A joyful, spiritual, cosmically empowering performer.
She is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, with each of her two studio albums having been nominated for the coveted award. She is no stranger to standing ovations, captivated fans and theatre-goers flocking to her acclaimed run on Broadway. She is a genre-defying artisté with a thoughtfulness and a silkiness to her voice and the stories it tells.
She is Allison Russell, and she is all of that and more, but also human. She is a mother, a collaborator, a friend, an activist, an entertainer, a poet, but she does not have the anecdote for the tumultuous world-at-large. She has her talents, her heart, her wisdom, and her platform, and we should all feel honored to be within the generation that experiences it, because it is beautiful and meaningful to those with open minds and open hearts.
Photo by Dana Trippe
First and foremost, New York has truly become a second home for you as of late, and us New Yorkers are so honored to have you. How has the Big Apple embraced you? And how has being around the sights and sounds of the Big Apple played a role in your artistry?
New York truly feels like a second home to me now. In fact, the span of my Broadway rehearsal and contract – 21 weeks total – is the longest consecutive time I’ve spent in one place since I began touring with my first baby band, Po’Girl, 20 years ago! I lived right next door to the Hadestown Walter Kerr Theatre in a furnished one-bedroom short term lease, so it was an easy walk to work everyday. My brilliant and generous and welcoming Hadestown Company, on stage and behind the scenes, became my NYC chosen family. Having an instant community and my favorite musical to work upon was a surreal, wondrous fever dream. I love that Central Park allows you to have dogs off leash between 9:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. – my rescue dog Millie and I had many joyful midnight rambles post-show. She chased the rats like they were squirrels. I adore the Hudson River Trail – I would walk and run there everyday during my Hadestown stint. I’m working on my first book – a memoir – and the mornings writing in the Rose Room at the New York Public Library were generative and peaceful. It’s just such a vibrant, inclusive, melting pot of a city with art at its heart. I find it endlessly inspiring and inviting.
It is all of that and more. Similarly, your role in Hadestown on Broadway surely must have impacted the way you now take the stage, command an audience, and entertain fans new and old. Am I right with that assumption?
That remains to be seen and experienced! [Laughs] I try to remain as unselfconscious and in the present moment of creative communion with my Rainbow Coalition sisters and the beautiful humans who choose to complete the Circle with us. We’re just one half of the Circle – y’all are the other half. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind co-creation each show. Being part of the Hadestown ensemble deepened my appreciation for the magic of theatre for sure, I hope to incorporate more multidisciplinary storytelling within my own shows as we grow.
The Returners Tour is sort of a longtime coming, but this run of dates happening right now actually feels right, and kind of kismet. What has it felt like to you thus far, through rehearsal, prep, anticipation, etc.?
Persephone returning with the spring! We just back from the first leg in Australia; it has felt like an antidote to the hellish distortion of our shared and equal humanity that plays out in the negativity bias amplifier of online spaces. Being back in real life, the live show creative communion with the Rainbow Coalition and the folks who embrace us, has been serious’y good medicine for me in these harrowing, heartbreaking, scary, rising authoritarianism times.
Your latest single, “Superlover,” has been on constant rotation since it was released earlier this month. It feels like everything comes to a stop when it plays, and that is a beautiful, welcomed, warming thing to have in this cold world of being jaded, non-stop, and always ‘on.’ Was the writing and recording process for this song as cathartic, emotional, and necessary, for lack of a better word, as the listening experience is?
Thank you for listening so generously. “Superlover” has had many lives. Its first incarnation was written by my partner, JT Nero, for our project Birds of Chicago, on a record called Love in Wartime. It grew up in a budget van with seven of us and our daughter, working poor, no ‘plan B,’ singing our hearts out hopefully.
The next incarnation was called into being by a suggestion from my chosen brother Hozier when we were working on writing songs for Mavis Staples – legendary Superlover that she is. He said, “Why don’t you extend the chorus?” So I did, and she wound up recording a different song that Hozier and I co-wrote.
It transformed once more when Hozier invited me and the Rainbow Coalition to join the Unreal Unearth Tour, to open last year. We sang it every night as the world descended into greater, acute harm for which our children paid, and are still paying, the price. I’m a hopeful agnostic and I don’t really know how to pray, so I offered up this song.
A magical thing began to happen: Hozier’s audience turned themselves into a constellation, phones shining like stars, arms waving in unison, and we cried together. I felt called to capture this new version of “Superlover” on record, and then another miracle, my beloved Sheroe and Superlover Supreme, Annie Lennox, said, “Yes,” she would sing it with me. I flew to her in LA on a “dark day” Monday during my debut as Persephone in Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown on Broadway and we shot the video in a few hours with Mason Poole (Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s frequent collaborator), and his tiny but mighty crew. I flew back on a red eye that same night in time for my curtain call on Tuesday to “Sing it Again to the World We Dream of and the One We Live In.”
For the audio recording session, Wendy & Lisa of Prince’s The Revolution band joined Annie, the Rainbow Coalition: Ganessa James, Caoimhe Hopkinson, Caoi de Barra, and me, at Henson Studios (the old A & M records where Joni recorded Blue and most her albums, and we were in the Carole King Tapestry Room for “Superlover”) in LA. It was a hopeful love-in of a session, with Dim Star co-producing.
Allison Russel & Annie Lennox / Photo by Mason Poole
On that topic, how did you come to collaborate with the great Annie Lennox? The two of you together only lends itself more to the stirring, soulful, stunningness of it all.
We met by the grace of the magical Brandi Carlile! Brandi invited both of us into the Enchanted Circle of the Joni Jam. Annie and I met at the rehearsals for Joni Jam at the Gorge two summers ago. Brandi, intuitive connector that she is, alongside her towering artistry, sat us down on a green velvet couch together, along with Sarah McLachlan, for the staging. We knew we were kindred spirits within the first five minutes.
Words are powerful, life-altering, and can carry more than most understand. They are also one of the most underrated ways to establish oneself. How has writing, whether it be poetry or a song or even a silly social media post, helped you anchor yourself, protect your peace, and go about this whirlwind entertainment career of yours?
I really do believe that words are spells. Words are infinitely powerful. Words can heal. Words can also kill. How we wield them matters. We are seeing the severe harm and havoc that inflammatory, demagoguery rhetoric is wreaking upon our country currently. There’s a real-life unbearable cost. I also believe that those who embody and stand at the intersections of the margins have the clearest view of the page. Our vision is needed. Our words are needed. We are poised on a precipice – our one human family. Will we fall into the abyss or learn to build a bridge? Learn to value every human on this planet equally? Our stories, told in our own words, are medicine and healing. Our empathy is honed, high-level, hardwon. Our whole lives we’ve had to see the world through a straight, cisgender, white man’s eyes in order to survive. We all hold PhDs in resilience and empathy. It’s our time to speak, to write, to lead. We must teach those whose empathy has been impaired through the false, destructive, abusive ideologies of bigotry and supremacy; we must teach them to also see the world in our images, in our experiences, in our hopes and dreams and wishes – teach them to acknowledge and respect our equal humanity for our sake and theirs, for the sake of all our children.
As James Baldwin wrote and I fervently believe, “All Children are Our Children. I use my words as fearlessly and mindfully as I’m able, because I know that silence is deadly. Audre Lorde taught me this: ‘My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.'”
FOR TICKETS TO ALLISON’S RETURNERS TOUR, ARRIVING IN PHILLY TONIGHT & COMING TO NYC NEXT WEEK, CLICK HERE!
