Allison Russell on Healing Childhood Trauma

Backstage at Red Rocks, past midnight, there were four hundred boxes of In-N-Out burgers, a pack of overtired children running wild, and musicians laughing like family (03:10). In the middle of it sat Allison Russell, a singer-songwriter whose songs had already convinced her listeners that she was exactly who she seemed: someone who tells the truth so completely it makes the room safer. The scene matters because it is the opposite of her childhood. Russell spent her early years in a house ruled by fear. The space she built as an adult, full of other people's children eating cheeseburgers at midnight, is the evidence of what she calls re-embodiment: the long process of coming back to a body that once felt like unsafe territory.

Russell was born in Montreal in 1979 to a white Scottish Canadian teenager and a father who had returned to Grenada before she arrived (13:55). Quebec's child protection services removed her from her mother's care before she turned two, after her mother, undiagnosed with what would later be identified as paranoid schizophrenia, struggled without support (14:16). To get the child back, her mother married a man born in 1936 in a sundown town in Indiana, an American expat who had been shaped by the ideological and physical abuse of his own upbringing (15:58). He adopted Russell and became, in her words, her primary caregiver and her primary abuser for over a decade. "I believe it's ideological abuse to raise children with violent indoctrination into white supremacy," she says, naming a kind of harm that leaves no visible mark but reorganizes a child's sense of self (15:58). She ran away at fifteen.

What she found instead was a city built, in her telling, for survival: all-night cafes, a Bohemian alternative high school, and a cemetery that felt safer than home.

"I felt safer sleeping in the cemetery than I did in the home of the people that called themselves my family at that time." — Allison Russell [17:08]

She found her first love there too, a girl she calls Persephone to protect her privacy, and with her learned what consent and equality felt like for the first time (18:18). She also found chosen family: an apartment of teenage girlfriends they nicknamed "the Womb," the first people besides Persephone she ever told the truth to (56:34). The pattern repeats throughout her adult life. Brandi Carlile and Catherine Carlile, the musician couple who brought Russell into their touring orbit, built a backstage culture where children run loose and parents do not have to explain why mommy's songs are sad. Russell's daughter Ida, now nine, once told Brandi and Catherine's daughter Eva that her mom "just sings sad songs about her sad past," a line that made the adults laugh because it proved something: sadness is not the water these children swim in (06:27). Breaking a cycle, Russell argues, is not just refusing to repeat harm. It is letting the next generation feel safe enough to tease you about your own pain (10:01).

The Argument Against Inner Demons

The episode's sharpest idea arrives through grief for Sinéad O'Connor, the Irish singer who tore up a photo of the Pope on live television in 1992 to protest child abuse within the Catholic Church, and who died in 2023. Russell was twelve when O'Connor made that stand, and she credits O'Connor, along with Tracy Chapman and Tori Amos, with showing her survival was possible before she had the words for her own situation (29:15). What angered her after O'Connor's death was the repeated description of the singer as someone who "battled her own demons." Russell's objection is precise: O'Connor was not fighting something inside herself. She was naming something outside herself, the real and ongoing harm of a Church and a Canadian government responsible for thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children at residential schools (26:38). Post-traumatic stress disorder, Russell says, is "a bodily, physical reaction to something that the world has done to a person," not evidence of a haunted interior (31:30). Calling it a demon borrows the language that has excused abusers for centuries, the same language once used to burn women as witches for being inconveniently right.

"She was right about everything. We should just try to honor the next inconvenient prophet in real time." — Glennon Doyle [30:32]

That reframing is not abstract for Russell. It is the architecture of her two most recent albums. "Outside Child," released in 2021, is volume one: the past, the escape. "The Returner," recorded in six days in Los Angeles with fifteen women, one gender-expansive collaborator, and three chosen brothers, is volume two: the present, re-embodiment (36:44). Russell describes the second album's ethos directly.

"It's stealing joy from the teeth of turmoil. It's loving on your people who love you back." — Allison Russell [40:10]

Where "Outside Child" closes by asking, in a song title, where all the joyful people have gone, "The Returner" answers the question (38:19).

What Brought Her Back Into Her Body

Russell locates the start of her re-embodiment in an unlikely place: an upright piano in her grandmother's Montreal apartment, where she sat under the curved Victorian legs as a toddler and watched her mother's feet work the pedals while playing Joni Mitchell's "For Free" (32:48). The clarinet solo at the song's end electrified her before she knew what a clarinet was. Decades later, Brandi Carlile invited Russell to play clarinet onstage with Mitchell herself at a gathering called the Joni Jam at The Gorge Amphitheatre, where Mitchell introduced her as the most beautiful clarinet player she had ever heard (34:33). Even in a relationship as troubled as the one with her mother, Russell says, music let her feel love when little else did.

The other turning point was motherhood, which arrived as what Russell calls a birth control pill baby: she had been on the pill for seven years without missing a dose, and still got pregnant with her daughter Ida, landing in the roughly one in one-hundred-thousand failure rate (54:19). Pregnancy, she says, flooded her system with oxytocin and stopped a lifelong habit of self-punishment, including disordered eating that she connects directly to childhood sexual abuse, calling eating disorders "part two" of that trauma (55:13).

"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.'" — Allison Russell [55:35]

Russell now lives in Tennessee, where she frames her activism as a continuation of the same argument she makes about O'Connor: do not mistake the people naming harm for the source of it. She points out that only 32 percent of registered voters put the state's current Republican supermajority in office (41:53), and that for nearly three years, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers (44:55), a statistic made devastatingly local by the 2023 shooting at Nashville's Covenant School, which killed six people (45:21). She campaigned for Tennessee state representative Gloria Johnson, who survived an expulsion attempt by the legislature's Republican majority that successfully removed two younger Black colleagues, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, before both were reelected by landslides (42:46).

The episode ends where it began, with the image that gives the hour its shape. Russell asks who decided that an unmarked page is more beautiful than one with writing on it, and then answers her own question by living otherwise: raising a daughter who feels safe enough to mock her, writing an album that insists on joy, and treating her own history, scars included, as something worth keeping legible rather than erasing (58:51).