6 hours ago
1
Headlining Tuesday night at the Belasco in downtown Los Angeles, Allison Russell acknowledged that she was coming into town late, really late, fulfilling a gig that was originally scheduled there for last fall. But she had one of the better tardy notes on record. “The only reason I would ever reschedule a tour date, other than terrible illness, is a Broadway debut,” she explained, apologetically, getting a lot of cheers from fans who’d made it to the opposite coast for her run as Persephone in “Hadestown.” The gods must be and are a bit crazy in that show, but she was not crazy enough to turn it down. Nor did she forgo the chance to open 53 U.S. and international dates for Hozier throughout the better part of last year.
All of which goes toward explaining why Russell is now newly re-embarked afresh on a headline tour behind her much-lauded sophomore album, “The Returner,” nearly two years after it came out. The enthusiasm of the Belasco crowd was none the worse for the wait. And if anything from 2023 merits returning to again and again, it’s that collection of material, the determined spiritual resilience of which arguably feels more necessary in today’s climate than it did even half-a-year ago. In the parlance of Van Morrison, an Allison Russell show is a true “did ye get healed?” experience. Just as much as it’s a concert, her performance feels like an activation… in the old-school, spiritual sense, of course, not the Coachella connotation.
There was a bonus to the deferment in the delayed gratification of this tour: She’s brought “Hadestown” with her for this run. Not so much literally, although she is closing her shows now with a cover of that production’s heart-rending denouement, “We Raise Her Cups.” It’s in the sense of how much she seems to have grown physically as a performer through her short but sure turn on Broadway. That’s wildly apparent even if she was already well on her way to fully embodying her own music on stage in the initial dates she did supporting “The Returner,” before she ever joined the Fates for a fateful detour into the legit world. The discipline she experienced in running through that taxing production every night may have afforded her an even greater sense of freedom in how she moves on stage now — and how she ties all that exuberant physicality to a seemingly bottomless wellspring of raw emotions.
Russell starts and finishes these emotional roller-coaster nights with what amounts to a cathartic exorcism party, especially with “Stay Right Here,” the number that really kicks the celebrating into gear early in her show, and “Demons,” the seriocomic single that has crept up as the inevitable closer to the main part of her nightly set.
You wouldn’t exactly call Russell a rock ‘n’ roll artist — she’s somewhere in the wide intersection of Americana, folk and soul, if it comes down to obvious genres — but “Stay Right Here” is undeniably a rocker, with Caoimhe Hopkinson laying down a signature electric guitar riff, bassist Ganessa James thickening up the mix and Caoi de Barra putting mallets where they matter. Plus, like just about every great rock song, it has a clarinet solo in it, courtesy of Russell augmenting her Rainbow Coalition band with her own reed work. The song sounds like a joy spree, and it is, but there’s also something hard-fought in every single line she sings — mostly just the battle to resist nihilism and want to stay alive, when trauma has had its day in your life, and to make things better for a daughter. “When we die, we’ll die fighting” is the key recurring lyric of the song, but now, on top of that, she bellows as an aside, “Fight fascism!,” because this is 2025.
Russell gets an entire concert’s worth of calisthenic workout in, in “Stay Right Here” alone, with enough leaping around to suggest the seemingly solid stage is built of trampoline material. But she’s also turning and twisting herself sideways to embody the more tortured undertones of the tune when she’s not jumping for joy. There’s an irony that this is one of those songs where she refers back to the abusive childhood that her fans are well familiar with, by singing, “Something that I learned when I was three: how to leave my body.” Clearly, she’s back in it enough to make up for those lost, dissociative years, and then some — with, surely, some additional technique she picked up executing choreography for “Hadestown” not hurting at all when it comes to now being as physically expressive a performer as she always was a spiritual one.
That same spirit comes back around near the end of the show with “Demons,” a slinkier, funkier and more mirthful signature song, with its message that the best defense against personal devils is self-knowing laughter. There’s a slyness to how she creeps around like the bogeyman she’s symbolically overcoming in this anthem of personal, psychological liberation… and some humor to how she alludes to historic racism with her call to “send ’em” — her demons, that is — “to the back of the bus.” (Terminate self-doubt with extreme prejudice, she seems to be saying.) Vocally, this is also one of the numbers where she shows that, as high as her voice can soar, she can also righteously out-growl any goblin these lyrics might conjure up.
Between the exuberant first and final stretches of her set, there is a lot of other terrain covered. Things get quite gentle with the acoustic, romantic idyll that is “Persephone.” That title is, by the way, no relation to the role she played in “Hadestown”… except that it is, inasmuch as mutual fans of Russell and Anais Mitchell’s Broadway show were prompted by the song’s title to wonder out loud, on social media and elsewhere, whether she might actually be a good fill-in for the role of Hades’ wife, who of course goes by that name. Russell’s real-life Persephone was a fellow teena girl back in Montreal who became her lover and her salvation when she ran away from home and was sleeping on park benches. Singing the song about this early transformational figure in her young life was an occasion for Russell to introduce it with just a bit of her personal story. “I did not get lucky with my birth family, my foster family or my adoptive family,” she told the audience, but “I got so lucky with my chosen family.”
Present company included in that, presumably. Russell always makes a big deal of her band, and this night was no exception, with the singer-songwriter joining her ensemble as part of a left-to-right, semicircular lineup for the opening, before eventually stepping in front of them as their leader. Even in the center spotlight, she’s the model of sharing the on-stage love, often spinning around in a circle, pointing at them with outstretched arms, shaking jazz hands at them as if she was sprinkling invisible holy water in the players’ (and the audience’s) respective directions.
What was real were the tears that came at a couple of mid-points in the show. If you’ve seen Russell on stage in any context before, even a purely theatrical one, this may be no surprise. In an interview with Variety while she was still doing “Hadestown” this past winter, she said that she cried every night while playing the goddess Persephone — not as an acting stunt, but because she was so in-character and so in-the-moment, she genuinely believed that those Orpheus and Eurydice kids were gonna make it, and was genuinely heartsick when they didn’t.
She has a less eternal, more topical reason to be sorrowful when she’s on stage now doing her own material. Russell has lately been reviving a moving song she used to do as part of the duo Birds of Chicago called “Super Lover.” (A recently released studio version featured friend Annie Lennox as her duet partner.) The lyrics have been partly rewritten to begin with the lines “Tears of rage, tears of grief / Palestine, Israel to Tennessee,” and those came naturally as she called the parents of the world to consider all the children of the world as their own, without exceptions. Somewhere, there is an audience that considers this too woke, and it’s not the audience that comes to an Allison Russell show, wherein most everyone is likely open to her call to be a mother for a few minutes.
And, speaking of mothers, Russell also used the acoustic mid-set section to bust out the song that closed her 2021 “Outside Child” breakthrough album, with the impolite chorus line “Where in the world are the joyful motherfuckers?” (It was preceded, as usual, by an apology to any young children in the audience, whom she urged not to do what she has done.) Here at the Belasco, no one had to look far to find a few hundred of them.
That song would be an effective encore number for Russell, and has been, but after her “Hadestown” experience, she’s now sagely ending her performances with Anais Mitchell’s “We Raise Our Cups,” joined in a choral lineup by her band and also her very talented opening act, Kara Jackson. This is the song that suggests that, in some kind of timeline, Eurydice and Orpheus have not been defeated in their mission to reunite outside the underworld. In the present moment, at which many in her audience might rather take Hades as a leader in place of what we’ve got, Mitchell’s hopeful closer is an anthem that resonates.
But then, so does Russell’s entire career, which still feels nascent, even though the performer is now into her wisened early 40s. Taking a rooting interest in her feels bigger than investing in just one artist — she represents the best of what music could be and sometimes is, with that stunning voice as a trigger for empathy, self-understanding and forgiveness. And if she can pull off the additional fear of making the banjo feel like the most inherently emotional instrument of them all, then deeper personal or societal transformations suddenly don’t seem so impossible.
Allison Russell’s remaining U.S. tour dates:
5-23 Austin, TX – Scoot Inn
5-24 Fort Worth, TX – Tannahill’s Tavern & Music Hall
5-25 Houston, TX – The Heights Theater
5-28 Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
Russell can also be seen coming up in Los Angeles taking part in a reunion of Our Native Daughters as part of a Rhiannon Giddens-led show June 18 at the Hollywood Bowl.
English (US) ·