Between the Notes: Allison Russell steals the show

She did it. By the last song, the crowd was on its feet — and a standing ovation for an opener is not something you see every week.

Russell doesn't sit in one genre for long. Folk and Americana are in there, sure, but so are soul, blues, gospel and pop, often inside the same song. What got me first was the voice: big range, real power and she rations both like she knows exactly what they're worth. A lot of singers with an instrument that size can't resist reminding you of it every few bars. Russell pulls back instead, and it's that restraint that makes the moments she finally opens up hit as hard as they do — her voice filling the amphitheater one line, then dropping to something almost spoken the next.

She's a storyteller before she's anything else. Her breakthrough album, "Outside Child," put her in front of a much bigger audience with songs about survival, identity, freedom and finding joy on the other side of a hard childhood. “Nightflyer” is probably the best known of those songs, and it's part of why she's become one of the more distinct new voices in roots music.

But a record only gets you so far with her. Live, she doesn't just sing a song — her face and hands and whole body are working the story too, and even in a venue the size of the Greek, she managed to shrink the room down to something intimate.

At the beginning and throughout the set she picked up a clarinet, its woody, searching tone adding one more color to music that already resists a tidy label, then switched to banjo later on. Neither felt like a prop. They read as two more languages available to someone who knows exactly what she wants a song to say.

She wasn't up there alone, either. Guitarist Caoimhe Hopkinson, bassist and vocalist Ganessa James, and drummer/percussionist Caoi de Barra make up the rest of the Rainbow Coalition, and they've clearly logged real road time together. Hopkinson could give a song bite or texture without ever crowding Russell out. James held down a bass foundation you could feel in your chest while still handling vocals. De Barra kept things moving without steamrolling the quieter passages. When Russell pulled the music in tight, they pulled back with her; when she let that voice all the way out, they had the muscle to match it.

There was real joy between the four of them up there, and it mattered, because Russell's own story has a lot of darkness in it. She's talked publicly about surviving an abusive childhood and finding her way out through music. Knowing that changes how you hear the exuberance she brings to a stage — it doesn't read as an act, it reads as something she earned the hard way.

I've spent thirty years as a psychotherapist, and artists who can hold that kind of material without letting it define them are the ones I find myself paying attention to. Russell does it as well as anyone I've watched live. The wounds are in the songs. So is the resilience, the humor, the sensuality, the sense of community — and none of it cancels the rest out.

Even the staging backed that up. The Rainbow Coalition name and the rainbow imagery were subtle, but none of it felt like branding. It read as an honest extension of what was already happening in the music.

It helped, too, that this wasn't her crowd going in. Most of the Greek that night came for Sarah McLachlan and the songs that have followed them around for twenty-plus years — Russell's job, on paper, was to warm the room up for somebody else. Instead you could feel the room turn over the course of the set. The applause got louder. People who walked in not knowing her name were listening by the end like they'd been fans for years.

Then they stood up, and that told you everything a review doesn't need to.

Some opening acts you enjoy in the moment and forget the second the headliner walks out. Others leave you wanting to know what they do next. Allison Russell is the second kind. Sarah McLachlan is probably why most of that crowd showed up at the Greek. Allison Russell is why they'll remember it.