How to Break Cycles with Allison Russell (Best Of)

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Welcome, Pod Squad.

Today, we are delighted to tell you that we have the Allison Russell with us.

After a career spent as a gifted multi-instrumentalist, backing numerous other artists, she finally released her solo project in 2021.

She made her Opry debut, appeared at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and performed at the 2022 Grammys Premiere Ceremony.

She has been nominated for four Grammys.

She has earned three Americana awards.

Her recent album, The Returner, is just,

it's a real experience.

You've got to listen.

Allison Russell, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

So excited to talk to y'all.

I was just listening to your incredible conversation with Andrea Gibson and me bang.

My beautiful literary agent, Meg Thompson, sent it to me and just intuitively didn't know we were doing this, you know, and just sent it to me.

No way.

Yeah.

She was like, you need to listen to this.

It's going to change your life.

I will.

Well, thank you for listening.

And we've already started.

So hi.

How are you, Alice and Russell?

Wonderful to meet you all

sort of officially.

I remember seeing y'all and saying hi kind of in a dark green room at Red Rocks, but

that was a while ago.

So I was thinking about that in preparation for this moment.

I think that you and I, the first time we met, we were sitting on the floor in a huge green room, the back of Red Rocks, eating In-N-Out.

I think there was like 400 boxes of In-N-Out burgers.

It was at backstage after a brandy, Allison Russell, Sister Strings.

Everybody was there.

Yes.

Show.

It was midnight, and I was so proud of myself for being awake.

And I was like, oh, this is what it's like.

behind the scenes at a rock star show, except that I don't think this is how it is at a rock star show because it was 500 cheeseburgers

500 children yeah there was like

it was the wolves yes the feral wolf pack my daughter was among them ida i know ida was next to you eva kath and brandy's kids were running everybody's kids were running all that's what it's like behind the scenes at one of these shows yeah every i i kept being amazed by the um love and family atmosphere and also by the fact that everyone was still awake yeah because it was like 12 wild feral children so excited they had all you know sung on stage and all the rest of it but that is the magic that brandy and catherine create with their you know their beautiful loving of it's not just a show it's a family and it's a foundation and it's making music mean more and it's uplifting everyone that comes into their magical orbit and circle you know that's just who they are they're they're extraordinary you know i had to represent today

oh allison's wearing a brandy shirt i mean i would i think it would

not be exaggerating to say that brandy and kath

are two of the most important people in our entire lives yeah they are same and

you're same for you same absolutely the same

i mean it was that show you know that was actually our first concert not only seeing you, but seeing Brandy live.

I didn't know that.

And it was the first time that, you know, we, everybody who's not in the music industry has a picture of what the behind the scenes looks like.

And we at the time were like kind of thinking like, what is Tish going to do?

Is she going to go into this industry?

It's very dangerous.

There's a lot of drinking and drugging, the whole thing.

And then we get backstage at the Red Rocks and it was totally not what we expected.

Yeah.

And so I don't know.

I just think that, yes, Brandy and Kath,

but also you to be able to like feel confident in them to bring your child with you on the road and to watch you perform.

I mean, Allison, you are magic.

You are fucking magic.

Those are so sweet.

It means a lot to me.

You're just, you're in our house all the time, Allison, just in every room.

Your music is so beautiful.

So speaking of Kath and Brandy, I read this story that made me giggle so much because it reminded me of my daughter and me.

But I read a story that

Kath once overheard Ida.

So your daughter, and how old is Ida now?

She's now nine.

She'll be 10 at the end of December.

Yeah.

Okay.

So Ida was talking to Eva, who is Brandy and Kath's daughter, about how your mommies do the same thing, right?

Because Allison and Brandy, both singers, artists.

And Ida said to Eva, No,

my mom doesn't do what your mom does.

My mom just sings sad songs about her sad past.

That's exactly what she said.

And Catherine was trying not to die laughing, you know, just trying to keep a straight face and with her sweet, you know, decorous.

Oh, Ida, your mommy's got a lovely voice, you know, just being so sweet.

And Ida cuts her off, like, yeah, my mom's got a good voice, but let's face it, she even makes jingle bells sound sad.

Oh.

I kind of put a B in my bonnet to write her some bangers for the, for the

record, because she was talking about outside child when she was saying that.

And she has become my great, greatest victory.

You will appreciate this as moms, was

I was on the road and I got a call from my partner JT.

And she, the new record had just dropped, dropped, the returner had just dropped.

And she's all about Spotify and listening to Tish, listening to Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish and everybody and

Beyoncé.

And she

walked by her room and she had the door closed as she often does when she's doing deep listening.

And she was listening to demons from The Returner over and over again and learning the words.

figuring out the chords on the piano and stuff.

So yeah, it just, that was such a triumph.

Like she likes one of the songs.

God.

I just know that Tish came to a couple of my speaking events a few years ago and we left.

And I was like, how what did you think?

And she said to me, I just, I, I don't understand why do you always have to start on the bathroom floor when you're addicted and you're pregnant and you're on drugs and you're what.

So that's what I thought of when I heard your thing.

but okay Allison here's what I think is so cool and I don't know if you're gonna relate to this at all but when I hear that Ida says that to you it makes me

feel like it's a beautiful thing because the reason why they are like oh that's sad is because sadness and pain is not the water that they swim in with us yes exactly so it feels like a difference to them yeah which is a triumph for us.

It's a total triumph.

It's taking miserable cycles for them in real time, in real life.

And it's joyful.

And you're absolutely right.

And it's also, they trust us enough to tease us and to mock us and to know that there aren't going to be some sort of draconian repercussions for doing so.

You know, they can be their full selves and have some backbone and have some.

sass and own it, you know, in this joyful way.

I love it.

I mean, I kind of almost to a fault sort of love it when Ida is a bit like,

a bit mouthy with everybody.

I kind of love it.

I'm like, she's so,

I was so cowed my whole childhood, you know, and like crumbled in.

So to see her having more backbone, you know, at, at three than I did at 30 is, is just joyful to me, you know.

And for them to be able to tease, like for them to be able to tease us about.

the kind of reckoning that we are trying to have with our own pain,

them being able to tease us is to also allow them space to be playful with their own pain.

Oh, yeah.

They're so you know, and I think that like we were all, I'll speak for myself, I was shut off to not experience my own discomfort or pain out loud at all in my childhood.

Yeah.

And what kind of human beings are they going to be that they're going to be able to not only experience it, but also be able to laugh about it

in some ways.

I do think that that's the defining, I mean, the emotional intelligence.

of of our young ones, you know, of the Gen Zs like Tish and the alphas like Ida and Eva and Eli, have just learned that they're called alphas, you know.

I didn't even know that.

Yes, if you're born after 2012, you're an alpha.

You're no longer a generation Z.

You're the next whole cycle, you know, of the generations of humanity, you know, if we don't drive, if we don't drive ourselves to our mass extinction.

But I have hope because these young ones are so attuned and

open to each other,

listening to each other's emotions in a different way than I've ever, certainly not with my, you know, I'm ancient, ancient millennial, not in my generation.

My partner's an exercise.

They are wide open in this really, really special way that I think is required for the kind of level of crisis that we're currently facing, you know, that our human family, our species is facing.

Yeah.

So People often ask me, parents don't know what to share with their children.

I'm Gen X.

Okay, So I'm like, wow.

And a lot of, I think our generation was taught not to reveal any of our past pain to our kids.

Yeah.

We're supposed to hide it.

We're supposed to, but what I love, what you two are saying is, but when we do,

what they learn is that we can survive.

Yeah.

And that it's not something to hide all the time.

Yeah.

And we can't hide it.

It's impossible.

We can't.

When we try to hide it, it comes out in toxic ways.

I think.

Yes.

Yes.

And they know because they're

unbelievably brilliant and they're empaths.

And when we try to,

I think that the message kids get, because they're getting a message, if our words are saying one thing, everything's fine, and our bodies are saying another thing, trauma.

I think that they're thinking there's something wrong with me.

My mom's reacting that way because there's something wrong with me, because we haven't said to them, no, no, babe, it's just there's something wrong with me.

Can you talk to us for people who don't know your story at all?

Tell us what you want to tell us about your childhood, the beginning.

You have said that you don't think it's brave to talk about trauma.

You just think it's part of survival.

Tell us what you want to tell us about your young life.

Well, I was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

My mom is a Scottish Canadian and She met my biological father when they were in high school and they had a brief high school romance and by the time she realized she was pregnant, he was already back in Grenada.

He had been studying in Canada from Grenada.

And by the time her parents found out they were getting a divorce and she didn't have family support.

So as a teenager who'd been quite sheltered, she wound up having me sort of in a home for unwed mothers, kind of a version of the Magdalene Laundries, I think, because this is Catholic Quebec.

I was born in 79.

And she was a white mother having a black child out of wedlock.

You know, we were called illegitimate children back then.

And it was a big, massive stigma to be an unwed mother.

And

she had a rough time of it.

And by the time I was born,

she had a social worker and a bit of a relationship with her mom, but was living in government housing and

was just didn't have support.

And back then, the trend in social work was to just remove a child at the first sign of trouble and put them in foster care.

Now, it's understood that social services try very hard to keep a child within a family, if it's at all possible, and to offer aid and try any number of things before they just remove the child.

But in my mom's case, she didn't have anyone really advocating for her.

She had pretty severe postpartum depression after I was born.

And I believe probably her first psychotic break, my mom has suffered with quite severe paranoid schizophrenia for most of her adult life and

went undiagnosed and then misdiagnosed asthmatic depression for many, many years, which did not help.

And she struggled with substances and going on and off of medication, which has not helped.

And she was very, very young when she had me.

And one of the things I've been reading about is the effect that it has for very young people when they become parents, when they're not ready, that that it can kind of cause an arrested development so i've always thought of my mom more like my big sister really than my mom and so i ended up being removed from her care in very early childhood when i wasn't quite two yet because she was doing harmful things

because of you know the depth of psychosis and despair that she was in and lack of support and so

when i was removed from her care it was under something called child protective services in quebec which means that the parent, if they want to get the child back, they have to go to court and prove their fitness to be parenting again.

And so whilst I was there, she was groomed and courted by a much, much older predatory man, an American expat who was born in 1936 in a sundow town somewhere in Indiana.

And

he brought

the abuses that he had suffered, both ideological and physical, with him.

I believe it's ideological abuse to raise children, you know, with violent indoctrination into white supremacy, any kind of supremacy beliefs.

And so he brought all that with him, you know, when he came to Montreal and he

courted my mother and he went to court and

got me back from child protective services after he married my mom and eventually adopted me and was my primary caregiver and a primary abuser for over a decade until I ran away from home at 15.

So the beginnings were fairly miserable, but I was very lucky because I was in Montreal, which is a city

that is defined by art and defined by bohemian community and has 24-hour cafes and and has one of the most beautiful cemeteries I've ever seen in the world where I felt safe on summer nights sleeping there sometimes after I left 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.

So

I was very lucky and I went to an alternative high school, mind moving in new directions.

And I met some of my best friends in this world to this day at that alternative high school.

And

that just, you know, I slowly found chosen family and met my first love, who I

called Persephone

to protect your, you know, their privacy and identity.

Damn it, that's not her real name.

It's not her real name.

It's not her real name.

But it was always how I thought of her because I would crawl in through her basement window and I was, you know, the nerdy kid that was into Greek mythology and every kind of mythology.

And I thought, I always felt like it was like a reverse thing where going

underground, going to Hades was this like

sheltering thing.

You know, it was the most, it was the safest I ever felt was when we fell in love and I would sneak in through her basement window because her parents would have had a heart attack if they realized the nature of our relationship.

And

we were both babies, we're just 15 years old, each of us, you know, and just learning what it meant to be loved consensually and to be thought beautiful and equal and worthy and all of those things.

It's an odd thing thing to be a black child raised in a white supremacist abusive family because there's physical abuse, and

your body eventually heals from that kind of abuse generally.

But

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Take us back to 15 because the Persephone song.

It's so sad, but it's so also joyful and beautiful.

Abby and I, as queer women, are just like,

yes.

I mean, it's just, there's something about it that's so universal to the queer experience also, while being incredibly personal to you about just finding safety.

I love that you hear the joy in it because I was quite startled when I realized.

that a lot of people did hear it as traumatic in some way because because I'm explicit in the beginning about what I'm running from.

But

to me, it's such a joyful song.

It's first love, it's sexual reclamation and awakening.

And I had never experienced anything consensual in my life up to then.

I'd never experienced someone really, truly loving me as an equal.

And that was

completely not just transformative, it was really, truly life-saving and joyful.

And realizing that sex could be joyful and not some sort of torture was

completely

shocking and incredible and you know all the things that it is for people who hopefully haven't been messed with but is in some ways even more intense for people who have you know

i i felt that deep in my bones when we listened to that song it's like every teenage queer kid who has been trying to fit into this one box their whole lives or stuffed into certain boxes.

And then this is like the tap, tap, tapping on your window screen.

To me, like, I'm a romantic at heart.

I just remember that first like experience with my first girlfriend.

And I mean, that visual is like, yes.

It made all of the confusion and pain and

angst.

I was like, oh,

got it.

I love

it so much.

This feels like the skinny arms get me.

The skinny arms get me.

I don't know why.

This is kids.

We're kids still.

We're really little ones.

We're meeting growing up together and learning about love together and listening to Ani DeFranco and Tracy

and the Indigo Girls together.

You know,

Sinead O'Connor, you know, all of them.

Like Bjork.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

I need to talk about Sinead O'Connor for a second.

That's amazing.

I actually have this on my list of things to talk about.

Okay.

Because

I

personally had what might be considered to some people an outsized

reaction to

Sinead's death and the public reaction to Sinead's death.

My therapist actually said to me,

I don't know.

if there's anyone in the country who's talking to their therapist about Sinead O'Connor who doesn't know Sinead O'Connor as much as you are.

Like we might have to wonder if what we're really talking about is you, Levin.

Okay.

I felt connected to you the day because I felt like you were saying on Twitter some of the things I was feeling.

Like I was so pissed that people, first of all, were celebrating her after she died who were not at all when she was alive.

But also

this repeated refrain of, well, she really battled her own demons.

I love your demon song.

And I just feel like demons should be something that if you're talking about them, they should only be yours.

You should not be talking about somebody else's demons who didn't claim them as demons.

Because actually, what Shineado is always doing was fighting real demons

outside of her.

Correct.

I remember

your tweet.

I remember your tweet that day, and I remember reposting it and being like, that is exactly it.

She was fighting real demons, real demonic behavior.

You know, I don't believe any human is truly a monster, but there are people who behave thoroughly monstrously and never stop you know yes and

what

the catholic church has done and continues to do there's still a residential school for indigenous kids open in the dakotas like that hasn't stopped yet and across canada we are digging up mass graves of indigenous children thousands and thousands of unmarked graves.

And this was done by the Catholic Church and the Canadian government and the settlers, all of us, you know, my ancestors too.

Yeah.

And people who are talking about it, people who like Sinead, Sinead was right.

She was right.

She was right about everything.

She was right.

She was right about everything.

Glenn, it's so interesting you say this because

my circle of close women and actually

someone I hadn't known well until Joni Jam, who I met at Joni Jam, who was Annie Lennox, we ended up texting texting each other back and forth, just she made deep cuts back and forth and different things she had said and talking about.

I mean, I was on the floor.

I was supposed to fly to Prague and do a video for demons, actually, with my incredible childhood friend, Ethan Toadman.

who is the creative director for the Eras tour and is a total superstar and was the set designer for like Formation and the Lemonade, those amazing lemonade movies, brilliant visual artist.

A big part of it, there are moving through different worlds.

And it's basically like rebirthing oneself, reclaiming oneself over and over again, calling oneself to courage in this visual narrative to accompany the words and the music.

And

a lot of it was to do with hair.

And but I was on the floor and to the point where I just wanted to shave my head and

not leave the hotel room where I was in New York.

ever again.

You know, I just wanted to mourn in a, in a physical, like I wanted to do something physical, like rend something on myself you know

shake i do know what means rituals clarification i had to be talked down you know by ethan he's like well we're doing this video that involves black women's hair so if you could wait till after that to do this you know he talked me down and my partner jt talked me down

and it's funny that your therapist said that to you because jt said to me could this be something about you and not shay at all because you never met her right you actually right like we're

but I, but I did, she's part of my survival.

When she made her stand in 92, it wasn't about ripping up the poet's picture.

It was about singing Bob Marley's war,

a cappella, essentially, and, and making it about child abuse and saying that and naming that on the biggest TV show of the day.

And I was, I think, 12 when she took that stand.

I don't know that I would have gathered up the courage to run from my situation.

I might have just simply died in my situation had it not been for these truth tellers, you know, who showed me that there is a life beyond abuse and that there are powerful women who stand up to abuse and that maybe I could be like them, like Tracy Chapman, who sang behind the wall, like Sinead O'Connor, who sang war and made it about child abuse, like Tori Amos, who sang Barbados, me and a gun and a man on my back, but I haven't seen Barbados, so I must get out of this.

These were my path lighters that showed me it was possible to survive and thrive and

get out of this, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it just felt like all of those women are pointing out demons in our world, like

homophobia, racism, greed that kills, religion that says it's one thing and then abuses children.

And then we are calling that person who's saying those things crazy.

And then everything that they said, and these are often women, everything that they're said is proven right, but the world has already done its damage to that woman.

And then the woman dies and we saint her.

While having villainized her whole life, instead of even just like pretending to honor that woman after death, we should just try to honor the next inconvenient prophet in real time.

Yes.

But we won't do that.

We won't do that.

We'll villainize them again and then saint them again after death.

So I think it is about Sinead.

It is about Torrey.

It is all these people individually.

It is about Tracy Tracy Tracy, but it's also about this rhythm, this pattern we see happening over and over again to women.

Well, I mean, and it's been going on since the witch burnings.

Exactly.

And I'm sure before it's, it's the martyring of women.

It's the demonizing, literally demonstrated.

They're witches.

They sleep with the devil.

Like it's literally demonizing.

Yes.

Powerful women, strong women, healers.

And it's also like calling, you know, Sinead, her abuse as a child, and then she had PTSD, right?

But, like, to call PTSD a demon is so fucking insane.

That is a bodily, physical reaction to something that the world has done to a person, correct, correct, right?

It's something that the world has done to us,

uh, an inner demon.

And also, when we label other people that, that's archaic religious language that has excused people for

yes, exactly, which yeah, exactly for so long.

So, we have to stop that shit.

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What's the first moment that you felt like I am

a child who survived being raised by a white supremacist,

psychological, sexual, physical abuser

to becoming what you are now, which I guess you're both things all the time.

But how did you fucking do this?

Because

my little brother and my niece and nephew.

And a number, and music, of course, art, of course, the magic and the mystery of art, even with my mom, even though we had a deeply troubled and have a deeply troubled relationship, I was able to feel

love through listening to her music.

Like one of my earliest childhood memories

was,

I think I was on a visit from the foster home because I would have weekend visits with her.

I can't remember if it was every weekend, maybe it was every other weekend, but she wasn't allowed to be alone with me.

So we would go to my grandmother's apartment and she had this gorgeous upright piano um with the kind of like very victorian curvy legs of the piano sort of curlicued and i remember sitting under there and watching my mom's feet on the piano and she was playing along actually joni mitchell is her favorite artist you know oh i've been listening to joni since i was in utero with my mom no way um and She was playing along to Ladies of the Canyon and a deeper cut, a song called For Free,

which is Joni singing about a busker and how nobody's paying attention because they're not famous.

And she's off stroking the star maker machinery, but really she just wants to go jam with this beautiful musician who's playing clarinet on the street for free.

You know, I slept last night in a good hotel when shopping today for Jews.

The wind rushed around in the dirty town.

Children let out from the school.

It's gorgeous melody.

And at the end, there's this beautiful clarinet solo as she's you know i heard his refrain as the signal changed He was playing good for free.

And she crosses the street and goes on with her life.

And then this beautiful clarinet solo comes out of it.

And I remember my mom singing along and hearing the sound of the clarinet for the first time and being like, like electrified by that sound.

Like, what is that sound?

You know, and my mom, I remember asking later, what was that?

And she said, it's a clarinet, you know, that was the clarinet.

And that imprinted on me.

And then all the mystery and the magic of all those, you know, full full circle later of being invited by Brandy into the magical circle of the Joni Jam, you know, and playing clarinet on stage with Joni and having her.

What did she say to you, Alison Russell?

The most beautiful clarinet player ever, you know, just this sweet, hyperbolic thing she said.

So, just in case you didn't hear it, Pod Squad, what happened is

under the piano, she's holding Joni.

Okay, then she hears the clarinet.

Fast forward to she's on stage at the gorge, was it?

It was the gorge.

Joni Mitchell and playing the clarinet.

And Joni Mitchell says, Allison Russell, the most beautiful clarinet player I have ever heard.

Or something like that, most beautiful clarinet

ever.

You know, she did.

It was just like a sweet, she demanded that I take a solo during Young at Heart.

And you just, Joni asked you to do something, you do it.

Yes.

And try not to mess it up, you know.

But it was so, it was just such a sweet, surreal moment.

And when you say, how do you get from there to there?

Well, it's all of it all at once because we're always still, I'm still that little girl that loved just that sound and imprinted on me.

And I was always, I feel like

in some ways, I think we all have a birthright.

Every human on the planet living now, we are the improbability of of us being who we are in this time, the

fact that we come from, no matter what our heritage, what our lineage, what our set of challenges or privileges, we all come from long lines of survivors.

And that is our human birthright is this resilience.

I was very moved

by a theme in The Returner, which feels very much like part of my recovery, which is, it feels like this big

love story to embodiment.

Nailed it.

And I don't know if it's just because whatever I'm doing feels like everyone's talking about that.

But can you talk a little bit about the song,

All Without Within?

Yes.

I love

that.

That's by far the sexiest song on the record.

Oh my God.

I fucking love that song.

And that's Wendy and Lisa, y'all, singing with me.

And they joined us, our rainbow coalition, a chosen family that we've been growing together over the last two years.

We made The Returner in six days.

And it was

over.

It was 15 women and one non-binary, identifying, gender, expansive, amazing, divine being.

And three chosen brothers, 10 songs, six days.

And we recorded it in LA at the old A ⁇ M studio,

which is now Hanson's studio, presided over by Kermit the Frog, which gave me a lot of joy.

But memes love you.

Yes.

And so that is, in fact, where Joni recorded Blue.

And

it's where Carol King recorded tapestry.

It's where they did, we are the wood, we are the children with Tina Turner and Cindy Lauber blowing the roof off the place.

You know, it's Shaka's made records.

The good ghosts in that place are just outrageous.

So it was like.

a family affair all around.

You can't make a record in six days without having complete trust with everyone that you're engaged in creative communion with.

It's a trustful exercise, basically.

And it only works if everybody lets go and jumps together, you know, and falls together.

You can feel that.

You can feel that.

In terms of healing, because the first album ends with, I think, where are all the joyful motherfuckers?

Which is, which is

joyful motherfuckers, right?

And it feels like you could play your records back to back and it would be like, where are they?

And then the returner's like, here they are.

picked up on that because that's exactly right because this is the kind of nerd i am i am obsessed with

multi uh volume journeys in literature

and in music

and for me an album is a journey like i feel about an album the way some people feel about a film i understand and i accept that the vast majority of people will be streaming and they will never listen to the record in the very deeply nerdy, exact order that we agonized over.

Yeah, exactly.

It's annoying.

Planned over.

But when people do, it's the greatest thing ever.

I will say that to anyone listening, and some of you may have never taken a journey with a record, and I understand that and I don't condemn at all.

But I promise you, if you do take the journey with an album that was written in that way, because not everybody wants to make albums in that way anymore, actually, right?

And some artists never did.

Some artists artists were always more single-driven.

But for nerds like me and Brandi Carlisle, for example, and Joni Mitchell and Prince and Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls, if you take the entire, and Odetta, if you take, and Mavis Staples, if you take the entire journey with the record, it is so much more rewarding when you have the time, because I also know how precious time is.

It's so difficult for someone to sit down for 45 minutes and do nothing, so to speak, right?

Of course, you're doing something very active when you're listening, but I know it's hard for us to justify those

taking that time in our busy lives.

But I not only is the returner its own narrative arc, although not linear,

it is connected to Outside Child, but anyone can take the journey with either album, but they are in fact Outside Child is volume one, broadly the past.

The Returner is volume two.

It's the present, it's re-embodiment, It's stealing joy from the teeth of turmoil.

It's loving on your people who love you back.

It's loving on the people that don't love you back, but not allowing them to derail your joy.

And it is just being here now.

Okay, two more things.

You fall in love with JT.

What a love bug.

Everyone

who meets JT is in love with JT.

Don't get Catherine Carlisle started.

I'm JT.

They have the most beautiful friendship.

I love their friendship.

I can tell.

I had this secret

idea of when women are queer women and then they marry men.

I wonder if they just want to wear like flags all day, every day to signal to the world I'm still queer.

And then I swear to God, Allison is wearing a rainbow wristband.

And I'm like, maybe they do.

Because you want to have a power wristband.

It's my anti-bigotry wristband.

I watch it on stage and it makes me feel strong.

I live in Tennessee now, y'all.

We're battling some medieval stuff over here.

But we're winning.

And Gloria Johnson is our next senator.

Just putting that out there.

This is airing before Election Day.

I'm incredible.

We have incredible

get to the polls.

Why should Tennessee show up for Gloria Johnson?

Tell us that.

She is who she says she is.

She has been showing up for community since she was a teacher, as a representative.

She's risking her seat as a representative.

She is a shoe-in to win again for Knoxville as a representative in the House.

But we are in a crisis situation in Tennessee.

We have essentially a hijacked people's house here.

Only 32% of registered voters voted this so-called

so-called GOP, so-called supermajority.

I say so-called because they're not behaving in any way like small government Republicans, which is what I used to think the GOP was.

Here in Tennessee, we have bad actors in office trying to unlawfully expel lawmakers because they are young and black and standing up for their constituents, like Brother Justin Jones, Representative Jones, and Representative Pearston,

Representative Jones from right here in my riding in 52nd District here in Nashville, and Representative Pearson from Memphis.

They tried to expel Gloria too, but

she pointed out, since she was a white woman, one of the

openly racist Republicans, you know, allowed her to stay with one vote.

And of course, both Representative Jones and Representative Pearson were re-elected by a landslide.

And they've become known now nationally as the Tennessee Three because they were standing up for our kids, for our community, for all Tennesseans, demanding a sensible response, any response to the carnage of gun violence.

I have thought of you so much in your activism for sensible gun reform.

When I think about your story and about being a kid where school was your safe place, I was a teacher.

And so I know that my classroom for a lot of little ones was the only safe place that they had.

Correct.

They came to school for safety.

They did not go home for safety.

They came to school for safety.

It was the one sanctuary that they had.

And so when I think now about how that is not even true anymore for children, school was a sanctuary.

It was a sanctuary.

And you have touched upon something here that I've been trying to explain to people and to explain to people back home in Canada who keep asking, when are you coming home?

You know, when the next wave of legislative terrorism rocks us here in Tennessee.

And

I just tell them, I can't show my daughter that I'm running away from fascism.

We don't run away from fascism.

We stop it.

We surround it with love and we overwhelm it and we vote it out.

That's what we do because we still do have a democracy.

And when I think about exactly what you said, Gleninv, that my child, I've been able to break cycles of abuse in our home, in our personal lives.

And yet my daughter wakes from nightmares.

has a lot of the trauma responses that I experienced from my abusive home as a child.

In her case, it is from fear of being shot to death at school.

It is from the active shooter drill, where they didn't tell the kids or the teachers that it was a drill because they've determined they'll save more children when, not if, an active shooter gets into the building.

When, because for almost three years now, the number one cause of untimely death for our babies, for our children and youth, is gun violence.

You And to have

blanket inaction here in Tennessee, where we just lost six beautiful humans in our community at the Covenant School, we

watched the absolute grotesque mockery of a special session where these lawmakers who claim to care about families and family values mocked Covenant moms.

The school was called Covenant, where this horrific gun violence took place, mocking those moms.

These are women who are white, Christian, seemingly straight.

Most of them have voted Republican their whole lives.

These are

who they're supposed to actually care about, right?

And they were mocking them, saying the most horrific, I mean, it can't be unseen.

Right.

And as awful as that is, what I have realized and why it is so important that people vote, because that does not represent Tennessee.

There are people who are having their religious beliefs manipulated to fear their neighbors that they don't have to fear.

They don't need to fear drag queen story time.

If they don't like drag queen story time, they don't have to go, but they don't need to fear it.

What must be so interesting for you as a child who was

raised and abused by a white supremacist, steeped in all of this shit,

saved

by a queer girl

to now be fighting religion, claiming that the queer people are the ones who are abusing.

It all goes back to Sinead O'Connor.

It all goes back to this thing.

It is the same projection and demonizing of the actual freedom fighters, truth tellers, prophets in our time.

That's right.

And Gloria is a truth teller.

She is exactly who she says she is.

I've been lucky enough to know her for about three years now.

I met her actually through the music world because she just shows up in the community.

She shows up to concerts.

She shows up to volunteer drives.

You see her at the supermarket.

You see her in the park.

And I think probably on some level, the last thing she wanted to do was have to run for senator, but she's doing it for all Tennesseans.

As we end here, as someone who is healing through re-embodiment, through landing in my body for the first time, to feeling everything that is without finally within,

to understanding, like feeling a touch or feeling even hunger or feeling rain as like a freaking resurrection.

Yeah.

Like just experiencing life in my body for the first time.

I have so many friends who don't get to or don't feel yet like they can that returner experience because of trauma, because of abuse, because all of that is what's in their body.

And disassociation

has been their

survival mechanism for their whole lives.

Because

you have

so much trauma in your background and

you are

experiencing,

through your music, it feels very much like you're experiencing re-embodiment as healing.

Wow.

Well, for me, I think it took a long time.

And motherhood helped vastly.

In my case, that was the first time I ever loved my body.

Was when I got, and I was terrible.

I never thought I would be a mother, never, never, never.

Certainly never thought I would bear a child.

You know, maybe if I fell in love with a woman who had a child, or, you know, I could do that, or,

but

I never thought I would physically

do that.

And Ida was a miracle.

You know, I was on birth control.

She's a birth control pill.

Yeah.

Birth control pills for seven years and they never failed me.

And I never skipped one either.

Anyone listening with a uterus,

birth control pills are not 100%.

They are 99.999 and Ida's that 0.0000111, what have you.

And

it was shocking at first.

You know, JT and I had been together for seven years at that point.

And I was just so terrified of paying for it any of what I lived.

And I felt that somehow I would be doomed to do that.

But because JT is so stable and has such a strong, gorgeous inner goddess and a beautiful, happy family that's not abusive, I just thought, well, if I'm completely undone by this, I know that he will be there for this child.

And it was the most

miraculous thing of all of the kind of self

evisceration that I was in the habit of doing, of just

continually being cruel to myself, because that's what I was used to, you know?

And I've talked about this with a lot of other survivors.

And I feel like, you know, an eating disorder is just part two of after you've been sexually abused, like that.

It just inevitably follows.

And, you know, so I had done, I had had various disordered eating patterns my whole life.

It all just stopped when I was pregnant with Ida.

It was like this miracle of happy endorphins and I don't know, a flood of oxytocin and joyful feelings, you know, and love for this little alien that was, that was growing and also fascination.

But I felt connected.

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.

Like you're you're fine you know you're fine you're okay and that was the beginning that has helped me move through some of the trauma in my body dancing playing music being in community with other women has been so important for me this woman that i feel safe with when i was 16 i moved in with i ran away from home at 15 and was kind of you know itinerant and hiding in

Persephone's basement and the cemetery and the staying up all night at the Croissant Real, Anse-Laurent, playing chess with the old guys, or, you know, going and hiding out in the Marie-Rén Du Monde's

cathedral, a little cathedral that was close to my alternative high school that was across the street from McGill, and going there in the winter and sitting in a pew and, you know, falling asleep.

But when I was 16, I got this terrible telemarketing job and I moved in with three other women that I went to high school with who are my dear beloved friends to this day.

Allie and Siobhan and Kim and our friends, and all of our other,

you know, friends just learning how to live in the world

would come by.

And we called the apartment the womb, you know, and it was that was such a healing time.

They were the first people other than Persephone that I disclosed to.

You know, they, we just learned so much from each other.

What love feels like.

What love?

To feel loved.

We did that for each other.

We became, you know, and I think that that is such a universally,

I think for everyone I know who identifies in any way as queer has had a version of that, where you, you, at some, except for the very, very, very lucky few who were fully, fully accepted by their families.

But I don't, I don't know many people who identify as queer, who were fully accepted by their families in those developmental years.

We know a couple, but they're our children.

Yeah, there are exactly fifth generation.

I should say that caveat of

people over

30 now, you know?

Right.

And

that, and isn't that beautiful?

Because we're healing, like, again, it goes back to breaking these cycles of trauma.

Well, pod squad, if you are in need of a beginning of

returning to your body, I do recommend Allison's latest album, The Returner.

I feel like it's an anthem to that, to that reclamation of being here now,

of feeling, of knowing that you also have the right,

the God-given birthright of experiencing joy and love and peace inside your body.

In this brief corporeal experience, I think about what Andrea Gibson was talking about, how brief it is.

And that's the beauty.

And we, we

I won't say waste so much time, but we are embroiled for so much of our lives, I think so many of us, in not feeling okay in our bodies or needing to escape our bodies and the joy of returning to our bodies and accepting all of the pain and the scars and the

history written there is beautiful.

Who fooled us into thinking that the unmarked page was more beautiful?

You know?

Yeah.

Who did that?

So beautiful.

I just want to say, I am stunned by your music.

I'm stunned at just how profound you are.

I just am so grateful to know you.

I'm so grateful that our Tishi got to eat dinner with you.

She is incredible.

Y'all, if you don't have Tish's new singles, you've got to get it.

It's so beautiful.

Produced by our beautiful Brandy Carlisle as well.

Yeah.

Well, she came home and said, after that weekend in Nashville, I said, so tell me your favorite part.

And I thought she was going to say the red carpet or whatever.

And she said, I think my favorite part was talking to Allison at dinner.

And I was like, oh,

that's the best award I'll ever be given.

Oh my gosh.

We love you, Alison Russell.

We will see you backstage next time with some burgers and fries and Ida and Tish.

And

you just keep going.

We're in your corner forever.

I love y'all.

I'm so grateful.

Thank you for having me today.

Same, same, same.

Bye, Pod Squad.

See you next time.

Bye, Pod Squad.

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We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.