulent periods in her life. The singer-songwriter fled her abusive home as a teenager growing up in Montreal, spending the rest of her adolescence roaming the city’s streets, sleeping in its graveyards, and playing chess late into the early-morning hours in its cafés. Russell remembered something she used to be told by those who didn’t know what she was going through at the time.
“‘These are the best years of your life,’” Russell jotted down while seated on the plane. “If I’d believed it I’d have died.”
By the end of the flight, Russell had goosebumps: She’d finished writing a song called “4th Day Prayer,” and it was unlike anything she had ever composed in her 15-plus years as a professional songwriter.
“That was when I knew this was a record,” says Russell, 39. “That there’s a whole journey of inquiry that I have to go on here, and it’s going to be painful.”
“4th Day Prayer” was the first song Russell wrote for Outside Child, her stunning debut solo album, which came together over a feverish three-month period during the summer of 2019. Singing a blend of elegant torch songs, ancestral ballads (in French and English), gentle country shuffles, and Al-Green inspired R&B, Russell embarks on a fresh musical beginning by dealing directly with her traumatic upbringing.
“It’s excavating and reckoning with the most painful part of my past, is what it is,” she says. “I just felt that because I can sing about it, I have to.”
Starting at age five, Russell was sexually abused by a close family member. She attempted to work through her trauma as a young singer-songwriter, starting out in her band Po Girl (see the group’s 2010 song “No Shame”). “I was in my twenties and I just didn’t have the support system yet, frankly, to be able to do it safely and honestly,” she says of that time. Russell then spent much of the ensuing decade largely side-stepping the darkest parts of her past as one half of the eclectic roots duo Birds of Chicago, with her husband, JT Nero.
Her latest work is the culmination of a years-long project of searching for the deeper generational, racial, and social roots of the abuse she suffered. “This record is about trying to lay to rest the shame and the anger,” she says, “From 2010, when I was trying to first start talking about things, there’s been much more integration of my own identity and sense of self.”
own identity and sense of self.”
Russell was inspired to mine such deeply personal material after becoming a member of the banjo-roots supergroup Our Native Daughters in 2018. Before Russell joined the group, she had gone through a nearly four-year period of writer’s block as a new mother. “The only thing I wrote were lullabies,” she says. When the group’s founder, Rhiannon Giddens, first invited her to become a member, Russell was “terrified. I was like, ‘What if I just get there and I have no inspiration, nothing to contribute, and I’m dead weight?’” she recalls feeling. “That was my biggest fear. But what ended up happening was, it was like the dam broke.”
The song that did it was “Quasheba, Quasheba,” an ode to the strength of an ancestor of Russell’s, who, centuries ago, had been captured from her native West Africa and enslaved on a new continent. Writing the song for Our Native Daughters’ 2019 debut album helped Russell understand the ways in which her years of abuse were part of a “continuum of that same white supremacist colonial system.”
“From the coast of Africa/to the hills of Grenada/to the cold of Montreal,” Russell sings on “4th Day Prayer,” tracing her continent-spanning lineage. “That whip, that whip still falls.”
Despite its heavy inspirations, Outside Child is anything but despairing or academic. Many of its songs mask their dark, difficult tales in deceptively sweet nursery-rhyme melodies (“I’m a violent lullaby,” as Russell herself succinctly puts it, on the gorgeous “Nightflyer”). One of the most jubilant moments on the record comes during “Persephone,” Russell’s ode to her teenage girlfriend and first love, whose home provided a refuge for Russell during her traumatic, transient adolescence.
“You can find joy and happiness even if you have climbed out of horrible circumstances,” says the singer. As if to prove her point, Russell closes the record with an acoustic anthem titled “Joyful Motherfuckers.” “Oh my father, you were the thief of nothing,” she sings in a moment of hard-won clarity, “I’ll be a child in the garden, 10,000 years and counting.”
She recorded the album in three short days in Nashville in September 2019 with producer Dan Knobler (Erin Rae, Rodney Crowell), as well as longtime members of Russell’s extended musical family such as Yola, the McCrary Sisters, and Erin Rae. “So much of my childhood was being isolated and alone and outside that it’s really comforting and compelling to me to feel like I’m in a magic circle,” says Russell. “That’s what a band is to me, a magic circle. It’s a sacred, holy thing, so the notion of stepping out on my own was terrifying.” The process of recording Outside Child, however, still “felt like being inside that magic circle: safer than safe and just endlessly creative.”
Russell’s decision to release her first ever album under her own name at 39 is part of her ongoing project to live up to the legacy of her ancestors like Quasheba. “It’s important for me as a survivor, as a mother, and as someone who wants the abuse to stop with me, to step into my own power and name and story,” she says. “Yes, my childhood was awful. But I have more agency than any of the women in my lineage prior to me. Every person that’s come before — on my Scottish side, too, they all went through unbelievable hardship. If they could survive, then I have to be able to.”
ON THE RISE
I've sometimes felt as though every piece of music is an exploration of our perception of time. What sparked the idea of focusing on time as the main focus for your new work?
The focus on time in this work emerged quite unconsciously.
What actually happened is that the title came last, after I received an email from John (Benedict ndr) regarding the production timeline. In the middle of that email, those two Latin words appeared, and for me, as an Italian reading them in an English context, they had an almost striking, illuminating effect.
At that point, I went back to the pieces I had written, listening again to how they had been developed and recorded, and also considering the broader time span over which the entire EP had been composed. It became clear to me that Tempo Fugit was the most fitting title to represent the work.
I've been listening to Tangerine Dream's Zeit a lot recently but that album is based on a very specific concept of time, as pioneered in the West bei Parmenides, that time does not, actually, move. What are your own reflections on time?
Time is perhaps the most objective construct that exists in nature, and yet the most paradoxical aspect of it is that it is entirely perceived in a subjective way.
At times, time seems not to pass at all; at other times, it rushes forward, or even feels as if it stops. But this sense of flow, its rhythm, its pace, is not determined by time itself, it is determined by us.
This is precisely why I see it as such a fundamentally objective dimension. It is inescapable, it is constant, and yet our perception transforms something absolutely objective into something deeply subjective.
Time is not just the medium through which music flows, it can also be a musical tool in its own right. How did you work with it for Tempo Fugit?
For this EP, I worked with time in two main ways.
On one hand, there are pieces built around a very clear and explicit temporal reference, a metronome. On the other, there are works that were recorded almost entirely without any fixed time reference. This applies both to the piano pieces and to the electronic ones.
In some tracks, the presence of a grid allows for a very precise perception of construction, almost as if the composition were being built brick by brick. In others, there is a deliberate need to remove any external reference and instead follow what I would describe as an inner sense of time.
These two approaches reflect the way I usually compose, and they are both clearly present and articulated throughout this EP.
Many contemporary composers have tried – or are still trying to make – time transparent by opting for extreme lengths. Your music, however, is quite to the point, on your earlier van Gogh EP even radically so. What is satisfying about concision for you?
I don’t usually approach composition by asking myself how long a piece should be.
When I work on immersive projects, of course, there are specific durations dictated by the storyboard. In those cases, the shorter the piece, the greater the risk of it sounding like a jingle. It becomes more difficult to preserve an emotional depth rather than just leaving behind a catchy motif.
At the same time, I find it very interesting to impose, in a way, constraints of brevity. I have written pieces that last twenty minutes or more, though they are often less suited to streaming platforms, and in some cases they have not even been officially released, as they belong to installations or more experimental contexts.
On the other hand, I also created a collection of one hundred one-minute pieces as part of a creative exercise called “100 days.” The idea was to repeat a creative act every day for one hundred consecutive days. My approach was to sit at the piano, even before having my coffee, and write exactly one minute of music.
Over time, this became a fascinating process. In the beginning, I relied on a timer, constantly checking the clock. But toward the end, I developed an internal sense of that one-minute span. Despite differences in tonality, meter, and tempo, I could almost instinctively feel when to begin and when to end each piece.
That experience taught me that duration is not something I impose from the outside, but something that can be internalized and shaped from within.
I understood that the process on Tempo Fugi was very different from piece to piece, with some finished quickly while others taking a lot of time. What is it about some works, do you feel, that makes them harder to nail down – how would you describe the sensation that something is “done”?
In this case, it was not really about how long it took to finish each piece. The tracks were written at different times, sometimes even years apart.
What happened later, when I listened back to them, was that I felt the need to create a stronger sense of cohesion across the EP. By “cohesion,” I mean introducing elements that could give more consistency to the role each track plays within the overall narrative.
So I revisited older demos that had been sitting in my archive for quite some time, pieces I still considered valid, and approached them almost as a form of rearrangement within the context of the EP. It was not about struggling to complete a piece, but rather about shaping it so that it could fully belong to this specific body of work.
For me, a piece is finished when I feel a strong coherence in the message I want to convey, when every sound has found its place, and when the musical discourse flows naturally and feels complete. It is not something I can define in purely rational terms. It is, above all, a sensation.
Since the process for Tempo Fugit was quite extensive, were there possibly overlaps between tracks composed for this project and the Van Gogh show? If so, how similar do pieces composed at the same time but for different projects tend to be?
There was no overlap. The music for the Van Gogh project we are referring to was written before the pandemic, whereas the material for Tempo Fugit dates back, at most, to about two or three years ago.
If we talk about similarities between pieces, I would distinguish between two different aspects.
From a purely musical perspective, meaning harmony and melody, it is actually more likely for similarities to emerge over time rather than within the same period. When you develop a certain awareness in your musical language, it naturally creates a kind of continuity, almost like a diary of melodic and harmonic ideas that evolves over the years.
On the other hand, pieces written within the same timeframe may resemble each other more from a sound design perspective. For example, if you are exploring a particular instrument, a specific synthesizer, a new effect, or even a certain way of miking the piano, these elements can shape the sonic identity of multiple pieces. Even choices like register or tonality can be influenced by those explorations.
So, if there is a form of resemblance within the same period, it is more likely to emerge from the sound and the tools being used, rather than from the underlying musical writing itself.
The release opens with a piece called “Repetition,” which called to mind a sentence by Ryoko Sekiguchi: “Time doesn’t pass, it returns.” How do you see that yourself – and how do you use repetition and variation in your work?
I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.
The presence of a pattern becomes almost a kind of subtle game with rationality, with perception, with the listener’s intelligence. It invites a process of recognition, almost like solving a riddle.
This is what I find particularly compelling about minimalism. An idea is explored, listened to, gradually exhausted, then transformed, and the cycle begins again.
Since one part of the project seems to have been to use music to capture specific moments in time – how do you see the relationship between the moment and the music created in it? Quite often, sad music gets written in happy times of an artist's life and vice versa, so it seems like a complex relationship.
I agree that it is a complex relationship, and I would even extend it beyond the idea of writing sad music in happy times, or happy music in sad ones, as a way of balancing or compensating.
For me, it also involves the relationship with instruments. My work moves between acoustic instruments, like the piano, and more electronic forms of production, and I often experience this dialogue between emotional states and sound through them.
For instance, I might be drawn to more experimental electronic instruments during a more rational phase, while in a more instinctive or emotional moment I might turn to something structurally more defined, like the piano. In this sense, the contrast or interplay between different emotional states becomes symbiotic with the choice of instruments.
So yes, I would definitely describe this relationship as complex, but also deeply fascinating.
Luca Longobardi Interview Image (c) the artist
“I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.“
