“Where in the world are the joyful motherfuckers”

So begins the final track of Allison Russell’s first solo album, “Outside Child” — a masterpiece of her reflections on trauma, abuse, love and legacy.

Born to a teenage Canadian mother and a Grenadian father, sexually and physically abused by a white supremacist stepfather, Russell ran away at age 15, living on the streets of Montreal before moving across Canada to some other relatives.

Much of the coverage I’ve read has focused on the narrative behind the album more than the details, so I want to say up front that the music is good — really damn good. Russell’s voice is rich and flexible, one moment high and soft, the next low and triumphant, then fading again, sliding the vowels of the lyrics into a hum. Her incongruous clarinet blends wonderfully with the more traditional folk-rock instrumentation. The lyrics are colored by light in azures and violets and blues, rooted in cathedrals and graveyards and basement windows.

Violence is omnipresent, more so in some songs than in others — “4^th Day Prayer” for example — but often decentered, the context for the song but not the topic of it. “Blood on my shirt, two ripped buttons, might have killed me that time, oooh if I’d let him,” is the lead in to “Persephone,” a love song to a high school girlfriend. The rest of the lyrics are about awkward teenage love and sexual awakening — “put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin.” The album is as much a celebration of the community that helped her survive as it is about what she survived.

Despite the personal and reflective nature of the album, Russell keeps looking outward, advocating an ethos of defiant solidarity, of celebration, of invitation to join the good fight — not only in the album, but in her interviews, her writing, her curated Newport set, and elsewhere. In every interview I’ve heard with her, she is frank, soft spoken, almost boundlessly compassionate, even to her stepfather, who she speaks of as being in part a product of his own abusive, racist upbringing.

Like Paul Simon, you might think Allison Russell would have trouble with the word motherfucker — it’s the only profanity on the record. But there’s no hitch when she sings “joyful motherfuckers” in breathy, light voice, capturing the ethos of the album in two words, hard edged, unapologetic, uplifting.

And yet it is not the most thrilling and challenging line of the song. That one is saved for the last line, when, after 49 minutes, Russell breaks the fourth wall, stares right out at the audience and sings “hey you, hey you, who you think I’m talking to, show ‘em what you got in your heart.” And then the album ends.