Brown-Forman Midnite Ramble Allison Russell

Allison’s new album, Outside Child — that draws water from the dark well of a violent past — is her first solo offering, she also being a pivotal voice in two bands: Birds of Chicago and Our Native Daughters. And telling her own story sounds now to have made her free — not from it all, but free within it: to reframe and reclaim her identity and its singular authority. 

The songs themselves — though iron-hard in their concerns — are exultant: exercising haunted dream like clean bedsheets snapped and hung out into broad daylight, and with the romantic poet’s lust for living and audacity of endurance. 

Venue: Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts