How to Break Cycles with Allison Russell
October 19, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome, Pod Squad. Today, we are delighted to tell you that we have the Allison Russell with us. After career spent as a gifted multi-instrumentalist backing numerous other artists, she finally released her solo project in 2021. She made her Opry debut, appeared at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and performed at the 2022 Grammys premiere ceremony. She has been nominated for four Grammys. She has earned three Americana Awards. Her recent album, The Returner, it’s a real experience. You’ve got to listen. Allison Russell, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.
Abby Wambach:
Yay.
Glennon Doyle:
There she is.
Allison Russell:
Hi. I’m so excited to talk to y’all. I was just listening to your incredible conversation with Andrea Gibson. My beautiful literary agent, Meg Thompson sent it to me and just intuitively didn’t know we were doing this and just sent it to me.
Glennon Doyle:
No way.
Allison Russell:
Yeah, she was like, “You need to listen to this. It’s going to change your life.” I was like, “Okay, I will.”
Glennon Doyle:
Well, thank you for listening and we’ve already started. So, hi, how are you, Allison Russell?
Allison Russell:
Hi. It’s wonderful to meet you all officially. I remember seeing you all and saying hi in a dark green room at Red Rocks, but that was a while ago.
Glennon Doyle:
I was thinking about that in preparation for this moment. I think that you and I, the first time we met, we were sitting on the floor in a huge green room back of Red Rocks eating In-N-Out. I think there was 400 boxes of In-N-Out burgers. It was at backstage after a Brandi, Allison Russell, Sista Strings, everybody was there show. It was midnight. I was so proud of myself for being awake and I was like, “Oh, this is what it’s like behind the scenes at a rockstar show,” except that I don’t think this is how it is at a rockstar show because it was 500 cheeseburgers, 500 children.
Allison Russell:
It was like the wolf pack. It was the feral wolf pack. My daughter was among them, Ida.
Glennon Doyle:
I know, Ida was next to you. Eva, Cath and Brandi’s kids were running. Everybody’s kids were running. That’s what it’s like behind the scenes at one of these shows. I kept being amazed by the love and family atmosphere and also by the fact that everyone was still awake because it was like 12:30.
Allison Russell:
Yeah, wild feral children so excited. They had all sung on stage and all the rest of it. But that is the magic that Brandi and Catherine create with their beautiful love in it’s not just a show. It’s a family and it’s a foundation and it’s making music mean more and it’s uplifting everyone that comes into their magical orbit and circle. That’s just who they are. They’re extraordinary. I had to represent today, my Brandi shirt.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, Allison is wearing a Brandi shirt. I mean, I think it would not-
Allison Russell:
Vintage.
Glennon Doyle:
… be exaggerating to say that Brandi and Cath are two of the most important people in our entire lives.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Allison Russell:
Same.
Glennon Doyle:
Same for you.
Allison Russell:
Same. Absolutely the same.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, it was that show that was actually our first concert, not only seeing you, but seeing Brandi live.
Glennon Doyle:
I didn’t know that.
Abby Wambach:
Everybody who’s not in the music industry has as a picture of what the behind the scenes looks like. At the time, we’re thinking, “What is Tish going to do? Is she going to go into this industry? It’s very dangerous. There’s a lot of drinking and drugging, the whole thing.” Then we get backstage at Red Rocks and it was totally not what we expected. So, I don’t know. I just think that yes, Brandi and Cath, but also you to be able to feel confident in them to bring your child with you on the road and to watch you perform. I mean, Allison, you are magic. You are fucking magic.
Allison Russell:
So sweet. You’re so sweet. It means a lot to me.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re in our house all the time, Allison, just in every room. Your music is so beautiful. So, speaking of Cath and Brandi, I read the story that made me giggle so much, because it reminded me of my daughter and me, but I read a story that Cath once overheard Ida… So, your daughter and how old is Ida now?
Allison Russell:
She’s now nine. She’ll be 10 at the end of December. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So, Ida was talking to Eva, who is Brandi and Cath’s daughter about how either your mommies do the same thing, right? Because Allison and Brandi, both singers, artists. Ida said to Eva, “No, my mom doesn’t do what your mom does. My mom just sings sad songs about her sad path.”
Allison Russell:
That’s exactly what she said. Catherine was trying not to die laughing, just trying to keep a straight face with her sweet decor. “Oh, Ida, your mom’s got a lovely voice.” Just being so sweet. Ida cuts her off, “Yeah, my mom’s got a good voice, but let’s face it, she even makes Jingle Bells sound sad.”
Glennon Doyle:
That’s just my favorite.
Allison Russell:
That put a bee in my bonnet to write her some bangers for The Returner record, because she was talking about Outside Child when she was saying that. She has become my greatest victory. You’ll appreciate this as moms. I was on the road and I got a call from my partner, JT, and the new record had just dropped. The Returner had just dropped, and she’s all about Spotify and listening to Tish, listening to Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish and everybody and Beyonce. I walked by her room and she had the door closed as she often does when she’s doing deep listening. She was listening to Demons from The Returner over and over again and learning the words and figuring out the chords on the piano and stuff. So, yeah, that was such a triumph. She likes one of the songs.
Glennon Doyle:
God, I just know that Tish came to a couple of my speaking events a few years ago and we left and I was like, “What did you think?” She said to me, “I don’t understand. Why do you always have to start on the bathroom floor when you’re addicted and you’re pregnant and you’re on drugs?” So that’s what I thought of when I heard your thing, but okay, Allison, here’s what I think is so cool and I don’t know if you’re going to relate to this at all, but when I hear that Ida says that to you, it makes me feel like it’s a beautiful thing, because the reason why they are like, “Oh, that’s sad,” is because sadness and pain is not the water that they swim in with us.
Allison Russell:
Yes, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
So it feels like a difference to them, which is a triumph for us.
Allison Russell:
It’s a total triumph. It’s taking miserable cycles for them in real time, in real life. It’s joyful and you’re absolutely right. It’s also they trust us enough to tease us and to mock us and to know that there aren’t going to be some draconian repercussions for doing so. They can be their full selves and have some backbone and have some sass and own it in this joyful way. I love it. I mean, I almost to a fault love it when Ida’s a bit mouthy with everybody. I love it. So, I was so cowed my whole childhood and crumbled in. So, to see her having more backbone at three than I did at 30 is just joyful to me.
Abby Wambach:
For them to be able to tease us about the reckoning that we are trying to have with our own pain, them being able to tease us is to also allow them space to be playful with their own pain.
Allison Russell:
You’re so right. That’s exactly right.
Abby Wambach:
I’ll speak for myself. I was shut off to not experience my own discomfort or pain out loud at all in my childhood. What kind of human beings are they going to be that they’re going to be able to not only experience it, but also be able to laugh about it in some ways?
Glennon Doyle:
Shit, that’s so true.
Allison Russell:
I do think that’s the defining, I mean the emotional intelligence of our young ones, of the Gen Zs like Tish and the alphas like Ida and Eva and Eli. I just learned that they’re called Alphas.
Glennon Doyle:
I didn’t even know that.
Allison Russell:
Yes, if you’re born after 2012, you’re an Alpha.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s cool.
Allison Russell:
You’re no longer a Generation Z. You’re the next whole cycle of the generations of humanity if we don’t drive ourselves to our mass extinction. But I have hope because these young ones are so attuned and open to each other, listening to each other’s emotions in a different way than I’ve ever… I’m an ancient millennial, not in my generation. My partner’s an X-er, not in that generation. They are wide open in this really, really special way that I think is required for the level of crisis that we’re currently facing that our human, family, our species is facing.
Glennon Doyle:
So people often ask me, parents don’t know what to share with their children. I’m Gen X. So, I’m like, “Wow.” A lot of, I think, our generation was taught not to reveal any of our past pain to our kids. We’re supposed to hide it. What you two are saying is but when we do, what they learn is that we can survive and that it’s not something to hide all the time.
Allison Russell:
We can’t hide it. It’s impossible to hide.
Glennon Doyle:
We can’t. Look at our bodies.
Allison Russell:
When we try to hide, it comes out in toxic ways, I think.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Allison Russell:
They know because they’re unbelievably brilliant and they’re empaths.
Glennon Doyle:
When we try to, I think that the message kids get because they’re getting a message. If our words are saying one thing, everything’s fine, and our bodies are saying another thing, trauma, I think that they’re thinking there’s something wrong with me. My mom’s reacting that way because there’s something wrong with me. Because we haven’t said to them, “No, no, no, babe. It’s just there’s something wrong with me.” For people who don’t know your story at all, tell us what you want to tell us about your childhood, the beginning. You have said that you don’t think it’s brave to talk about trauma. You just think it’s part of survival.
Allison Russell:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us what you want to tell us about your young life.
Allison Russell:
Well, I was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. My mom is a Scottish Canadian, and she met my biological father when they were in high school. They had a brief high school romance. By the time she realized she was pregnant, he was already back in Grenada. He had been studying in Canada from Grenada. By the time her parents found out, they were getting a divorce and she didn’t have family support. So, as a teenager who’d been quite sheltered, she wound up having me in a home for unwed mothers, a version of the Magdalene Laundries, I think, because this is Catholic Quebec. I was born in ’79 and she was a white mother having a Black child out of wedlock. We were called illegitimate children back then.
Allison Russell:
It was a big, massive stigma to be an unwed mother. She had a rough time of it. By the time I was born, she had a social worker and a bit of a relationship with her mom, but was living in government housing and just didn’t have support. Back then, the trend in social work was to just remove a child at the first sign of trouble and put them in foster care. Now, it’s understood that social services try very hard to keep a child within a family if it’s at all possible and to offer aid and try any number of things before they just remove the child. But in my mom’s case, she didn’t have anyone really advocating for her. She had pretty severe postpartum depression after I was born.
Allison Russell:
I believe probably her first psychotic break, my mom has suffered with quite severe paranoid schizophrenia for most of her adult life and went undiagnosed and then misdiagnosed as manic depression for many, many years, which did not help. She struggled with substances and going on and off of medication, which has not helped. She was very, very young when she had me. One of the things I’ve been reading about is the effect that it has for very young people when they become parents, when they’re not ready, that it can cause an arrested development. So, I’ve always thought of my mom more like my big sister really than my mom.
Allison Russell:
So, I ended up being removed from her care in very early childhood when I wasn’t quite two yet because she was doing harmful things because of the depth of psychosis and despair that she was in and lack of support. So, when I was removed from her care, it was under something called Child Protective Services in Quebec, which means that the parent, if they want to get the child back, they have to go to court and prove their fitness to be parenting again. So, whilst I was there, she was groomed and courted by a much, much older predatory man, an American expat who was born in 1936 in a sundown town somewhere in Indiana. He brought the abuses that he had suffered both ideological and physical with him.
Allison Russell:
I believe it’s ideological abuse to raise children with violent indoctrination into white supremacy, any kind of supremacy beliefs. So, he brought all that with him when he came to Montreal and he courted my mother. He went to court and got me back from Child Protective Services after he married my mom and eventually adopted me and was my primary caregiver and a primary abuser for over a decade until I ran away from home at 15. So, the beginnings were fairly miserable, but I was very lucky because I was in Montreal, which is a city that is defined by art and defined by Bohemian community and has 24-hour cafes and has one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever seen in the world where I felt safe on summer nights, sleeping there sometimes after I left home.
Allison Russell:
I felt safer sleeping in the cemetery than I did in the home of the people that called themselves my family at that time. So, I was very lucky and I went to an alternative high school, moving in new directions. I met some of my best friends in this world to this day at that alternative high school. I slowly found chosen family and met my first love who I called-
Glennon Doyle:
Is that called Persephone?
Allison Russell:
… Persephone to protect their privacy and identity.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, damn it. That’s not her real name?
Allison Russell:
It’s not her real name. It’s not her real name, but it was always how I thought of her because I would crawl in through her basement window. I was the nerdy kid that was into Greek mythology and every kind of mythology. I always felt like it was like a reverse thing where going underground, going to Hades was this sheltering thing. It was the safest I’d ever felt was when we fell in love. I would sneak in through her basement window because her parents would have had a heart attack if they realized the nature of our relationship.
Allison Russell:
We were both babies. We were just 15 years old, each of us, and just learning what it meant to be loved consensually and to be thought beautiful and equal and worthy and all of those things. It’s an odd thing to be a Black child raised in a white supremacist abusive family, because there’s physical abuse and your body eventually heals from that abuse generally, but of course, it’s always the psychological abuse that’s more insidious. It’s the colonizing of our minds. I think we’re all decolonizing our minds all the time because we’ve been raised in these toxic systems of hierarchy.
Glennon Doyle:
Take us back to 15, because the Persephone song, it’s so sad but it’s so also joyful and beautiful. Abby and I as queer women are just like, “Yes!” I mean, there’s something about it that’s so universal to the queer experience also while being incredibly personal to you about just finding safety.
Allison Russell:
I love that you hear the joy in it because I was quite startled when I realized that a lot of people did hear it as traumatic in some way, because I’m explicit in the beginning about what I’m running from. But to me, it’s such a joyful song. It’s first love. It’s sexual reclamation and awakening, and I had never experienced anything consensual in my life up to then. I’d never experienced someone really truly loving me as an equal. That was completely not just transformative. It was really, truly lifesaving and joyful. Realizing that sex could be joyful and not some torture was completely shocking and incredible, and all the things that it is for people who hopefully haven’t been messed with but in some ways even more intense for people who have.
Abby Wambach:
I felt that deep in my bones when we listened to that song. It’s like every teenage queer kid who has been trying to fit into this one box their whole lives or stuffed into certain boxes and then this is the tap, tap, tap on your window screen. To me, I’m a romantic at heart. I just remember that first experience with my first girlfriend, and I mean, that visual is like, “Yes, it made all of the confusion and pain and angst…” I was like, “Oh, got it.”
Allison Russell:
I love that so much. This feels so right.
Glennon Doyle:
The skinny arms get me. I don’t know why.
Allison Russell:
Because we’re kids still really.
Glennon Doyle:
Little ones.
Allison Russell:
Growing up together and learning about love together and listening to Ani DiFranco and Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls together.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Allison Russell:
Sinead O’Connor, all of it, Bjork. Oh, my gosh.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. I need to talk about Sinead O’Connor for a second.
Abby Wambach:
That’s amazing.
Glennon Doyle:
I actually have this on my list of things to talk about. Okay. Because I personally had what might be considered to some people an outsized reaction to Sinead’s death and the public reaction to Sinead’s death. My therapist actually said to me, “I don’t know if there’s anyone in the country who’s talking to their therapist about Sinead O’Connor, who doesn’t know Sinead O’Connor as much as you are. We might have to wonder if what we’re really talking about is you, Glennon.” Okay. I felt connected to you the day… Because I felt like you were saying on Twitter, some of the things I was feeling.
Glennon Doyle:
I was so pissed that people, first of all, were celebrating her after she died, who were not at all when she was alive, but also this repeated refrain of, “Well, she really battled her own demons.” I love your Demons song, and I just feel like Demons should be something that if you’re talking about them, they should only be yours. You should not be talking about somebody else’s demons who didn’t claim them as demons, because actually what Sinead is always doing was fighting real demons.
Allison Russell:
Correct.
Glennon Doyle:
Outside of her.
Allison Russell:
Correct.
Glennon Doyle:
Not inside of her.
Allison Russell:
I remember your tweet that day, and I remember reposting it and being like, “That is exactly it.” She was fighting real demons, real demonic behavior. I don’t believe any human is truly a monster, but there are people who behave thoroughly monstrously and never stop. What the Catholic Church has done and continues to do, there’s still a residential school for indigenous kids open in the Dakotas. That hasn’t stopped yet. Across Canada, we are digging up mass graves of indigenous children, thousands and thousands unmarked graves. This was done by the Catholic Church and the Canadian government and the settlers, all of us, my ancestors too.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, and people who are talking about it. Sinead was right by the way.
Allison Russell:
She was right.
Glennon Doyle:
The whole time-
Allison Russell:
She was right about everything.
Glennon Doyle:
… she was right.
Allison Russell:
She was right about everything. Glennon, it’s so interesting when you say this because my circle of close women and actually someone I hadn’t known well until Joni Jam, who I met at Joni Jam, was Annie Lennox. We ended up texting each other back and forth, just Sinead deep cuts back and forth and different things she had said. I mean, I was on the floor. I was supposed to fly to Prague and do a video for Demons, actually with my incredible childhood friend, Ethan Topman, who is the creative director for the Eras Tour and is a total superstar and was the set designer for Formation and The Lemonade, those amazing Lemonade movies, brilliant visual artist.
Allison Russell:
There are moving through different worlds, and it’s basically like rebirthing oneself, reclaiming oneself over and over again, calling oneself to courage in this visual narrative to accompany the words and the music. A lot of it was to do with hair, but I was on the floor and to the point where I just wanted to shave my head and not leave the hotel room where I was in New York ever again. I just wanted to mourn in a physical… I wanted to do something physical like rend something on myself, shave my head.
Glennon Doyle:
I do know what you mean.
Allison Russell:
Ritual scarification. I had to be talked down by Ethan. He was like, “Well, we’re doing this video that involves Black women’s hair, so if you could wait till after that to do this.” He talked me down and my partner JT talked me down. It’s funny that your therapist said that to you, because JT said to me, “Could this be something about you, not Sinead at all? Because you never met her, right?” Yes, but I did. She’s part of my survival. When she made her stand in ’92, it wasn’t about ripping up the Pope’s picture. It was about singing Bob Marley’s War acapella essentially and making it about child abuse and saying that and naming that on the biggest TV show of the day. I was 12 when she took that stand. I don’t know that I would’ve gathered up the courage to run from my situation.
Allison Russell:
I might have just simply died in my situation had it not been for these truth tellers who showed me that there is a life beyond abuse and that there are powerful women who stand up to abuse and that maybe I could be like them, like Tracy Chapman who sang Behind The Wall, like Sinead O’Connor who sang War and made it about child abuse, like Tori Amos who sang Barbados. Me and a gun and a man on my back, but I haven’t seen Barbados. So, I must get out of this. These were my path lighters that showed me it was possible to survive and thrive and get out of this, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It just felt like all of those women are pointing out demons in our world, homophobia, racism, greed that kills, religion that says it’s one thing and then abuses children, and then we are calling that person who’s saying those things crazy. Then everything that they said, and these are often women, everything that they said is proven right, but the world has already done its damage to that woman. Then the woman dies and we saint her while having villainized her, her whole life. Instead of even just pretending to honor that woman after death, we should just try to honor the next inconvenient prophet in real time.
Allison Russell:
Yes, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
But we won’t do that. We won’t do that. We’ll villainize them again and then saint them again after death. So, I think it is about Sinead. It is about Tori. It is about all these people individually. It’s about Tracy, but it’s also about this rhythm, this pattern we see happening over and over again to women who speak out.
Allison Russell:
Well, it’s been going on since the witch burnings.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Allison Russell:
I’m sure before. It’s the martyring of women. It’s the demonizing, literally demons. They’re witches, they sleep with the devil. It’s literally demonizing powerful women, strong women, healers.
Glennon Doyle:
Sinead, her abuse as a child and then she had PTSD, right? But to call PTSD a demon is so fucking insane. That is a bodily physical reaction to something that the world has done to a person.
Allison Russell:
Correct, correct.
Glennon Doyle:
Right? It’s something that the world has done to us, an inner demon. Also, when we label other people that, that’s archaic religious language that has excused people for witch burning-
Allison Russell:
Yes, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
… for so long. So, we have to stop that shit. What’s the first moment that you felt like I am a child who survived being raised by a white supremacist, psychological, sexual, physical abuser to becoming what you are now? Which I guess you’re both things all the time, but how did you fucking do this? Is my question.
Allison Russell:
My little brother and my niece and nephew and music, of course, art of course, the magic and the mystery of art. Even with my mom, even though we had a deeply troubled, and have a deeply troubled relationship, I was able to feel love through listening to her music. One of my earliest childhood memories was I think I was on a visit from the foster home because I would have weekend visits with her. I can’t remember if it was every weekend, maybe it was every other weekend, but she wasn’t allowed to be alone with me.
Allison Russell:
So, we would go to my grandmother’s apartment and she had this gorgeous upright piano with the very Victorian curvy legs of a piano. I remember sitting under there and watching my mom’s feet on the piano. She was playing along. Actually, Joni Mitchell is her favorite artist. Been listening to Joni since I was in utero with my mom.
Glennon Doyle:
No way.
Allison Russell:
She was playing along to Ladies at the Canyon and a deeper cut, a song called For Free, which is Joni singing about a busker and how nobody’s paying attention because they’re not famous. She’s off stroking the star maker machinery, but really she just wants to go jam with this beautiful musician who’s playing clarinet on the street for free. I slept last night in a good hotel. I went shopping today for jewels. The wind rushed around in the dirty town, and the children let out from the schools. This gorgeous melody. At the end, there’s this beautiful clarinet solo. I heard his refrain as the signal changed. He was playing real good for free.
Allison Russell:
She crosses the street and goes on with her life. Then this beautiful clarinet solo comes out of it. I remember my mom singing along and hearing the sound of the clarinet for the first time and being electrified by that sound. What is that sound? My mom, I remember asking later, “What was that?” She said, “It’s clarinet.” That was the clarinet and that imprinted on me. Then the mystery and the magic of all those full circle later of being invited by Brandi into the magical circle of the Joni Jam and playing clarinet on stage with Joni and having her say-
Glennon Doyle:
What did she say to you?
Allison Russell:
“… Allison Russell, the most beautiful clarinet player ever.” Just this sweet hyperbolic thing she said.
Glennon Doyle:
So just in case you didn’t hear it, Pod Squad, what happened is under the piano, she’s holding Joni. Okay. Then she hears the clarinet. Fast forward to she’s on stage at the Gorge, was it?
Allison Russell:
It was the Gorge.
Glennon Doyle:
With Joni Mitchell and playing the clarinet. Joni Mitchell says, “Allison Russell, the most beautiful clarinet player I’ve ever heard.”
Allison Russell:
Something to that, most beautiful clarinet player ever.
Glennon Doyle:
Something like that.
Allison Russell:
She demanded that I take a solo during Young At Heart. When Joni asks you to do something, you do it and try not to mess it up, but it was just such a sweet, surreal moment. When you say, “How do you get from there to there?”, well, it’s all of it all at once, because I’m still that little girl that loved just that sound and imprinted on me. I feel like in some ways, I think we all have a birthright. Every human on the planet living now, the improbability of us being who we are in this time, the fact that we come from no matter what our heritage, what our lineage, what our set of challenges or privileges, we all come from long lines of survivors. That is our human birthright is this resilience.
Glennon Doyle:
I was very moved by a theme in The Returner, which feels very much like part of my recovery, which is it feels like this big love story to embodiment.
Allison Russell:
Nailed it.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know if it’s just because whatever I’m doing feels like everyone’s talking about that for them, but can you talk a little bit about this song All Without Within?
Allison Russell:
Yes, I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, my God.
Allison Russell:
That’s the by far, the sexiest song on the record.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, my God. I fucking love that song.
Allison Russell:
That’s Wendy and Lisa, you all, singing with me. They joined us, our rainbow coalition of chosen family that we’ve been growing together over the last two years. We made The Returner in six days.
Glennon Doyle:
No way.
Allison Russell:
It was 15 women and 1 non-binary identifying gender expansive, amazing divine being, and 3 chosen brothers, 10 songs, 6 days. We recorded it in LA at the old A&M Studio, which is now Hanson Studio presided over by Kermit the Frog, which gave me a lot of joy.
Glennon Doyle:
It means a lot to you. Yes.
Allison Russell:
So that is in fact where Joni recorded Blue and it’s where Carol King recorded Tapestry. It’s where they did we are the word, we are the children with Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper, blowing the roof off the place. Chaka has made records. The good ghosts in that place are just outrageous. So, it was like a family affair all around. You can’t make a record in six days without having complete trust with everyone that you’re engaged in creative communion with. It’s a trust fall exercise basically, and it only works if everybody lets go and jumps together. It falls together.
Abby Wambach:
That’s amazing.
Glennon Doyle:
You can feel that. You can feel that. In terms of healing, because the first album ends with, I think, “Where are the joyful motherfuckers?”
Allison Russell:
Where in the world are the joyful motherfuckers?
Glennon Doyle:
It feels like you could play your records back to back and it would be like, “Where are they?” Then The Returner’s like, “Here we are!” Here’s all the joyful motherfuckers.
Allison Russell:
I love that you picked up on that because that’s exactly right. Because this is the kind of nerd I am. I am obsessed with multivolume journeys in literature-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, me too.
Allison Russell:
… and in music.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, me too.
Allison Russell:
For me, an album is a journey. I feel about an album the way some people feel about a film. I understand and I accept that the vast majority of people will be streaming and they will never listen to the record in the very deeply nerdy exact order that we agonized over.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s annoying.
Allison Russell:
It’s planned over, but when people do, it’s the greatest thing ever. I will say that to anyone listening, and some of you may have never taken a journey with a record. I understand that and I don’t condemn at all, but I promise you, if you do take the journey with an album that was written in that way, because not everybody wants to make albums in that way anymore actually. Some artists never did. Some artists were always more single driven. But for nerds like me and Brandi Carlisle, for example, and Joni Mitchell and Prince and Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls and Mavis Staples, if you take the entire journey with the record, it is so much more rewarding when you have the time, because I also know how precious time is.
Allison Russell:
It’s so difficult for someone to sit down for 45 minutes and do nothing, so to speak. Of course, you’re doing something very active when you’re listening, but I know it’s hard for us to justify taking that time in our busy lives. But not only is The Returner its own narrative arc, although not linear, it is connected to Outside Child, but anyone can take the journey with either album, but Outside Child is volume one, broadly the past. The Returner is volume two. It’s the present. It’s re-embodiment. It’s stealing joy from the teeth of turmoil. It’s loving on your people who love you back. It’s loving on the people that don’t love you back, but not allowing them to derail your joy. It is just being here now.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, two more things. You fall in love with JT. What a love bug. Everyone-
Allison Russell:
The greatest.
Glennon Doyle:
… who meets JT is in love with JT. Don’t get Catherine Carlile started on JT.
Allison Russell:
They have the most beautiful friendship. I love their friendship.
Glennon Doyle:
I can tell. I had this secret idea of when women are queer women and then they marry men, I wonder if they just want to wear flags all day, every day to signal to the world I’m still queer. Then I swear to God, Allison is wearing a rainbow wristband. I’m like, “Maybe they do,” because you want-
Allison Russell:
My power wristband. It’s my anti-bigotry wristband. I went on stage and it makes me feel strong. I live in Tennessee. Now, you all, we’re battling some medieval stuff over here, but we’re winning. Gloria Johnson is our next senator. Just putting that out there.
Glennon Doyle:
This is airing before election day.
Allison Russell:
Incredible.
Glennon Doyle:
We have Allison Russell here.
Allison Russell:
Everybody, get to the polls.
Glennon Doyle:
Why should Tennessee show up for Gloria Johnson? Tell us that.
Allison Russell:
Because she is who she says she is. She has been showing up for community since she was a teacher as a representative. She’s risking her seat as a representative. She’s a shoo-in to win again for Knoxville as a representative in the house, but we are in a crisis situation in Tennessee. We have essentially a hijacked people’s house here. Only 32% of registered voters voted this so-called GOP, so-called super majority. I say so-called because they’re not behaving in any way, like small government Republicans, which is what I used to think the GOP was. Here in Tennessee, we have bad actors in office trying to unlawfully expel lawmakers because they are young and Black and standing up for their constituents like Brother Justin Jones, Representative Jones and Representative Pearson.
Allison Russell:
Representative Jones from right here in my writing in 52nd District here in Nashville, and Representative Pearson from Memphis. They tried to expel Gloria too, but she pointed out since she was a white woman, one of the openly racist Republicans allowed her to stay with one vote. Of course, both Representative Jones and Representative Pearson were reelected by a landslide. They’ve become known now nationally as the Tennessee three, because they were standing up for our kids, for our community, for all Tennesseans demanding a sensible response, any response to the carnage of gun violence.
Glennon Doyle:
I have thought of you so much in your activism for sensible gun reform. When I think about your story and about being a kid where school was your safe place, I was a teacher. So, I know that my classroom for a lot of little ones was the only safe place that they had.
Allison Russell:
Correct.
Glennon Doyle:
They came to school for safety. They did not go home for safety. They came to school for safety. It was the one sanctuary that they had. So, when I think now about how that is not even true anymore for children, school was a sanctuary for you. Correct?
Allison Russell:
It was a complete sanctuary. You have touched upon something here that I’ve been trying to explain to people and to explain to people back home in Canada who keep asking, “When are you coming home?” when the next wave of legislative terrorism rocks us here in Tennessee. I just tell them, “I can’t show my daughter that I’m running away from fascism. We don’t run away from fascism. We stop it. We surround it with love and we overwhelm it and we vote it out. That’s what we do because we still do have a democracy.”
Allison Russell:
When I think about exactly what you said, Glennon, of my child, I’ve been able to break cycles of abuse in our home, in our personal lives, and yet my daughter wakes from nightmares, has a lot of the trauma responses that I experienced from my abusive home as a child. In her case, it is from fear of being shot to death at school. It is from the active shooter drill where they didn’t tell the kids or the teachers that it was a drill, because they’ve determined they’ll save more children when, not if, an active shooter gets into the building, because for almost three years now, the number one cause of untimely death for our babies, for our children and youth is gun violence.
Allison Russell:
To have blanket inaction here in Tennessee where we just lost six beautiful humans in our community at the Covenant School, we watched the absolute grotesque mockery of a special session where these lawmakers who claim to care about families and family values mocked Covenant moms. The school was called Covenant, where this horrific gun violence took place, mocking those moms. These are women who are white, Christian, seemingly straight. Most of them have voted Republican their whole lives. These are who they’re supposed to actually care about. They were mocking them saying the most horrific… I mean, it can’t be unseen. As awful as that is, what I have realized and why it’s so important that people vote because that does not represent Tennessee.
Allison Russell:
There are people who are having their religious beliefs manipulated to fear their neighbors that they don’t have to fear. They don’t need to fear drag queen story time. If they don’t like drag queen story time, they don’t have to go, but they don’t need to fear it.
Glennon Doyle:
It must be so interesting for you as a child who was raised and abused by a white supremacist steeped in all of this shit, saved by a queer girl, to now be fighting religion, claiming that the queer people are the ones who are abusing. It all goes back to Sinead O’Connor. It all goes back to this thing.
Allison Russell:
It is the same projection and demonizing of the actual freedom fighters, truth tellers, prophets in our time.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Allison Russell:
Gloria is a truth teller. She’s exactly who she says she is. I’ve been lucky enough to know her for about three years now. I met her actually through the music world, because she just shows up in the community. She shows up to concerts. She shows up to volunteer drives. You see her at the supermarket, you see her in the park. I think probably on some level, the last thing she wanted to do is have to run for senator, but she’s doing it for all Tennesseans.
Glennon Doyle:
As we end here, as someone who is healing through re-embodiment, through landing in my body for the first time, to feeling everything that is without finally within, to understanding feeling a touch or feeling even hunger or feeling rain as a freaking resurrection, just experiencing life in my body for the first time. I have so many friends who don’t get to or don’t feel yet they can have that returner experience because of trauma, because of abuse, because all of that is what’s in their body. Disassociation has been their survival mechanism for their whole lives. Because you have so much trauma in your background and you are experiencing through your music, it feels very much like you’re experiencing re-embodiment as healing. How?
Allison Russell:
Well, for me, I think it took a long time and motherhood helped vastly in my case. That was the first time I ever loved my body. I never thought I would be a mother. Never, never, never, certainly never thought I would bear a child. Maybe if I fell in love with a woman who had a child, I could do that, but I never thought I would physically do that. Ida was a miracle. I was on birth control. She’s a birth control pill baby.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I heard that.
Allison Russell:
I was on birth control pills for seven years. They never failed me, and I never skipped one either. Anyone listening with a uterus, birth control pills are not 100%. They are 99.999. Ida is that 0.0000111, what have you. It was shocking at first. JT and I had been together for seven years at that point. I was just so terrified of paying for it any of what I lived. I’ve felt that somehow I would be doomed to do that. But because JT is so stable and has such a strong, gorgeous inner goddess and a beautiful happy family that’s not abusive, I just thought, “Well, if I’m completely undone by this, I know that he will be there for this child.”
Allison Russell:
It was the most miraculous thing of all of the self-evisceration that I was in the habit of doing, of just continually being cruel to myself, because that’s what I was used to. I’ve talked about this with a lot of other survivors, and I feel like an eating disorder is just part two of after you’ve been sexually abused. It just inevitably follows. So, I had had various disordered eating patterns my whole life. It all just stopped when I was pregnant with Ida. It was like this miracle of happy endorphins and a flood of oxytocin and joyful feelings and love for this little alien that was growing and also fascination, but I felt connected. It was like my mitochondria woke up and said, “Hey, hey, you’re part of this unbroken line of badass bitches who just make life on earth. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re okay.”
Allison Russell:
That was the beginning that has helped me move through some of the trauma in my body. Dancing, playing music, being in community with other women has been so important for me, those women that I feel safe with. When I was 16, I ran away from home at 15 and was itinerant and hiding in Persephone’s basement and the cemetery and staying up all night at the crescent royale on Saint-Laurent, playing chess with the old guys or going and hiding out in the Marie Reine du Monde little cathedral that was close to my alternative high school that was across the street from McGill, and going there in the winter and sitting in a pew and falling asleep.
Allison Russell:
But when I was 16, I got this terrible, terrible marketing job. I moved in with three other women that I went to high school with, who are my dear beloved friends to this day. Allie and Siobhan and Kim and our friends and all of our other friends just learning how to live in the world would come by. We called the apartment the womb, and that was such a healing time. They were the first people other than Persephone that I disclosed to. We just learned so much from each other.
Glennon Doyle:
What love feels like, what love feels like.
Allison Russell:
We feel loved. We did that for each other. I think for everyone I know who identifies in any way as queer has had a version of that, except for the very, very, very lucky few who were fully, fully accepted by their families, but I don’t know many people who identify as queer who are fully accepted by their families in those developmental years.
Glennon Doyle:
We know a couple, but they’re our children.
Allison Russell:
Yes, they are children. I should say that caveat of people over 30 now. Isn’t that beautiful? Again, it goes back to breaking these cycles of trauma.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, Pod Squad, if you are in need of a beginning of returning to your body, I do recommend Allison’s latest album, The Returner. I feel like it’s an anthem to that reclamation of being here now, of feeling, of knowing that you also have the right, the God-given birthright of experiencing joy and love and peace inside your body.
Allison Russell:
In this brief corporeal experience, I think about what Andrea Gibson was talking about, how brief it is, and that’s the beauty. I won’t say waste so much time, but we are embroiled for so much of our lives, I think so many of us in not feeling okay in our bodies or needing to escape our bodies. The joy of returning to our bodies and accepting all of the pain and the scars and the history written there is beautiful. Who fooled us into thinking that the unmarked page was more beautiful? Who did that?
Glennon Doyle:
That’s so beautiful.
Abby Wambach:
I just want to say I am stunned by your music. I’m stunned at just how profound you are. I just am so grateful to know you. I’m so grateful that our Tish got to eat dinner with you.
Allison Russell:
She’s incredible. If you don’t have Tish’s new singles, you got to get it. It’s so beautiful. Produced by our beautiful Brandi Carlile as well.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
She came home and said… After that weekend in Nashville, I said, “So tell me your favorite part.” I thought she was going to say the red carpet or whatever, and she said, “I think my favorite part was talking to Allison at dinner.” I was like, “Aww, the baby.”
Allison Russell:
That’s the best award I’ll ever be given. Are you kidding? Oh, my gosh.
Abby Wambach:
Well, we love you.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you, Allison Russell. We will see you backstage next time with some burgers and fries and Ida and Tish. You just keep going. We’re in your corner forever.
Allison Russell:
I love you all. I’m so grateful. Thank you for having me today.
Abby Wambach:
Same, same, same.
Glennon Doyle:
Muah. Bye, Pod Squad. See you next time.
Allison Russell:
Bye, Pod Squad.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on Follow. This is the most important thing for the pod.
Glennon Doyle:
While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend. We would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios.