Allison Russell: A Persistent Return To Beauty

**Lee C. Camp** (0:02)
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, Exploring What It Means to Live a Good Life.

**Allison Russell** (0:10)
I left home when I was just shy of 15, and in another city, I don't know that I would have survived that experience.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:19)
That's Grammy-winning singer, actress, activist, Allison Russell, talking about the six months she spent living on the streets in Montreal after leaving an abusive home.

**Allison Russell** (0:30)
My little alternative school was across the street from McGill University. So I would go sit at Café Croissant Real and play chess until six in the morning with the McGill students.
There was a little, the Marrierein du Monde, this little basilica close to my school that was open early and open late, and that had all kinds of little nooks and crannies with velvet cushions where I would go sleep and pretend I was praying, you know, and go sleep there. In the summertime, we had this gorgeous cemetery that was incredibly safe late at night where I would go sleep in the summertime.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:12)
Navigating such acute challenges, Allison says the music and art that surrounded her changed her perspective on the world.

**Allison Russell** (1:20)
I would go to the Montreal Jazz Fest. It goes for a month long, and it's just free concerts.
I would go to Shakespeare in the Park, you know, it had free repertory theater. I just was constantly having it reinforced to me that there were other ways to live. When my particular nuclear family was unbearable and dangerous and violent, I got the glimmer that it didn't have to be that way, because of all of the amazing kind of alternative possibilities that I was seeing in these other places.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:59)
Allison's mother was suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia. Her adoptive father was deeply abusive, and she was in and out of foster care throughout her childhood.
Somehow, through this turbulent upbringing, she taught herself to play the clarinet, guitar, banjo, and began busking in her late teens. That led to nearly two decades touring and performing collaboratively in independent bands, sleeping on floors to make ends meet, and all the while working through the trauma she carried.

**Allison Russell** (2:29)
Those of us who survive chronic abuse in childhood, it can go different. You can be running from it your whole life, which often leads to self-medicating in really destructive ways and destructive behaviors.
I think I've gone the opposite way of like really clinically almost remembering things in great detail and trying to face them head on and accept that everything that happened is a part of who I am now. Not that it should have happened, but it did happen.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:59)
She confronted that reality very publicly in 2021 by releasing her first solo album, Outside Child. It's a deeply personal reflection on her early years, full of songs lauded both for their defiance and their joy.
That record earned her three Grammy nominations and catapulted her into the spotlight.

**Allison Russell** (3:18)
For me, the self-medication was the music. Luckily, it's a less harmful.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:25)
Right. Of ones to choose. It's a pretty great one to choose. Yeah.

**Allison Russell** (3:28)
It's a less harmful habit. I ran away with the circus. I just kept running.
I think songwriting for me was and continues to be really cathartic and has been a way to process the pain of that history.

**Lee C. Camp** (4:08)
Soon there followed a Grammy-winning second album, The Returner.
Then her Broadway debut as Persephone in the hit musical Hadestown. Now, having just returned from Broadway to Nashville, following her second run in Hadestown, Allison is finishing a memoir.

**Allison Russell** (4:23)
None of us is getting through this mortal life without experiencing a lot of pain and trauma that's just part of it. Being worn is painful and scary and hard, and part of why we don't remember it, I'm sure. And we're going to die. We know this. But we have this brief and glorious time on this living planet, the only living planet that we know of in the entire universe, which whatever our belief system, that is a remarkable and magical fact. We are here and it's so improbable and amazing.
It's so joyful.

**Lee C. Camp** (4:59)
Today, my joyful interview with Allison Russell.
Hello friends, Lee C. Camp here. There is, as you may have noticed, no shortage of content in the world. Opinions, endless, outrage, plentiful.
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