Allison Russell at the Brooklyn Bowl
When I stepped into Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl last Thursday night, I had known of Allison Russell for over five years, ever since a friend took me on a blind musical date to see the Birds of Chicago at Seattle’s Fremont Abbey. I had heard her deep river of voice. I had followed the Birds of Chicago from Seattle, to San Francisco, to Cincinnati. I even found myself sharing an artist green room with her once, though I was shy and didn’t make her acquaintance. And yet I was completely unprepared for what I witnessed there in Nashville.
Centered in a stage-spanning line of all-star, all-female musicians, Russell began the show with an invocation:
We are not alone
We are not what we’ve lost
We are more than the sum of our scars
The music began to swell, the rhythm section kicked in, and for 45 minutes I was launched into another world, Allison Russell’s world.
On her new record, Outside Child, Russell puts it all on display. Her spirituality. Her queer identity. Her struggle for belonging. The abuse she survived as a child. Her joy. It’s a self portrait of deep consciousness, and a generous offering indeed.
“Nightflyer" is a song whose lilting melody and lumbering groove are enough to make you forget the lyrics altogether. But in those lyrics, Russell reveals a mystic spirituality, a knowledge of oneness with all that is. “I'm the melody and the space between, every note the swallow sings // I am the mother of the evening star, I am the love that conquers all,” she sings. It’s a powerful statement set alight by her soaring voice and the electricity of the band.
As I stood before the stage and took it all in song by song, I couldn’t help but notice a tug at the edge of my mind, and asked myself: how does this oneness, (as Brené Browne puts it, and I’m tempted to think Russell would agree, this inextricable connection), hold up in the face of a world that’s tearing at the seems in real time? Of those audience members who look deadpan at Russell while she appeals for them to put their masks back on and do nothing about it? Of the one she calls the Jackal, her childhood abuser? I listened and I wondered.
For her final song, Russell invited her partner, JT Nero, onstage to sing with her. Together, with just an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, they leaned their faces in side by side and sang the wonderfully-titled closing track from Outside Child, “Joyful Motherfuckers.” “If you got love in your heart, but it’s way down in the dark / You better let it see the sun, this world is almost done / Grandma always told me love will conquer hate / I don’t know if it’s too late” they sang, their voices dancing back and forth in harmony. Then came Russell’s voice alone, once again like an invocation:
Blessings be upon the thief of my childhood
The ragged jackal, that loveless coward
Oh my father, you were the thief of nothing
I’ll be a child in the garden, ten-thousand years and counting
What does oneness really mean these days? I suppose that night at the Brooklyn Bowl it meant that there was room enough in the music for all of it. For the feeling that maybe this world really is almost done and we’re just waiting to find out. For celebrating unity and being pissed off at anti-maskers all at once. For hard-fought moments of triumph and the forgiveness of jackals. For the audacity to say, in spite of so many things, I’ll be a child in the garden.
Russell and the band took a bow and the stage hands were already making haste to tear things down for the next act. It was over as quickly as it had begun. And yet, in those 45 minutes onstage, Allison Russell staked a claim to oneness and somehow she prevailed. Right now that takes some kind of mystic. Yeah, that takes a joyful motherfucker.