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On 'Outside Child,' Allison Russell Confronts Trauma With Compassion

Allison Russell
Marc Baptiste
/
Courtesy of the artist
Allison Russell

Music heals. Allison Russell is a great example of that.

The singer-songwriter has been part of several musical projects, including Po' Girl and Birds of Chicago. Most recently, Russell was involved with folk group Our Native Daughters, where she was able to dispel a massive writer's block.

New songs came out in a torrent. The result is Outside Child, an album that lays bare both personal and intergenerational abuse. Despite creating art from trauma, Russell is strengthened by love, connection and creation. The blues stirs the soul, bringing with it catharsis and joy.

Listen to the conversation and performance via the audio player above.

Copyright 2021 XPN

World Cafe Nashville correspondent Jessie Scott is a 50-year radio veteran, and is currently the program director and afternoon drive host at WMOT Roots Radio in Nashville. She has spent the last couple of decades nurturing, curating, writing, and creating audio and video, in an effort to tell the story of American roots music.
Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

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