Interview: Before sold-out Tampa concert, Allison Russell talks oppression, forgiveness and more

On her current tour, Allison Russell regularly joins Hozier to sing “Work Song,” an anthemic ballad about people holding each other up. The performances are happening in front some of the biggest crowds the 44-year-old has ever played in front of, and they come just months after her earth-shattering single “Eve Was Black” beat out Jon Batiste, Rhiannon Giddens and others to win the 2024 Grammy for “Best American Roots Performance.”

Still, there’s at least one collaboration that eludes the Montreal-born, Nashville-residing, songwriter and activist.

“Oh my god. You don’t know how much I want to collaborate with Kermit. Kermit is the reason I play banjo, before I knew anything about the banjo being America’s African instrument, brought over by the diaspora,” Russell told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “Let me tell you, if ‘Sesame Street’ ever comes calling, me and Kermit have a date.”

Russell—who’s been nominated for eight Grammys and the Polaris Prize, plus won two Juno Awards—brings a similar joy and intentionality to everything she talks and sings about.

As she preps for a sold-out show in Tampa, Russell’s single “Tennessee Rise” is being deployed to get out the vote in support of U.S. Senate candidate Gloria Johnson who Republicans tried to oust from the state legislature last year.

While her latest recordings, in part, harrowingly and soulfully reference instances of sexual abuse by Russell’s adoptive father and the work she’s done to heal and reclaim her life, her activism is largely built around getting out the vote.

“It’s really our trans siblings who are just being assaulted left, right and center, you know, the most vulnerable among us,” she said about the state she’s called home since 2017. She very well could’ve been talking about Florida. In fact, Russell would love it if Sunshine State artists co-opted the idea of the Tennessee Freedom Singers for a “Florida Rise” song or offshoot of the “Love Rising” concerts that raised close to $600,000 for LGBTQ+ causes in The Volunteer State.

“We can’t erase history by banning books. We can’t break cycles of harm by pretending harm never happened. And that the only way out is through. And the only way through is together,” she said about her upcoming visit to our neck of the woods. “We have to stop treating each other as enemies and the other—we are one human family on this precious beleaguered, under full-on assault by our worst practices, planet. We can change things together. We can grow circles of goodness together.”

Her band’s moniker, the Rainbow Coalition, is a nod to that ideal and to a term that surfaced in the late-’60s when Fred Hampton brought together seemingly juxtaposed organizations—the Black Panthers, white southerners in the Young Patriots, and the Latin group Young Lords—to combat a common enemy: poverty.

“I think any people that has ever been oppressed can relate to any other people that have been oppressed,” Russell explained. “Because it’s the same toxic hierarchies trying to divide and conquer in order to extract and hoard resources. It’s just the same story over and over and over again.”

She gets the boost to soldier on onstage and on the road with bandmates. Tour, in many ways, is her refuge.

"Playing and playing shows with my friends—I always think about Willie Nelson, "On the road again / The life I love is makin' music with my friends”—basically it's what I've always loved the most," Russell said. The road is where she grows loving circles bit by bit. "I take comfort in growing circles of safety and understanding and connection. That makes me feel like I'm doing my small part to reduce harm in the world and leave it slightly better than I found it."

Right now, that world includes Hozier's fans, who are packing amphitheatres across the U.S., including the show at Tampa's MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre on Saturday, May 11.
Russell—who released her latest album, The Returner, last year—says that Hozier’s audiences are some of the most diverse she’s ever seen. In North Carolina, she played to more queer Black women than ever. “It was so joyful. When we sang ‘Eve Was Black,’ there was a group of women right at the front, holding up these signs saying ‘Eve was Black, and so are we.’ I was crying because it was so beautiful,” she added.

The audiences, she noted, are young, too—and it’s Gen Z that gives her the most hope.

“They just seem to not have a lot of the same biases that have plagued previous generations, and they seem to have deep wells of empathy and compassion and care,” she said. “Really the Rainbow Coalition is everybody that believes in the basic principle of human equality of our one human family and the fact that we have a shared destiny on this one life-bearing planet that we know of in the universe. We gotta show up for each other in better ways.”

And while Russell has a lot of ideas about the world, rest assured, she’s working on herself, too.

When Russell and her husband toured the country in their band Birds Of Chicago, she watched her daughter grow up in a van and try to meet new kids at a different park almost every day. Sometimes they accepted her, and other times, she would get rebuffed. But Ida—who’ll join mom for a few dates on the Hozier run—didn’t stay daunted for long.

“She’s made so many friends where other people might just see or feel like they couldn’t try again or take it to heart that they’ve been rejected. She has an endless curiosity about other people. She feels things really deeply,” Russell explained, adding that Ida often wonders why the world doesn’t do more to help people, who, like mom at one point, didn’t have a home. “She just really motivates me to be more proactive in trying to change the things we can no longer stand.”

Russell is working on getting closer to understanding true forgiveness, too—something she said is paramount if humanity is going to make it.

“Excommunicating anybody is really dangerous.”

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“It’s in short shrift these days. There’s a kind of an unfortunate kind of addiction to outrage that’s that I see happening online. Excommunicating anybody is really dangerous. To have a lack of forgiveness condemns us to an endless cycle of vengeance and violence and discord,” she added.

This summer, when Russell gets to Toronto for a show with Sarah McLachlan, she hopes to have enough courage to visit her abuser, who is now an elderly, ailing man.

“I’m going to try and go see him and just say, ‘I forgive you, go in peace,’ kind of thing. We’ll see if I’m able to do it,” she said. As the world asks the places like the Middle East, Sudan, the Congo and East Timor to break cycles of violence, Russell knows that she, too, must try.

“I think about these cycles of unbelievable harm. People that have endured and meted out harm far greater than anything I’ve ever had to endure. And we’re asking them as a global community to stop the violence, and we’re asking them as a global community to change, to break the cycles,” she said. “If I can’t practice forgiveness in my own life, how can I be asking anybody else to do it right?”

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