You’re right. The quote rhythm had become mechanical: setup, quote, one paragraph, quote, repeat. This version lets scenes and ideas develop for several paragraphs before bringing Russell back in, and it introduces In the Hour of Chaos naturally while italicizing album titles throughout.
Five years ago, Allison Russell wasn’t sure she’d ever release the most personal album she’d made.
Outside Child had been recorded with help from a Canada Council writing grant that gave Russell enough money for four days in the studio. The songs were deeply autobiographical, and for a while, she just sat on them.
Then the pandemic hit. Russell was living in Nashville with her partner and their young child, staring down what she describes as “deep and scary financial insecurity.” The music industry had shut down, work had disappeared and the future felt increasingly unstable.
“I don’t know that I would have ever put out Outside Child if it hadn’t been for the desperation of the lockdown,” Russell says.
The album was what she had, so she started reaching out. One of those people was Brandi Carlile, whose career Russell admired not only for the music but for the way Carlile had built a community around it and opened doors for other artists.
Russell thought maybe she’d have some advice. Instead, Carlile and her wife, Catherine Shepherd, became early champions of the record, helping Russell find a team and break through in an industry where she’d spent years largely working as a songwriter.
“They ended up really championing that record and knocking open doors in the music industry for me,” Russell says.
Those doors changed everything. Outside Child came out in 2021, and Russell’s career took off quickly.
She curated a closing set at the Newport Folk Festival, toured with Carlile and Hozier, performed with Joni Mitchell and won a Grammy for “Eve Was Black.” She made her Broadway debut as Persephone in Hadestown, co-wrote a song for Mavis Staples with Hozier and is now opening for Sarah McLachlan.
Russell can trace nearly every turn in that rise back to someone making room for her.
“Basically every single kind of magical, pinch-me thing that’s happened for me as an artist in the last five years has come through the auspices and the grace and the generosity of other women,” she says.
She doesn’t tell the story like a solo triumph. Community isn’t a side note to the career. It’s the reason the career happened, and that idea now sits at the center of her new album, In the Hour of Chaos.
The record is packed with collaborators, including Norah Jones, Brittney Spencer and Cassius Culpepper. Russell says collaboration is the thing she’s “hooked on,” partly because she believes the skills required to make music with other people extend well beyond the studio.
Being in an ensemble means listening. It means leaving room for someone else and paying attention to what’s happening around you instead of simply waiting for your turn.
“Those are the things that also make us good members of a civil society,” Russell says.
The emphasis on community in In the Hour of Chaos also comes from something Russell has been missing. As her career has grown, she’s spent more time on the road and less time with many of the people who shaped her. The album became a way to bring some of that connection back into the work.
“I don’t want to talk to myself,” she says. “I want to talk to people that inspire me and uplift.”
For Russell, the point isn’t to collect recognizable names on a track list. She wants to be surrounded by artists who push her somewhere she couldn’t get on her own.
“The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts,” she says. “We have a musical conversation that I could never have just on my own, talking to myself.”
That idea has become more urgent for Russell as she looks at the world around her. She sees a culture increasingly shaped by fear, polarization and constant online outrage, where people can spend hours absorbing the worst thing happening anywhere without ever being in a room with the people around them.
She worries that outrage can become its own kind of paralysis. Rather than spending all her energy reacting to every new crisis, Russell has been looking to writers and leaders who resisted injustice while continuing to build the kind of communities they wanted to see.
“I’m learning from those teachers who came before us that joy is resistance,” she says.
That doesn’t mean ignoring what’s wrong. For Russell, joy is what makes it possible to keep going without surrendering to fear or isolation. It’s a choice to keep creating, gathering and caring for other people when the pressure is pushing in the opposite direction.
Music is central to that choice because it gets people back into the same room.
Russell sees live shows as one of the few remaining spaces where people with different beliefs, backgrounds and identities can gather and experience something together. A song can move a room before anyone has agreed on what they think about everything else.
“You can all feel something at the same time through a song,” she says. “It links. It’s incredible what it does for us physiologically and spiritually.”
Russell describes herself as a “hopeful agnostic,” but she has deep respect for people of faith in her life and sees something undeniably spiritual in what can happen when people create together.
“The closest I come to feeling a sense of magic and mystery and spirituality is being together in creative communion at live shows,” she says.
Her band reflects that idea physically. They stand in a semicircle onstage, leaving the audience to form the other half. Russell doesn’t see the people who show up as passive observers. They’re part of what’s being created.
“We create a conduit together,” she says. “It’s not just the people onstage. It’s the people that come to participate in this practice of sharing music and community together.”
After everything that’s happened over the past five years, Russell keeps returning to the same truth. Her life changed because people showed up for her, opened doors and invited her into rooms she couldn’t have entered alone.
Now, with In the Hour of Chaos, she’s trying to extend that circle.
“We’re not alone,” Russell says. “We are a beloved community every time we choose to be.”
For Russell, the choice doesn’t have to look dramatic. Careers can change because someone sends an email, makes an introduction or decides there’s room for one more person. Communities can change the same way.
“All those little things make a difference,” she says.
