In honor of Allison Russell’s 2024 Grammy win for Best American Roots Performance, we’re re-running our interview about the making of “Eve Was Black.â€
On her 2021 debut, Outside Child, Allison Russell vividly described escaping the abuse perpetrated by her white adoptive father and finding joy in its aftermath. The singer-songwriter opens her second album, The Returner, by attempting to turn a page on that story completely. “So long, farewell, adieu, adieu / To that tunnel I went through,†she sings on “Springtime,†over a burst of strings and synthesizers.
Of course, personal narratives are rarely that neat. At the center of Russell’s largely sunny new record is “Eve Was Black,†a direct confrontation with the racism inextricably linked to her abuse. “Do I remind you of what you lost?†Russell snarls. “Do you hate or do you lust?†In the stirring third verse, she narrates a lynching, her voice growing more urgent by the line as the pounding percussion gets louder. A body swinging from the tree would be an evocative final image, but Russell isn’t content to end in such a dark place. As the song fades out, another banjo and violin enter, and she begins to sing, “De l’Afrique aux Amériques / Une famille, une famille.†The lines are repurposed from “You’re Not Alone,†a song she wrote with the group Our Native Daughters: “From Africa to America, one family, one family.â€
“Eve Was Black†was a true community effort: first written for a ballet collaboration, then brought to life with the violin-cello duo SistaStrings, and later produced by Dim Star, the electro-folk duo that includes Russell’s singer-songwriter partner, JT Nero, and writer-producer Drew Lindsay. It also forms “the backbone†of the record with two empowering tracks, “Demons†and “Snakelife.â€
While Russell was keen to speak more about “Eve,†she cautioned that listeners need to “take their own journey†with it: “That is a beautiful part of the alchemy of art to me: the way that songs magically transform depending on who is taking that song into their heart, their lived experience, where they are in that moment as they listen.â€
When in the process of the album did “Eve Was Black†start to come together?
“Eve Was Black†actually predates all the rest of the songs on the record. I wrote it for a ballet that was a collaboration with Kevin Thomas, who was a fellow Caribbean Montrealer, and he has an incredible dance company called Collage Dance in Memphis, Tennessee. He was coming to Nashville to be a guest choreographer for a short piece at the Nashville Ballet, and the rough title was Songs of Freedom. I composed the bones of “Eve Was Black†— it was just voice and banjo and me stomping my foot in its first iteration. We did like a seven-and-a-half-minute version of it, and I invited in SistaStrings to flesh it out with their absolutely inventive cello and violin interplay.
As soon as I wrote it, I knew that it was part of the larger story of The Returner. “Eve Was Black,†“Snakelife,†and “Demons†live as their own little sub-trilogy. When I wrote “Demons,†it became clear by the end that this was deeply related to “Eve Was Black.†And I knew that I wanted to have another song that went even more explicit. If I had to give a dissertation about this album, I would say that “Snakelife†was the thesis statement. It’s the final stanza, really: “I used to dream, but now I write / I wield my words like spindles bright / To weave a world where every child / Is safe and loved, is safe and loved / Is safe and loved / And Black is beautiful and good.â€
How did knowing that you were writing “Eve Was Black†to be performed in dance and then later remaking it for the album affect what the song sounded like?
It deepened my relationship with the song thematically. There’s a thing that happens — and my dear brother Joe Henry talks about this — where sometimes you’re writing and you don’t actually know what you’re writing about until later. “Eve Was Black†is an anthem of love for our intersectional communities that are fighting for equality in a time when we are suffering from major empathy impairment globally and still so deeply plagued by the false ideology of white supremacy and all the other bigotries that ride on its coattails. And I realized that for me, that song had become a personal anthem of sorts, but also an homage to all of the powerful women on whose shoulders we’re all standing.
I’m not a religious person, even remotely. I’m a hopeful agnostic, I would say. So often, the language of religion, and particularly Christianity and the book of Genesis, is used as a weapon against Black women. And there’s a satisfaction in playing with that imagery as a literary device. My entire childhood was spent being told that I was inherently sinful because I was raised, unfortunately, by an American expat who grew up in a sundown town and who had been ideologically abused by his community. I will spend the rest of my life decolonizing my mind. And “Eve Was Black†is very personally satisfying to have written and very empowering. It’s kind of an open letter to people suffering from the sickness of white supremacy.
You have this deep understanding of history in your songwriting. This made me think back to songs like “Quasheba, Quasheba†or “Hy-Brasil†that are informed by the history of slavery and your own ancestry.
I am interested in the things that we are told and the images that we are shown over and over again to the point where it seems reasonable. In what world does a blond, blue-eyed Jesus seem reasonable when he was a Jewish man from Bethlehem? [Laughs] Just stuff that is so culturally ingrained and how helpful it is to actually do the research and pick apart the fallacies. It takes the fangs out.
There’s a lot more raw rage and sorrow in “Eve Was Black†because it’s never just one thing. My abuser was also my adoptive father, the only father figure in my life. And he became monstrous because of the monstrous abuse he had suffered as well. Ideological abuse is some of the most insidious of abuses to overcome. We’re seeing that in our country too with this massive resurgence of fascism, of demagoguery, of racism, of homophobia. An unfortunate number of people are sleepwalking through it because they’ve been gradually, by degrees, radicalized.
What you were saying makes me think about this idea of bearing witness to history.
We’re not separate from it, you know. If we choose to speak, that has a ramification, and if we choose to be silent, that has bigger ramifications. There’s no being neutral — it’s impossible in this time. There’s an urgency to the music on The Returner because it’s an urgency we’re all feeling as a community and a refusal to be cowed or paralyzed or frozen in fear.
For me, it’s a reclaiming of my own body, reclaiming of my own spirit of joy, because the last two years of touring Outside Child and talking a lot about my childhood, it’s been challenging. I signed up for it; I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it because I think it ultimately reduces harm because those cycles of abuse and violence flourish with our silence. But it does still take a toll.
In the third verse of “Eve Was Black,†you begin narrating a lynching in the song. What were you considering in both writing that part of the song and then performing it?
I was considering all the ways that we get lynched in real life. We’ve had a senator in our own house, here in Tennessee, talk about how we should bring back hanging from trees. Lynching hasn’t stopped in America, and in fact, it’s been ratcheting up again. And then there are the ways that we psychologically lynch one another every day. This intensity of anti-Blackness is ongoing in so many different ways. Things like people assuming that you are being violent as a Black woman if you’re simply having a boundary. And there’s an internalized self-hatred that occurs. I talk about that in “Demons.†The person who says to me, “It’s such a shame, you’ve got the bad hair and the bad skin†— that was my friend’s Jamaican mom. That was a Black, grown woman who said that to me when I was five years old because that’s how deep internalized self-hatred and bias goes.
So, what can I do? All I can do is throw songs at things and do harm-reduction work as best I can within my sphere of influence and expertise. It’s very hard to imagine trying to love someone who sees you as less than human, who would happily hang you from a tree if they could get away with it. I wanted any listener who heard that song to feel the intense discomfort in that moment. And I wanted them to come back into the circle in the end, where I switched to French. I grew up speaking both languages and thinking in both languages, and the colonial dominance of English everywhere is its own violence.
That’s the other moment on the song that stands out to me. It feels cleansing, and also, the lyrics call back to your song “You’re Not Alone.â€
It’s like the rebirth. All of these things are present in us at all times. The trauma is present, the healing is present, the pain of healing, the joy of it, the pain of deep loneliness, and of being in community and circle. Those things coexist paradoxically within us at all times.
“Eve Was Black†takes the form of an open letter to my abuser, but also to anyone suffering from these false ideologies of toxic hierarchy, whatever that may be. When you’re told this is how it is your whole life, it takes active de-brainwashing to free your mind. That coda is an invitation back to the circle. It’s saying, “You may have done horrible and monstrous things, but nobody is a monster.†There always, I think, has to be a way back to the circle.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.