Ocean Vuong on Allison Russell’s In the Hour of Chaos: “Music to live, fight, and fuck to”

I think of In the Hour of Chaos, co-produced and co-written by dim star and me, as the mixtape to a musical that has yet to be written. I cast it with some of the artists that I find the most compelling and heart-opening (in alphabetical order here): Ahya Simone, Anna Butterss, Autumn Nicholas, Brandon Bell, Brittney Spencer, Caoi de Barra, Caoimhe Hopkinson, Chibueze Ihuoma, Denitia, Devon Gilfillian, Drew Lindsay, Elizabeth Pupo-Walker, Ganessa James, (my daughter) Ida’s Explore Community School Pop Choir, Joy Oladokun, JT Nero, Julie Williams, Kara Jackson, Kashus Culpepper, Kyshona, Lisa Coleman, Megan McCormick, Nikki Glaspie, Norah Jones, Ruby Amanfu, Sara Watkins, and Wendy Melvoin. 

We recorded between multiple tours and my two stints on Broadway guest starring as Persephone in Hadestown, in stolen hours over the span of two years and three cities: LA, Nashville, and Austin. I have felt the pull both to be part of and to call-in a collaborative, creative circle more than ever in these times of deep discord, division, dislocation, and global backslide into authoritarianism, dehumanization, and unbearable violence.

I turn to art always when I am in turmoil. Ocean Vuong’s books have become bibles to me. I have been living inside of The Emperor of Gladness on this current tour opening for divine Sarah McLachlan. Ocean and I first connected during our participation in Red Hot Org’s Hard Rain project spearheaded by Kronos Quartet. His words mean the World to me; that our music means something to him, sends me and the Rainbow Coalition out and up through the rafters to the Cosmos and the Mystic. 

—Allison Russell, 2026

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Music has healed human beings for as long as we have been singing. But what does it mean when an artist deliberately turns her instrument into medicinal enactment? What is discovered when joy, fulfillment, and wonder are the guiding lights of an album, when one does not repair by accident—but by deliberate artistry?

 This is indeed rare, even daring, in a culture that sees artistic methods of healing and repair as merely “service” or “social work,” that believes “real” art, serious “grown-up” art, the art lauded by institutions and museums, shouldn’t concern itself with something so minor and domestic as “feeling better.” But this revisionist view of music goes against its historic reality: that music, made to heal, heals. This is true of our most ancient hymns and rhythms and chants. Why should this change now?

 In this new album by Allison Russell, one of the greatest lyric storytellers of our time, redemption does not come from the voice alone—it comes through the act of controlling and re-casting our stories so that they might be embodied, shared, and celebrated by others. Not unlike the R&B, Blues, and Folk/Country traditions that she honors and expands, her songs are sonic accompaniment to life itself. This is music to live, fight, and fuck to. Songs you put on after work because you need to be beside somebody in an empty room. Songs to which you could drive to the edge of the county just to return to whatever keeps you faithful—or to floor it across state lines and start a Tracy-Chapman-fast-car new life and get “outta here.” But more importantly, these are songs you send to a friend and say, simply, call me after you hear this. An impulse that comes from the ancient desire to use music as a conductor of love between two people. Here’s what I wanted to say but couldn’t find the words for. And even if what we want to say are a litany of the most painful things, that the song makes it shareable, makes it known, like a cigarette passed from one to another in the dark, is a triumph.

—Ocean Vuong, 2026

Watch Allison Russell perform “Poison Arrow” and “Persphone” below.

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