A Grammy-Nominated Singer Performs and Explores Music's Power

In times of deep sorrow or joy, humans have always turned to music. Archaeologists have found evidence of instruments among very early civilizations. Spiritual communities have centered on music for centuries. We teach our children their ABCs and how to brush their teeth with songs. We dance out our feelings and cry along with sad tunes. What is it about music that enables it to work so powerfully on our bodies, minds and emotions? That is one of the core animating questions of this conversation with Allison Russell. Russell is a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter whose debut album, “Outside Child,” was named one of the best albums of 2021 by critics at NPR and The Times. Russell has played in bands including Birds of Chicago and Our Native Daughters, traversing folk, rock ’n’ roll, Celtic music, the blues and other genres. But alongside her powerhouse vocals and gorgeous melodies, Russell infuses a deep scholarly curiosity into her songs — not just about the nature and power of music, but also what it can teach listeners about our world. Digging into archives and family history, she explores themes like generational trauma, our relationships to diaspora and migration and how music can build empathic bridges between us in times of deep division. But above all, her songs testify to the sheer human capacity for resilience: our capacity to transcend our darkest times if we hold on, reach out to one another and seek out art that helps console. In this episode, Russell performs four songs with a full band, so listeners can enjoy her infectious art. And then we use those songs as jumping-off points to explore the deeper ideas embedded in her music: why we fall into melodies so soon after our births; how music moves us differently from how books or speeches do; how sound can help regulate our emotions, slow our breathing and rewire our neural networks; how Russell’s melodies and vocal performances come together in her mind; why songs can at times be more persuasive than nonfiction; why our unwillingness to divulge painful secrets goes back to the Victorian era; how generational trauma like the Middle Passage connects to personal trauma in the present; how Russell structures her songs to help people transcend profound pain; what message Russell would send to people who are struggling and much more. This episode contains references to sexual abuse. Mentioned: “The Transmogrification of Trauma into Art” by Allison Russell “Barley” by Birds of Chicago “Real Midnight” by Birds of Chicago “Songs of Our Native Daughters” by Our Native Daughters “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot “Take Em Away” by Old Crow Medicine Show “The Art of Disappearance” by Hanif Abdurraqib Music and Book Recommendations: The Bone People by Keri Hulme A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib Breaking the Thermometer by Leyla McCalla Carry Me Home by Mavis Staples and Levon Helm This episode was guest hosted by Annie Galvin, the associate producer of “The Ezra Klein Show.” Galvin has covered books and music for almost a decade and hosted a season of “Public Books 101,” a public-scholarship podcast she co-created. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Erika Duffee. Russell’s band is Monique Ross, Chauntee Ross and Mandy Fer. Additional thanks to Jeff Gruber of Blue House Productions and Allison’s touring engineer, Ross Collier. The songs Russell performs in this episode were written by Allison Russell and Jeremy Thomas Lindsay.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it's Ezra. I am off this month, but today, today is an exciting day. It is the guest hosting debut of our associate producer, Annie Galvin. Annie works very, very closely with me and Roger prepping and editing the show. She's very much the cultural mind of the show. Episodes with Ada Lemo and Margaret Atwood and Dan Olson owe so much to her brilliance. She previously hosted a season of the Public Scholarship Podcast she created in her last job, Public Books 101, and she's got a great episode for you here today. Enjoy.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  During the hardest times in my life, no matter what it is I'm going through, I always find myself coming back to music. Music doesn't solve everything, but it's something that you can feel in your body. It can help regulate your emotions. There's just something about it that resonates on a layer that's deeper than our rational minds. There's something about music that can be truly healing and hopeful, especially in times of darkness. It's hard for me to think of anyone who embodies this quality, quite like the musician Allison Russell. Russell has played in a bunch of bands over the years, mostly working in what we would call roots or folk music,

• 1:45Speaker 01

  but also the blues, gospel, R&B, Celtic music, rock and roll, and so much more. If you don't know Allison Russell's name yet, I have a good feeling you'll be hearing it a lot more in the coming years. Her debut solo album, Outside Child, came out in 2021 to just tremendous critical acclaim. That music was nominated for three Grammy Awards, which is not bad for your first record. And her music is truly an intellectual project. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to invite her on the show. It explores race and history, how to wrestle with your own trauma, and just the sheer human capacity for resilience.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  But more than anything, Allison Russell is my favorite currently working singer, full stop. There's something about her voice that shakes me to my core, and it moves me and it inspires me. And I want you to hear it, too. So in that spirit, we have a real treat for you today. Russell will play a few of her songs accompanied by a three-piece band, so electric guitar, violin, cello, four-part harmonies. And then Russell and I will use those songs as jumping off points to explore some of those deeper topics and questions that run through her work. There's just something about music that speaks to us at a different and more guttural level than other mediums. And so I really wanted

• 3:08Speaker 01

  to bring that out here and try to figure out what that quality is. And I think it worked. This conversation brought me a little dose of joy and hope, and I really needed it. And I hope it can do the same for you. As always, our email is [email protected].

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Allison Russell, welcome to the show.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Hello, Annie. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here with you.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Me, too. So I want to begin by asking you about your journey into and through music. So if you think back to your earliest memories of hearing and performing music,

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  what was it about music that called to you?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  I just, there's not a time before music for me. My mom is a beautiful piano player and was playing piano throughout my gestation. And of course, listening to her Joni Mitchell records and Stevie Wonder records and Diana Ross records. And I just feel like there's never been a time where

• 4:21Speaker 02

  I don't have a memory that isn't associated with some sort of sound or music. And some of my earliest memories are of my mom's piano playing, hiding under the piano, watching her feet on the pedals, feeling the resonance of the sound in my body. And it's just always been how I translate the world, humming. I mean, I do think that's our first instrument for all of us, is our voice, of course, and how we cry for help and how we get our needs met in any way, starts with voice. And that is inherently musical.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's probably one of the earliest things we have as humans, just realizing we had voices.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  I do want to dig into that a bit more for a moment, because I know that you engage with a lot of other mediums. You're writing a memoir, which is really exciting, and you've done a lot of public speaking. You gave a really great TED Talk that folks should check out. And I can tell that you're a big reader, and that probably started early. So I'm just curious if you think about music in relation to these other mediums. What does music do to you, either as a fan or performer, that, let's say, reading a really great poem doesn't quite do?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Right. I think that there is a physiological and neurological immediacy to the way we interact with music. There are vast fields of study now about what music physiologically does to us, how it changes our biochemistry, in the same way that if we cry, it changes our biochemistry. Listening to music can change our biochemistry, too, and slow down our heart rates or speed it up. We react physiologically and neurologically and emotionally, of course, to music. And so I think that there is an immediacy to that. And there is an almost, to borrow a term from Rupert Sheldrake, amorphic resonance

• 6:10Speaker 02

  to it, that within a species, there's an almost kind of like telepathy that happens, I feel like, with music. Or a highly, highly heightened version of empathy, where we can feel things together at the same time, which is rare, very rare. I think now, especially in our modern culture, there are very few places of public assembly anymore where we are having a shared kind of emotional journey together. And fewer and fewer of those times and places, I feel like, as our divides fracture and deepen. It's a way to get us through. I even think about the role that music has played over time has always been very much... You know, whether it's a work song that helps you get through

• 6:53Speaker 02

  hard labor of a day, whether it's a gathering, a party song to dance and blow off steam, there has always been this communal element. And it's only very recently that we've started to look at music as some kind of blood sport or competition. It never really was that, I don't think, evolutionarily speaking.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow, there's so much to unpack there. And I'm, I'm just really personally obsessed, just having experienced it so much, with music as a bodily phenomenon that then sort of activates your mind and your spirit and your empathy, as you say. So we'll definitely get into that. And on that note, I'd love to hear a song from you and your band. And this is from your solo record, Outside Child, and the song's called "Persephone."

• 7:36Speaker 02

  So Persephone is really an homage to my first love. I grew up in a very abusive household and I ran away when I was 15 because I really understood at that point that it was run or die, that I was safer sleeping on a park bench or on the Mount Royal Cemetery than I was in the home of the people that called themselves my family at the time. And I was very lucky because I found a community through music, through art, through my alternative high school, that was accepting and loving. And I met my first love, my first girlfriend, who shall be called Persephone for the purposes of this song. And she really saved me because she taught me what it means to love

• 8:19Speaker 02

  consensually, freely, without fear or coercion, and loved me in my entirety and saw me as an equal. And it was the first time that I felt worthy of love or that I could be equal to anybody. And so she really did save me. So this is for her, Persephone.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Blood on my shirt, two red buttons, would've killed me that time. Oh, if I'd let him, he's slow and he's drunk and he Lost his grip on me. Now I'm running down La Hurst Saint-Paz, Trying to get out from the weight of it all. Can't flag a cop, I know he won't stop. I go see Persephone. Tap, tap, tapping on your window screen. Gotta let me in, Persephone. Got nowhere to go, but I had to get away from him.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  All my petals are bruised, but I'm still a flower. Come run into you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Mouth to mouth, mouth to flower. Salty, sweet, you give me power. I feel you shake under my lips. Your fingers tender, find my secrets. Don't make a sound, don't cry out loud. Your pants are sleeping, just a man. I kiss you once, I kiss you twice. Fall asleep looking in each other's eyes. Tap, tap, tapping on your window screen. Gotta let me in, Persephone. Got nowhere to go, but I had to get away from him.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  All my petals are bruised, but I'm still a flower. Come run into you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Light on your shoulder, light on your cheek, light telling me it's time to leave. The birds are calling to the morning, your parents' feet above a stir. I kiss your belly before I go, climb back out of your basement, wind up back to the cold's back, back to the hard life, back to that hash bright street. Tap, tap, tapping on your window screen, gotta let me in, persephany.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Got no repel, but I had to get away from hell. All my petals are bruised, but I'm still a flower, could run into you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin. All my petals are bruised, but I'm still a flower, could run into you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I'm like truly choked up.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  That was so beautiful. Thank you.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I have the huge pleasure of being in the room with you. And it's making me think about how much I missed this during the pandemic. I mean, you could put on a record or put on headphones. My husband and I would have two-person dance parties in the kitchen. But it's just so different to feel the harmonies and the cello truly in your body.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And I'm curious what that's like on the other side. I mean, what does it feel like to be able to play together in a room with an audience of one? But you know, bigger audiences elsewhere. What's that like for you?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  It's joyful. You know, I think to echo what Jean-Baptiste said when he won his album of the year at the Grammys, it's not just entertainment. You know, it's not a show, it's a spiritual practice. And for someone like me, who I don't have the comfort of a religious conviction, I'm a hopeful agnostic at best. And I think for me, this creative communion of actually playing music in a room with people and having others come to listen and sort of complete that circle of, to me, a sacred, creative energy, humanizing, empathy-growing energy, that takes the role of religious ritual in my life, I suppose. And so I missed it desperately during the pandemic.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  And you know, live streams were better than nothing. But you're right, what you said, in your body, feeling the resonance in your body. We are resonating in the same way that the instruments are resonating, in the same way that the sound waves are resonating. We're connected physiologically and neurologically and emotionally and spiritually, not just auditorily.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  There's a lot of pain in the story and the memory that's at the heart of that song. But it makes me feel so hopeful. I remember listening to it the first time, you know, the day your record came out, going on a walk and just feeling so hopeful and uplifted. And I had to listen to it a few times and then realize, whoa, this is about what you just prefaced that song with. And so. If we were to take away the lyrics and replace them with babble or something, I'm just curious, when you were writing the song, what were you trying to do with the music, right? Whether it's the vocal performance, the melody, the chord structure, the instrumentation? What kind of feeling were you trying to give the listener apart from the lyrics?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  I think that you got it. I think it's hope and it's survivor's joy. And even in that time, which was in many ways the most difficult time of my life, that period of just finally breaking free from my abusive family and not having anywhere to go and climbing in through my, you know, secret high school girlfriend's basement window because her parents would have been horrified. They were quite a conservative family. You know, it was also this joyful time of self-discovery and of reclaiming myself and my body and sexuality and all of it, you know, was joyful. And so I did want the music to feel hopeful and joyful because it is that, even, you know, both things coexisted

• 16:14Speaker 02

  and were made even more intense by their contrast, you know?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, as a listener, I think you very much accomplished that. And it's really cool watching you perform it because you're almost smiling, right? I mean, it's just this really interesting contrast. But I think for me, this song, it really brings out something that I think you do so well. And I imagine it's really hard to pull off, but you're able in your music to hold, you know, pain and trauma on the one hand and joy and hope and even exuberance on the other. I could name a whole lineage of other musicians who do that. And maybe I'll do that in a second. But I'm just curious, I mean, how exactly do you do that? I think I understand why you do that and where that comes from. But I guess on a more craft level,

• 17:02Speaker 01

  what does it take to bring that kind of painful emotion together with this really exuberant, you could call it maybe musical package around it?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  I think I just felt compelled to talk. I didn't sort of construct it in a conscious way other than I knew that I needed to start to tell my own story if I wanted to be part of. Breaking those endless loops and cycles of intergenerational trauma, violence, silence, bigotry, that, you know, that it's like a terrible self-feeding monster. And I felt strongly after I became a mom that I had to be part of doing something about it. You know, and I'm always saying to my daughter, use your words. And I started to question myself, how am I using my words as fully as I could be? And I realized I wasn't.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  And so, and by the way, this is not to any other survivors listening, by no means am I saying, there are many people who will never speak of their trauma. And that is legitimate, valid, I respect it. I would never cast an aspersion or stone at anyone who never wants to speak of it again. But I have felt compelled to do so because my, the way I move through the world is to write songs, and that's just my compulsion. And so eventually I realized I would need to write songs about that aspect of my childhood too. But that embodiment of, I mean, that's just how I feel. I just feel really joyful when I get to be making music with my friends and people actually come to listen.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  It's the most miraculous, joyful miracle of my life, really. And that's just how I feel. And I write about the realities that I've lived in. So there is pain in that, there is trauma in that, but that's every human life, every human life. None of us are coming out of it alive, A, and B, without trauma. We, our birth is traumatic.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  I thought about that so much when I was giving birth to my daughter because I was, you know, I, we were lucky in that we had no complications and I was able to have the natural birth I dreamt of. And I wasn't sedated and she wasn't sedated, and so we were feeling it all. And that was what grounded me through that process, was thinking about how traumatic it was for this poor little being that has been in like, perfect comfort for, in her case, 10 months, like baby whale.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was two weeks late, I did not, I was like, I'm good here.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  You and I don't, you'll have to meet Ida. She's like, I'm perfectly fine right here. It's traumatic, there's a reason we don't remember birth, you know? And we are, we are ushered into the world with here it all is, it's, you know? It's shocking, completely like earthquake-like pain, but also great, deep joy and unconditional love when we're lucky from our mothers and, you know? All of it, but it's all the things at the same time. Trauma is also a mother of joy. It's hard to to wrap our heads around that.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I appreciate that you shared that about birth. I have a lot of friends who've given birth and I remember one friend, I was just texting her, "Hey, what's up?" And she said, "I'm on the way to the hospital." And then she just emerged 48 hours later and was like, "I have a baby now." And I think you said a word that really jumped out there as a musician, silence. And I wonder whether just about anything that's kind of traumatic, that the question of silence after the trauma happens is the thing that you really need to reckon with. And I really appreciate how you said, "It's fine either way." You know, I don't know my friends, any of my friends' birth stories. And I'm like, "That's fine." That's, I, there's no, I do not need access to that information.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  The silence and birth stories, for example. I do think it was so helpful to me when, particularly when I was pregnant with Ida, when women shared their birth stories. Because it's a terrifying event when you experience it for the first time. It's very, for me, it felt very sci-fi and just, I couldn't believe that it was even really feasible, that this person was growing inside my uterus, you know? And I do think sharing these things and normalizing the daily sort of traumas that we all live, but also the incumbent joys as well that are connected to those often. I do think that's incredibly healthy and we've, we used to do that.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  You know, I think most of human history, we did share these things and talk about them and live more communally than we do now. And I feel like there has been, I don't know, I chalk it up to Victorian era almost of like, and a holdover from that of the kind of the shaming around all sort of bodily human reproductive, everything sort of being cloaked in shame. Literally, they would cloak the piano legs. "But she had 20 kits, you know, so clearly."

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  "Healthy sex life." "Had no problem popping out those babies."

• 22:04Speaker 01

  But the piano is way too sexy.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  "Cover the piano legs."

• 22:09Speaker 02

  I just think that there is this holdover from the kind of, I don't know, British imperialism, empiricism, that is also part of the cultural architecture of what we are living currently, doesn't serve us well. It doesn't serve us well to have so much silence around anything difficult. We are very capable of weathering difficulty. We are very capable of weathering trauma. And we are very capable of experiencing joy and happiness on the other side of those. So I just think it helps to hear those stories. And that was part of what my impetus for writing, not for, I mean, I would write anyway,

• 22:55Speaker 02

  but for sharing outside child, was I felt this need to be part of creating narrative that people can find themselves in, who didn't have, you know, parents that took care of them. Because there are lots of people who will never feel ready to talk about whatever abuses or traumas they've experienced.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think that something that's some of the most enduring music, whether it's blues music or civil rights era, or really, I think the music you're creating can do is it can be specific, but it can also be universal. You know, I think oftentimes it's the verses. Frankly, Taylor Swift does this really well. I don't want to necessarily, I mean, you're on a different plane, but the verses are so particular and very literary and evocative and descriptive. And then something like the chorus will open up to something that, you know, you and I are different people. We've had different experiences, but I can very much latch on to. Sometimes when music is that lyrically potent, and I guess in some ways political,

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I think we sometimes miss the form. You know, we really focus, well, If this were on paper, what are the lyrics saying? So I'd love to ask you first about melody and then about your vocal style and delivery. And I think with melody, just as a music lover and someone who actually likes to sing and play music in a very amateur way with friends and cover songs, it feels to me like melodies are just these magical things that just pop out of the air. You know, I listen to Persephone and I'm just like, oh, that just sprang out of nothing. But obviously, it had to be crafted.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  So maybe we can anchor it in that specific song. How did you literally build that melody?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  I mean, that was one that just playing around with the melody really came first and the words came later. I knew that it was about her.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  But the full flesh of the words didn't come later. And I often, when I'm messing around with a melody, I pay attention to like the sounds you make pre, pre-language, right? When you're just like, what vowel sounds you're making.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  When you're sort of humming.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  You know, that kind of thing.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  I try to pay it, and I've really learned this from JT Nero, my partner and writing partner, to pay attention to those.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Those initial sounds that you make as a melody is starting to form. Because you're right, there is a mysticalness about where, where do the, where do the songs come from?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Where does the music come from? And yes, you're crafting it, but you're also tapping into what I feel like is a vast sort of subconscious of our species, you know? And the slipstream, the mystery. And that definitely, the melody shifted a little bit as the words came to you. So I think that sometimes it's, very rarely I've had the experience of like waking up from a dream and there's a melody fully formed in my head and I follow that thread and I write the lyrics to it. There was a song that I wrote a few years ago called "Barley" that was like that, where it sprang fully formed into my head. The melodic part and the sort of the main motif. And then I, you know, followed the thread with the rest of it.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  But with most of the songs on Outside Child, it was more of a...

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Trial and error and seeing what felt good to sing and finding what felt good to sing and what stuck. And that, so I think Persephone was more like that.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm actually glad to hear, I think, what you were saying. There is a kind of magical element to melody. Obviously, it's a craft, very much so like writing poetry. But there is this almost divine or spiritual vibe about it. I would love to talk about singing, too. In your music, that was really the first thing that jumped out to me. I first heard your voice. I think NPR First Listen did a stream of Real Midnight, your Birds of Chicago record, which I just love so much. And you have one of those voices that just, I love this experience so much. It feels like it just grabs you and it's like, stop focusing on the road. I mean, focus on the road, drive safely, but you know, get out of your annoying

• 27:12Speaker 01

  internal monologue and just listen to this. We were speaking earlier about the ability of songs to hold pain and joy together, and I just think you're one of the great dynamic vocalists. I truly mean this, you know, I think about Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Brandi Carlile, Sam Cooke, A Change Is Gonna Come. I think one of the great dynamic vocal expressions that I can think of, you know, at least from the 60s. And so with your vocals, I'm just curious, when you're kind of modulating within a performance, are you thinking, okay, in this moment, you know, I need to almost whisper like I'm talking to you? And then now I need to almost have this guttural?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  No, it's not as conscious as that. It's much more, the way I approach singing is much more subconscious, I suppose. I just, I really, I mean, that's one of the things that I love about performing, playing music, singing, being in creative communion with my chosen musical family, is that's when my busy brain stops. When I can actually, that's as close to being in the moment as I ever get, I think. I really struggle with meditation, still meditation. I have to do sort of moving meditations like running or yoga. But for me, singing, playing, communing in that way, being in the moment,

• 28:32Speaker 02

  listening to what's happening in the moment is very, I feel very present in that and I'm not actually. Thinking about it in a sort of conscious choice way. Right. You know? Right. I mean, that's part of why I'm so hooked, I think, on live music performances, because that's when all of the kind of miserable, internal monologue and dialogue stops. Yes. You know, and I feel connected. Right. And that's when I feel like the best shows are when you feel like that happened together as a journey for those on stage and those who've chosen to come listen, and we formed the sacred circle together. And we exchanged something meaningful. You know, that's what I'm totally hooked on. You know, and I see that in Brandy, too. I see that in Joni. And to be even mentioned in the same breath is thrilling.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  One thing that I think about when I hear you play this song is the concept of home, because you've talked about this really kind of interesting period in your life. You left home. Your home, in a sense, was the streets of Montreal. And I hear in the song a kind of transit between this really violent home and the streets. You know, it's set in the cold, you know, winter, a cold night, and then the window of your lover. Could you just talk a little bit about that period in your life? You know, you left home and what that was like?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Well, you're absolutely right to say that the streets of Montreal kind of became my home. What I remember the most from that period was just very much like I would walk for hours at night. And, you know, I was still going to my alternative high school. It was called Mind, Moving in New Directions. And it was one hallway of a larger arts high school called FACE, right across the street from McGill, so it was right in the McGill ghetto. And I would walk on the mountain at all hours. I would go sleep in the graveyard, because it was, no one ever bothered me there. And that was, of course, when it was warm enough, in the kind of summer. In the winter, there was, you know, I would sort of haunt the pews of the Notre Dame Basilica

• 31:06Speaker 02

  and St. Joseph's Oratory. I would go to the Croissant Real, which was this 24-hour kind of coffee shop, bagel place, and I would go play chess till all hours. You know, creep into my school when it opened and sleep in the student lounge for a couple of hours. I mean, it was very much this almost nomadic, I couldn't sleep well, I was having, you know, such severe nightmares that I couldn't sleep. So I was going through a period of chronic insomnia and pretending everything was normal at school and really just getting to know my city through my feet. And I was really lucky in that I was not, I did not meet with violence during that time.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  And it was a kind of a restoration where it was the first, you know, finally leaving the violent situation was the first time I was not being violated at night, was the first time I wasn't being sort of forced to live a lie and live according to very tyrannical, you know, set of rules. It was a time of very much like being embraced by Montreal herself and somehow being protected by her, even in these precarious circumstances, sleeping in a cemetery, sleeping on a park bench, climbing in through my girlfriend's window, you know, hiding out at the Croissant Real till I could go to the student lounge and not there.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  It was exhausting in a way, but it was also, it was also a restorative time.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds like the city held you in a way, kind of caught you in a way.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Very much.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Home didn't. And I do just want to ask one more question about home because I think it's such a fascinating concept. I used to teach a class called, a college class called Global Women Writers, and it was all about very migratory and... You know, diasporic literature. And we'd have a day where we'd talk about, what does home mean to you? It was so interesting to hear. I had a student who said, I can go to a hotel room as long as I can unpack and set up my books, I'm home. So for you, I'd love to hear how you think about that.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  That's kind of home lately.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Hotel room with my books.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yes, right, right, right. I mean, can home be, you know, a church bench that you sleep on one night? Can it be the body of someone like a lover?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  I think the idea of your home, your shelter, your sense of safety coming from your chosen family. I think that is very much what home has meant for me and still means for me because only in the last year have I become a homeowner. And there's a mystery about it. And of course, in this last year, I've also been touring and working and writing a book. And I've barely been there, you know? And so home for me is when, you know, my daughter and my partner come visit on the road, that's home. When I get to go, when I get to go physically home for any period of time, that's also home. But being on the road with my chosen family is also home.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really inspiring. So, speaking of migration and movement and the very vexed question of home, I'd love to hear another song from you and your band, and it's called "Kashiba, Kashiba." And I'll just say that you created it and originally recorded it with what I like to think of as a supergroup, Our Native Daughters. So it's you, Rhiannon Giddens, Leila McCalla, and Amethyst Kia. And so let's hear that.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  All right, we'll play. This is one, I've been thinking so much in these troubled times about those who've come before us, you know, the ancestors whose shoulders we're all standing on, and the fact that no matter what our perceived differences or perceived different lineages, if we go back far enough into our mitochondria, we all have the same mother. And we all come from long lines of survivors, and every single one of them lived through times harder than these. This is a song called "Kashiba," and it's for the great matriarch of my paternal lineage in remembrance, in gratitude, and in love.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Kishiba, kishiba, you're free now, you're free now. How does your spirit fly?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Blood of your blood, bone of your bone. By the grace of your strength, we have life.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  From the golden coast of Ghana, to the bondage of Grenada.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  You kept the dream of hope alive.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  They burned your body, they cursed your blackness. But they could not take your light.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Kishiba, kishiba, you're free now, you're free now. How does your spirit fly?

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Blood of your blood, bone of your bone. By the grace of your strength, we have life.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Raped and beaten, your babies taken.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Sold and starved, and sold again.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Ain't you a woman, who love deserving?

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Ain't it something you survive? Kishiba, kishiba, you're free now, you're free now. How does your spirit fly?

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Blood of your blood, bone of your bone. By the grace of your strength, we have life.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  You dreamt of home, you dreamt of freedom.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  You died enslaved, you died alone.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  But you came from warriors who once built empires.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  The shanty's kingdom carries on. Kashiba Kashiba, you're free now, you're free now. And does your spirit fly? Blood, you're blood, born, you're born. By the grace of your strength, we have life, we have life.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  You were forgotten, almost forsaken.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  But your children founded generations.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Your strength sustained them. We won our freedom, traced our roots to find a way. Kashiba Kashiba, you're free now, you're free now. And does your spirit fly?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. That's just such an incredibly powerful song. Can you tell me a bit about the figure who's named in that song? And whose story is at the center of that song? A woman named Kashiba. How did you learn about her? And what have you learned about her life?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Okay, so I was raised in a white supremacist household. My mother, my biological mother, is a Scottish Canadian. And she had me when she was very young, 17 years old. And in those days, in Montreal, a black, mixed heritage child born out of wedlock was quite a stigma. And she ended up, I was taken from her by Child Protective Services and placed in foster care for a number of years. And during that time, she was courted by an American expat, who became my first stepfather and then adoptive father, and also my primary abuser. And in the work of outside child, I refer to him as the jackal.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  But he is my primary abuser and my, you know, the man who raised me. So my adoptive father. I met my black family, my biological father, when I was thirty years old. And my biological father, Michael George, is from an island called Grenada, which is quite close to Trinidad and Tobago in the West Indies, in the Caribbean. So it was invaded by French colonials and who wrought enslaved peoples from Africa and other parts of the world. And then it was taken by the British.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Kishiba was a woman who was born, as far as we know, free. We don't know where, but we know that she was kidnapped, probably somewhere in West Africa, and sold off the coast of Ghana. And that she made her way, survived the Middle Passage, survived a couple of plantations in Trinidad and Tobago, and wound up on a plantation in the north of Grenada. And we know that she was skilled in midwifery because there were notes of her so-called owner, her enslaver, being paid for her midwifery services from other plantations. So she brought some knowledge from the Old World.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  And she is the great matriarch of my paternal lineage. And I learned about her when I met my black family when I was thirty years old. And my father is one of thirteen children. And my eldest aunt Denise has gotten, has gone deep on trying to trace our lineage and trying to reclaim and learn as much of our history as is possible. Because, of course, with, with the Black diaspora and those of us who were descended of enslaved populations, language, history, original geography of where our people could have been from,

• 44:05Speaker 02

  most of that has been lost or encoded in ways that is difficult to decipher. And so I feel really lucky because I've been handed this kind of...

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Heritage and a more fulsome knowledge of it because of my aunt's journey with trying to trace our family. And so, learning Kashiba's name, I just started weeping. It was this physical, deeply, I don't know, emotional, physical, spiritual response to hearing her name and feeling this connection, like I am here because of this woman's, my daughter is here because of this woman's unimaginable strength. I can't imagine what that is like to be ripped from your language, from your culture, from your country, to never see it again, to survive the hold of a slave ship, to survive multiple enslavers and people stealing your children.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  And, you know, of course, I know what it's like to survive continuous sexual abuse, but that's just scratching the surface of what she survived, you know? And so, I just felt this gratitude and this love and a sense of connection that the only reason I exist in this world and the only reason I survived what I did is because she survived what she did. And my daughter's strength and backbone comes from her. I just knew it, hearing her name. And so, I wanted to pay homage and I wanted to celebrate her life and celebrate her survival.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  That is not just something to mourn, these horrific circumstances that many of our ancestors lived through, but to also celebrate their survival is really, really important.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I just want to underscore what you were saying there by recalling a really powerful line from that chorus. And it goes, "Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength, we have life." And I think that that couplet captures kind of what you were saying, where it seems like at the heart of this song is that you're holding this incredibly complicated truth in your mind as you've worked through this and learned about her, which is that you would not exist, right? You would not have been born, your daughter would not have been born, had she not survived the horrific, almost unimaginable things she did.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  And if you wouldn't mind talking a bit, what is it like to just walk through the world and think about your life in that way?

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Well, it was really in connecting with Kishiba and in connecting with that, beginning to know and learn my, the black side of my family and the diaspora and what we've lived through, that I started to see my own personal history in a different context and as part of, not sprung out of some vacuum, but part of this continuum, a direct line. Those same, that same kind of bigotry and extractive abusive practices that traumatized my ancestor, that is connected to the trauma that I lived. And my primary abuser is an American expat who was born in 1936 in a sundowntown,

• 47:32Speaker 02

  who was literally taught that anyone who looked like me was three-fifths human and did not deserve the same human consideration, which set him up for all these many years later to become an abusive stepfather and then adoptive father of a black child in Montreal, all those years later. They're connected. What the kind of macro abusive practices of empire and country and colonialism are connected to these micro abuses as well. What we do to the land, we also enact upon women and children and non-binary folks and trans folks and men, of course, too.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  They're connected. And it was really,

• 48:20Speaker 02

  it was deeply affecting to understand that. But it was also galvanizing and it was also a source of strength in a strange way to understand and recognize that and connect my history and Kishiba's history and the greater story of the black diaspora and all diasporas, really.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  And that on the other side of that survival, there is a deeper knowledge and understanding of how hard one, our human rights are, our freedoms are, our, our joy, our choice to live every day with some sort of open heart and love in our hearts. These are, that takes courage and it takes bravery and it takes self-awareness and knowledge of the past as well.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  One thing that I so deeply admire about the work that you do and that Brianna Giddens and so many other artists are doing right now is that I see your work as a deeply scholarly and archival and historical project. You know, just in describing the origins of that song, you're talking about records, you're talking about books. I'm a former academic, so it's like this is just so rich. And not all music really comes out of that intellectual project. And so I did want to think for a moment about performance because I had the great honor of seeing you perform with Our Native Daughters at Newport Folk Festival a few years ago before the pandemic. I mean, it was just one of the most kind of transporting

• 50:24Speaker 01

  performances I've ever seen. But I've been thinking about how when you perform, I imagine you're, you don't know who's in the audience. You might have some friends or family members there. But, you know, on the one hand, you might have someone who's hearing the music and really deeply identifying with it. You know, you might have someone like me who doesn't have the exact same lineage, but is very curious and is there to listen and really is actually attaching to certain parts, certainly not all. But then I imagine there's also a listener, particularly at a festival, who's just kind of like, it's a nice day. You know, I'm here to just chill. I'm here for the vibes. I'm here to have a beer with my friends. And I didn't necessarily walk into this tent to kind of think about slavery and trauma.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  And so I'm just really curious, when you're either preparing to perform or when you're really on the stage, do you think about those different types of listeners? And if you do think about that third, what are you maybe trying to say to that person or get that person to feel?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  I don't think I'm ever trying to get anybody to feel anything. I think if people feel moved to engage with what we're doing, then that's enough. And if they don't feel so moved and they want to get up and leave, I respect that. Nobody should ever feel like they have to be trapped at a performance. If you are uncomfortable with anything you're hearing, you don't have to be there. You can get up and go. And that is a beautiful thing. Can you imagine if we were the tyranny of being forced to listen to something you don't want to listen to? It's terrible.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  No matter who you are or what your experience is.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  No, doesn't matter. And no matter what, you know, I totally get it and I respect it. It's fine that not everything is for everyone in every moment.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  And that is the beauty of the subjectivity of our human experiences. And we are each curating our own, you know, life's experience. And if you're sitting at a festival and you're hearing something that's harsh in your mellow, you can get up and leave. You don't have to listen to it, you know? But there is a beautiful thing that occurs where sometimes people do stumble in and they're not, they don't know. And they're not necessarily prepared for that, but they are open to it for whatever reason. And then that's a kind of a beautiful act of discovery that can occur. And I've had people come and share that before. They, oh, we had no idea. We didn't know it. And we were stopped in our tracks and we had to stay. And there was an emotional resonance for them.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I think that's a really generous and probably kind of healthy way to think about it because some things are out of your control.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  So many things.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Basically, everything, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I do want to say, just for folks listening, you know, having seen, you know, the work that you're performing here and our Native Daughters, I really don't want to make it sound like it's all dark and heavy because, you know, at that performance, people are up, they're singing along, they're moving, they're clapping, they're very much crying, tears of, you know, probably sadness, but also a kind of, it's almost like an exorcism, like getting something out of you. So I just do want to note that.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're not all depressing all the time.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  No, oh, my gosh, totally the opposite. And I think in the next song, we're going to really, really hear that. And what you were saying there, I think it goes back to something we talked about very early on about music as a medium, because I think what you're able to do by transporting people is it's not like you're forcing them to sit in a chair and listen to, you know, a dissertation or a written speech. You're kind of easing or coaxing us in. And I'm sure that at a festival like that, there are people who just stumble in because they're intrigued, they've read about you, they've heard an interview, and then they are just totally awakened and they're just thinking, I thought I knew this music, this genre, and I'm truly learning so much more. And then, I love the liner notes of our Native Daughters.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  You know, I always had the pleasure of writing about that record. And, I mean, I'm highlighting, I'm commenting, it's a deeply kind of scholarly companion. And I learned so much just from reading about the banjo. So I just wanted to note that. So how do you feel about that kind of theory, perhaps, that music is a way of welcoming people into a kind of knowledge or maybe even a conversation that they would not enter?

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And so you agree. And is there anything more you'd want to say about really what it is about music that does that?

• 54:41Speaker 02

  I think it's a number of things. I think it helps us form, I mean, we know this, it helps us form literally neural connections between the hemispheres of our brain.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  So that just helps with lateral thinking and processing and all of it. I mean, think about even how we teach children in every culture and every language, we use music to teach children.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  We use it with learning the alphabet.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Twinkle, twinkle.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  We use it with learning counting. We learn it with, you brush your teeth.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  You brush your teeth, you know, whatever it is. We make up these little songs and that helps us process things and it helps us make it ritual that we can use and access daily. And it helps us enter things into memory. Like if I had to memorize all of the lyrics of songs without melody, I don't know that I could do it. I don't know that I could do it. Melody helps us memorize too, commit to a deeper memory as well and internalize. You know, music gets internalized in this really visceral way. And it does, it transports us, you know, and it's powerful.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  And it does, it connects us and it leads to movement, like dancing, doing something with synchronicity is so difficult for us as the wildly individual, often contentious beings that we are. But I do, you know, music to soothe the savage beast, that old expression. There's a reason for this notion that when we are having trouble self-regulating, music can help us do that. You know, just as our breathing can do that too. But music can help us regulate our breathing. So it's like, there's so many layers to it.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  And there's so much that I think we're just scratching the surface of. You know, we close our eyes, we lay our bodies down and are still at night, but our ears are never off. We are always processing auditorily, orally, we are always processing.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and I think there's something interesting that happens with a song like Kishiba, which again, has this beautiful melody, beautiful vocal part, beautiful harmonies, where, you know, even someone like me, who I have a very different heritage than you, but you know, I have ancestors who survived the Irish famine and who escaped British colonial oppression, which was economic, political, social, bodily, and that's a diasporic identity. In some ways, it's again, very different, but you know, and I'll find myself singing along to that song. And it's a little strange because I do not have, I cannot claim this person as my ancestor. But I think what's happening there is that the music is getting into your body and then the lyrics are making you think.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  And that's what's opening someone up and educating them.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  And the thing is, Yes, of course, there are different experiences with different communities, lineage, diasporic communities. But trauma is like universal and it's not the trauma Olympics, you know?

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  We all have to talk about this all the time.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  We need to put that aside.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  It's not the trauma Olympics. Trauma is trauma is trauma.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  And it is a way to begin to have empathy for other communities that had a different traumatic experience, right? But to understand, oh, that's what that is. Like, that's what... And to celebrate other communities' experiences is beautiful, I think. You know, and I think that we get so... We are so ensnared right now around questions of identity, questions of appropriation, questions of, you know, who benefits and who doesn't, that sometimes we can trip over our own feet where we start to accidentally resegregate in a dangerous way, in my opinion.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  You know, this notion that like you can sing along to Keshib at the top of your lungs and not be thrilled.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Thank you, because I've done that many times.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Thrilling to me. You know, just the way I sing along at the top of my lungs to, I don't know, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which is not my experience. Or Old Crows Take 'Em Away, and I'm not a white sharecropping farmer from the 1800s, but I love that song, you know?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  You know, and it's not to appropriate it, it's to celebrate another's experience.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  And I mean, mentioning something like the division, the profound divisions that we are so riven by, I really... That really made me think in a new way about the way that music... It would be cliche to say it, ugh. I don't want to say it builds bridges, but it really puts you inside.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  It really does.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Like, you sing that song with your body and then I sing, you know? So it really, it creates this very deep, I guess, connection or sort of transiting of thought and emotion. And so as we close up, I would love to think a little bit about transcending pain and trauma and joy. And so to do that, I'd love to hear another song from Outside Child called "Fourth Day Prayer." So could you play that for us?

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  This is called Fourth Day Prayer. I have a mantra that I've been saying every day since what was for us the first day of lockdown in Nashville, Tennessee, about a week after the tornado tore through, March 13th in the year 2020. And the mantra is this: We are not alone. We are not what we've lost. We are more than the sum of our scars.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  I was the queen of Westman Park. It was a man after dark. Oh, willow tree, it was my throne. Till I, till I went home. Father used me like a wife. Mother turned the blindest eye. Stole my body, spirit, pride. He did, he did, each night. It's one for the hay days. Two for the poison and the roots. Three for the children begging. Four for the day we're standing in the sun. Ooh. Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Ooh. Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  These are the best years of your life. If I believed it, I'd have died. Something told me that they lied. Oh, oh, I survived. I left home, I was just a child. Slept in the graveyard and at the mound. When the sun came up and found my skin, I rose, I rose again. And it's one for the hay days. Two for the poison and the roots. Three for the children begging. Four for the day we're standing in the sun. Ooh.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Slipped streams and fevered dreams, Do you see what I can't see? Tell me, tell me, tell me, I want to understand. From the coast of Africa, To the hills of Grenada, To the coast of Montreal, That brick, that brick still falls. It's one for the hated and failed, Two for the poisoned and bruised, Three for the children breaking through, Four for the dead, we're standing in the sun. One for the hate that looks sad, Two for the poisoned and bruised, Three for the children breaking through, Four for the dead.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  One for the hate that looks sad, Two for the poisoned and bruised, Three for the children breaking through, Four for the dead.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Man, that's such an interesting song, I think. And I'm really excited to dig more into it with you. I think that I've heard your collaborator, JT Nero, describe your music in Birds of Chicago as secular gospel. And I think I hear gospel influences there from the choir that's in the background. And, you know, you're not performing with an instrument, but there's so much movement. It's impossible to listen to that and not move your body in some way. So I'm just curious if you also thought of a gospel influence there? And if so, what that music means to you? And why use that for this song?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I mean, I think all modern musicians are influenced to some degree by gospel, by music of the Black diaspora, basically. I am definitely personally deeply obsessed with Mavis Staples.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  And the Staples Singers. And have listened to a lot of that. So that certainly creeps in all kinds of places in my writing and informs the way I approach group singing, for sure, and harmony, and the use of the voice as a rhythmic instrument as well.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  There's really no one of her generation doing it the way she is. And, you know, that she is the last of her family, I feel in my heart really deeply. And that feels, in a way, sorrowful to me. But she's carrying forward their legacy of radical love and inclusion and joy and, you know, stealing joy from the teeth of trauma and trouble and injustice. And she's still, still marching that freedom highway. And we are so lucky to have her. And I think we should not take her for granted, ever.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So in that song, there's some really painful lines. There's "Father used me like a wife," and "That whip, that whip still falls." But it's really, I mean, talk about a song-

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  The most painful line to me is "Mother turned the blindest eye."

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  But I think listening to it and watching you perform it, you don't have an instrument, you're really moving and you're gesturing. It feels like you're really reaching towards something that feels like transcendence and joy and overcoming. And I love to just hear a bit about the way the chorus is structured because when I hear it, it sounds like climbing a mountain, you know, when you you start, you're tired, you have to go through all these annoying rock scrambles and stuff. And then when you get to the top, the whole world looks different. The light looks different and

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  And that's the hope, you know, that song is very hopeful. It is the most sort of directly autobiographical about the abuse

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  in a one way, but it really is more about hope. And it is about the inner voice and that inner intuition that can guide us when we are able to quiet the world enough and quiet our minds enough to hear it. You know, and the, these are the best years of your life. If I believed it, I'd have died. Something told me that they lied, so I survived. I left home, I was just a child, slept in the graveyard, ended the mile. When the sun came up and found my skin, I rose again, I rose again. You know, that there's a sense of the resurrection, the rebirth, the second chance that starting to listen to our own intuition can give us.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  And it's hard and we especially, I think, as women in our culture, get trained not to listen to our own intuition. And it for me has been life changing, once I started really heeding that inner voice. And the chorus is very much the hope. Yes, one for the hate that loops and loops. Hope doesn't come from ignoring the realities of what is wrong, what is hurting us. We have to acknowledge what is hurting us in order to do better, in order to change the narrative, change the script. One for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots. We can't forget our history. Three for the Children breaking through.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  I have so much hope in our generation and all the young ones coming up. I just see an incredibly high emotional intelligence, a sense of connection. They are the most anti-bigotry, just naturally, of any Yeah, it's really generation of humanity. Yeah. Yet, it's extraordinary. Yeah. I mean, my daughter and all her friends have already kind of gone through, well, maybe I'm non-binary, maybe I'm like, just talking about gender in this very Yeah. They do not have any of the baggage around gender that I had coming up, you know? They just don't. And then sort of cheerfully deciding, she and her friend, Lulu, oh, no, actually, we are, we feel like we're girls. Yeah. Yeah. You know? It's cool, too. Yeah. It's cool, too. You know, just work it out, you know?

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  And not shaming each other Yeah. about any of it, you know? Yeah. So, Three for the Children breaking through, and then Four for the Day We're Standing in the Sun, which of course is like, that's the dream of Yeah. more and more of us being drawn into these circles of loving protection, of being seen, of being heard, of being held, of being loved as we are, and accepted as we are. You know, have no interest in tolerance. Yeah. Tolerance is for mosquitoes. We tolerate mosquitoes. Right, right. Humans require love. Right. We require love, and we are suffering through an intense empathy impairment and deficit that comes from so many people Yeah. feeling unloved. Like, that's the root of it.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  And it is a dangerous, dangerous thing to ignore that kind of, we have to address it. And that's part of what I feel like is so special about music. People can feel loved and cared for through a song. I did. I found that solace in music. My mom couldn't express love in any kind of direct way to me, but I felt it when she played the piano. Mm-hmm. You know, I felt it when she sang along out of tune to Joni Mitchell. I really did. And I think that we have to Think really carefully about how the importance of art in in public spheres,

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  in educational spheres, and to have that be accessible to everyone. Because if I hadn't had free art accessible to me, I don't know that I would have survived my childhood.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that I love that point about public art. I that's just so important. And as we come to a close, I want to ask about a phrase that you've sometimes said and written, survivor's joy.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  And I think one thing that I hear in a lot of these songs, certainly the ones that you've played, is what I might call the work of joy or the practice of joy. Because you've been through so much and our society collectively, right? Pandemic, climate change, gun violence. You know, I have personal things going on. And it's not like we just wake up one day and joy goes off like a light bulb. It feels like a practice or even a form of work that you need to cultivate.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  And so if there's someone in the audience who's listening and is going through something really difficult, personal trauma, weariness at the world, sickness, what have you learned from your experience that you might share with them?

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  What I would say is that it is OK to be in that place of weariness with the world. It is part of our process, all of us. I don't think that any of us escapes from this life without those times of feeling very overwhelmed. But what I will say is, please hang in there because you are needed. Someone desperately needs you. And your lived experience, everything that you're feeling now, that is going to be of use to someone else at some point, if you're ever willing to share it. And

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Who you are, we just, we need you and your love in this world. And there are people who are gonna love you just as you are. And if you're trapped right now in a situation where you are not being seen or loved for who you are, please know that it can and does get better. Like, if it did for me, it can for anybody. And I really believe that. And you are going to find your people. You will find your chosen family. You will find your community. I just know that beyond a shadow of a doubt. If we can hang in, and that's the hardest part, though, is to hang in when we are feeling so desperately overwhelmed and like, it's not worth it, you know? And I've been there.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  And it's like the little joys, hanging on to a little joy, and that's the thread that can start to pull you through to another thing. For me, escapist reading was the, was one of the main things, always. You know, being able to disappear within a book and another world was incredibly important to me as a child. And I was lucky in that I was an early reader. And so that escape route was open and available to me always. And we had great public libraries in Montreal, and I spent many, many, many, many hours in them. There's nothing wrong with self-preserved escapism. Nothing wrong with it.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  In fact, it's crucial to do that at times, to lie fallow at times, to go to ground at times, to hide at times. All of those things are absolutely necessary. But there is the time of emerging, and you will, I believe, that you will find your people if you have not yet found them. We're all moving through this human journey briefly, and we go through the toils and troubles, but we can sing as we go, and the hour of miracles can arrive anytime.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  I think that's a really hopeful and moving note to end on. And speaking of books and escapism and libraries, always our final question, and I know this one is tough for you, we'll do it with a twist. What are two books and two albums that you would recommend to the audience that have been powerful and shaping for you?

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so the two books, one that...

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  I started reading first when I was 11 years old and returned to you almost yearly. Is called The Bone People by Keri Hume, H U L M E, Keri, K E R I. She is a New Zealand author who recently passed away. It is one of the most important touchstone books to me, The Bone People. And I won't go too much into it, but it is a story of a survivor.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  And the other book is actually a more, much more recent one, a book of poetry by a writer who I knew more as a music journalist initially, but I have now become an initiate into his poetry and I think it is extraordinary. And this book in particular, I have been returning to and returning to over the last few months. And it is called A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib. Love him so much. He is brilliant. Yeah. Absolutely brilliant. And actually, on that note of what we were speaking of, you know, hanging on or not, Hanif wrote an incredible piece about an artist who disappeared.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  And it's a really deep exploration of, you know, choosing to stay and choosing to go. And I think it's a beautiful piece. I recommend. We can link that, yes. Yeah, that'd be great. And the albums, I have to give a massive shout out for my, our native daughter's sister, my next life wife, Leila Mikala. Love that. Her new record, Breaking the Thermometer, I have not stopped listening to you since it came out in May, earlier this year in May. And I can not recommend it highly enough. Immerse in it, give yourself the time to take the whole journey with it. But Leila Mikala's Breaking the Thermometer, which comes from a Haitian expression, breaking the thermometer to hide the fever.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  It is brilliant. Go get it. And the other album that I've been obsessed with lately is Mavis Staples and Levon Helm,

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Posthumous, Posthumous in Levon's case. A record that they recorded together at his barn. And it's really, really beautiful. I've just been listening and weeping because of course Levon is gone now physically to us. But to hear his voice and to hear him singing with one of his favorite singers and humans of all time, Mavis Staples, is really joyful and we still have Mavis, as I say. So we need to celebrate. She's a survivor of the civil rights movement and she's still carrying the torch, you know? And when I listen to her sing, it gives me hope and strength and galvanizes me to keep,

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  keep going and to, to understand that we can survive and thrive through hard things.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Allison Russell, your solo album is Outside Child. Thank you so much for being here.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Annie, for having me.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  And we'll go out on Alison's song, Poison Arrow, from Outside Child. Thank you for listening.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Poison arrow, be kind to me

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  And I'll be kind to you It's not just your poison It's the bow, the string Shaft and feather too The rush of the wind The blue sky above

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  The rain that soaked the ground to give me

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  only under love. Go and please be sweet. Not afraid. Roll me easy, namaste. Are you sad and broken travelers? Come on.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by me, Annie Galvin, and Roji Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Carol Sabaro and Isaac Jones. Our audience strategy is by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lynn, Christina Samulski, and Erica Duffy. The band you heard playing with Allison is Monique Ross, Shontay Ross, and Mandy Fair. The songs you heard Allison perform in this episode were written by Allison Russell and Jeremy Thomas Lindsay. Additional thanks to Jeff Gruber of Blue House Productions and Allison's touring engineer, Ross Collier.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Not afraid. Roll me easy, namaste. Are you sad and broken travelers? Come on.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Trying to make noise for the whole crowd that's not here, but thank you so much. That was just so beautiful, all four of you. Just amazing.