90. Allison Russell
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Folks, this is my dear friend Alli Russell. I spent well over 100 days on the road with her last year playing in her band, Birds of Chicago. We were on the road when the pandemic spun out of control and we all came home to Nashville and I haven’t seen her since. That makes me sad because she and her husband JT, who is also in the band, are 2 of my very favourite people. I actually have known Alli for a long time, going back to the late 90’s in Vancouver, although she was on the road so much, I rarely saw her. I had a different episode ready to go today, but decided to yank it in light of the utter meltdown here in the US, and just felt it wasn’t a good time for unrelated music talk. So I wasn’t going to release anything this week, but it’s also not a good time for silence, so I called Alli and asked her if she would just come on and talk. This show is anything but political, and frankly I’m not an eloquent speaker on those kinds of subjects, even when I feel strongly about the horrific things I see going on around me, living in a country that is not my own, but seeing such divide and hatred all being fumbled and fueled by an ineffective, and unqualified leader. But Alli is eloquent and heartfelt, and we talked about her experiences with racism and bigotry both in the US and Canada (Yes, Canada is far from innocent). We had one of those dreadful Zoom connections where there is about a 2 second delay, making conversation awkward (c’mon tech world it’s 2020 - you really can’t figure that out?), so I just kept my mouth shut pretty much the whole time, which I think is what Zoom was trying to tell me to do anyway. I had wanted to have Alli on the show to talk music, but that’s for another time, and a future episode, so we didn’t talk about music at all. I thought she’d be angrier. I’ve seen some of the crap she has to go through on a daily basis dealing with airports, hotels, sometimes even audiences, and venue owners - not often with those last two, but enough blatant bigotry to be shocking to me. I figured the violence unleashed on George Floyd would have pushed her over the edge and she’d be pissed off and fiercely angry, and she is, but in a way only Alli can be, which is to see light and hope somewhere in all of this and taking it all in calmly and trying to make sense of it. I thought maybe she’d have some insight into things we can do to actually help to change the current climate, starting with getting rid of completely ineffective and destructive “leadership” on all levels, through to educating, reading, admitting where we’ve f’d up and can do better and try to change it. And she did. And she has some excellent ideas of where to look, what to read, where to give money if you can, and she even plays a song for us. One I’ve played with her probably 100 times, but never get tired of hearing. Have a listen. I did. Thank you Alli.
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