Soccer Mommy

ON HER POWERFULLY PERSONAL SECOND ALBUM, SOCCER MOMMY UPS THE ANTE WITH A BROAD SONIC AND THEMATIC PALATE THAT SHOWS HER TRUE STRENGTHS AS A SONGWRITER.

At age 22, Tennessee trailblazer Sophie Allison – better known by her indie-rock alter ego

Soccer Mommy – has lived through more than her fair share of ups and downs. Her music, often cool and charismatic as Allison herself, is defined by its heart-on-sleeve honesty, quips that cut straight down to the soul, and fretwork so fanciful it demands repeat listens. She’s been compared to artists like Mitski and Avril Lavigne (both of whom she also cites as major influences), but really, pairing Soccer Mommy with anyone else is doing Allison an injustice – she’s a Strat-wielding superstar all of her own accord; a luminary of the lowkey, and one to watch with a keen eye as she continues catapulting through the ranks.

On her second album ColorTheory, Allison separates her thematic abstractions into three distinct categories marked by – shock and awe – colours. Blue represents sadness and depression; yellow represents physical and emotional illness; and gray represents darkness, emptiness and loss. Driven by a notably prickly and raw mix – an intentional byproduct of Allison recording the album live with members of her touring band (in her own words, she wanted the experience of listening to it to feel like “finding a dusty old cassette tape that’s become messed up over time”) – it’s a viscerally poignant and powerful listen. Naturally, we had to learn more.

How did you come up with the concept of using colours to represent the different emotions and themes you explore on LP2?

I think I’ve always associated certain colours with themes, even just from reading stuff in high school and college. Specific types of imagery are often used to make a theme really prominent, and [allow the writer to] continue bringing it up without having to use any exact dialogue around it. I’ve always been really intrigued by the idea of an album having these little themes that reoccur a lot and carry that same weight and same idea, and using them to paint a more vivid picture for the listener. And colour has been a huge one for me. People often associate a lot of different feelings with random colours that have random meanings to them, and I think that’s really cool.

Did you find that having a colour-coordinated palate for those themes helped you shape this record structurally?

I think I’ve always been one, when I’m making a record, to need it to feel kind of perfect and feel intentional, and feel like it has this sense of a beginning, and then rising and falling action, and then closure – just like a book or a movie would have. And closure for me doesn’t always have to be literal closure, it can just be the final thing you have to say on a certain topic. But it’s always been really important to me to have those arcs, and make sure that it feels like if you were to sit down and listen to this record the whole way through, it had a coherent story and a journey – even if it’s not in the same way that a book would have a story.

Do you find that writing on the road is a good way to ground yourself and take your mind away from the chaos of touring?

For me, writing on the road feels no different than writing at home. I think when the inspiration for a song starts coming to me, I just want to finish it, and I don’t really feel any barrier to that based on where I am. As long as I can get some time alone or at least a little bit of privacy, I can work on that and get in that headspace. I don’t know that it really detracted from any of crazy stuff that happens on tour. I’m a Gemini – my life is chaotic at home too. It’s constant chaos. Writing is even a little bit chaotic for me. Most things in life are chaos in my book.

Do you feel like the experiences you had on tour rubbed off on the songs themselves?

I can listen to like one or two of the songs and remember exactly where I was. Like “Yellow Is The Color Of Her Eyes” – that imagery is hugely inspired by the city I was in the day I wrote those verses. We were spending a day in Holyhead in the UK, which was just the most beautiful little seaside town where we could walk to the ocean right from where we were staying. It was so beautiful and the imagery was really inspiring to me, and I got the verses for “Yellow” down that day. I didn’t even write them down. I didn’t even have a guitar – they just kind of came into my head. The imagery in that song is obviously about the water, looking out at the water and having this kind of moment, and that’s literally what I was doing in Holyhead.

How did you find the experience of recording with a full band?

I had always wanted to bring the band into the studio with me. Julian [Powell, guitar] has been a part of the experience since Clean – he played guitar on that and had all these ideas for production and stuff, so he was a big part of that record. I always wanted to have the band that I play with in the studio with me and be able to capture that live feeling, but I just didn’t really have that at the time beyond Julian. We had a lot of people interchanging. Graeme [Goetz, bass] might’ve been in the band when Clean was recorded, but it was a recent thing, and the rest of the band was still kind of phasing in and out. Plus, we didn’t have any money to send everybody up to New York.

Did you find that jamming and recording live was crucial in capturing the feeling you were after on ColorTheory?

Oh, absolutely! When I think of a song like “Crawling In My Skin”, I can’t help but think about how it was originally an 18-minute recording. There was literally, like, 12 minutes of us just playing this insanely long outro and trying out all these ideas between me and Julian and Graeme. There were a couple of tracks where we kind of went on forever, just trying to capture the magic that happens when we go and we practise at Rodrigo’s [Avendano, guitar] house and spend hours jamming together.

What axes were you slinging in the Color sessions?

Theory

I have this ’94 custom shop Strat with a holographic purple sparkle, and that’s basically my baby. And then we had a couple of Teles from the studio, and I brought my Jaguar in with me.

What makes that ’94 Strat so special to you?

I wish you could see it, then you’d know! The finish has these sparkling red, blue and purple flakes in it so that when the light hits the guitar, it shines really bright and creates all these crazy colours. But it also just sounds amazing. It has these pickups that I really love on it – I don’t remember the name of them, but they sound incredible. It’s just a really nice guitar that also happens to be the perfect visual experience. I bought it for myself for my birthday one year – I found it while I was scrolling aimlessly on Reverb and I was like, “Oh my God, that is literally the coolest guitar I have ever seen in my life.” And I got it! It’s mine!