Allison Russell concluded her 2021 tour with a Monday evening show at Listening Room in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her band features Sistastrings (Chauntee Ross on violin and Monique Ross on cello), Larissa Maestro (cello) and Mandy Fer (guitar)
Listening Room is one of a growing number of smaller (200 seats) venues designed to facilitate intimacy by, for instance, in this case, dramatically minimizing the usual physical space between artist and observer. At Listening Room, the front of the stage, which is only one foot high, is close enough for those in the first row to prop their feet against it and the back of the shallow stage is a brick wall so there is literally no place for artists to hide and no way for them to escape contact with the audience.
I wondered what it would be like to see Allison Russell play such an intimate room – especially given that she was touring behind Outside Child, her solo album that deals, quite directly, with the horrific and persistent physical, sexual, and emotional abuse she experienced at the hands of her stepfather from early childhood through the age of 15 when, understanding that, one way or another, staying would kill her, she left her family’s Canadian home and struck out on her own.
Would the decreased distance increase her sense of vulnerability to a point that would compromise her performance? Would the intimacy intensify, perhaps to an uncomfortable level; might the night be either flattened to the point of no impact or, my greater fear, might boundaries become so over-run that the night could descend into a sort of self-indulgent cathartic encounter at the expense of the music.
I need not have worried. Though, in other hands, any of the above might have occurred (I have been there when it has), Allison Russell’s command of her craft is so great, and her evolution so strong, that neither of these risks could take root.
While other artists might have fallen into the belief that the audience had come to hear their story or to witness their growth, Russell, though engaging and gracious with the audience and with her band, never lost sight of the fact that we were there to hear some music. The audience didn’t come for a therapy session, it came for a rock show, and it got one. And, in that, it may have gotten more for, though I cannot explain why, I somehow left the show with more hope than I had at the start.
Joe Henry suggests on her website that this might be because, “In the end, Outside Child is not only a radical reclamation of a traumatic childhood and lost home, it is a lantern light for survivors of all stripes – a fervent reminder of the eleventh hour, resuscitative power of art…“ “The songs themselves ––though iron-hard in their concerns–– are exultant: exercising haunted dream-like clean bedsheets snapped and hung out into broad daylight, and with the romantic poet’s lust for living and audacity of endurance.”
My only half-joking romantic thought is that, as Allison Russell often refers to herself as a hopeful agnostic, maybe these songs are hopeful agnostic scripture.
Order Outside Child via Bandcamp: https://allisonrussell.bandcamp.com/album/outside-child
UK Dates include Celtic Connections: details here – https://allisonrussellmusic.com/