‘I had been in a very dark place’
‘I’ve never found that music is going to cure something for me’
Soccer Mommy is the name of the musical vehicle of Nashville singersongwriter Sophie Allison. Being only 22, she isn’t old enough to be one of those suburban U.S. ‘soccer moms’.
‘It’s just a name. I liked the words and well, Sophie Allison… that’s not very rock and roll!’ she says in a southern drawl.
But mining the memory of your most anguished hours and laying your soul bare definitely is. She, her three-piece band, boyfriend and guitarist Julian Powell among them, create a lofi indie guitar soundscape for lyrics such as those which cover her mother’s battle with cancer (Yellow Is The Colour of Her Eyes) and her own struggles with depression which underpin many of the songs on her sophomore album Color Theory. It comes two years after the release of her debut Clean.
‘I don’t really like happy music, not happy guitar music at least,’ she says.
‘I listen to rap and pop music. In terms of my own style, my own voice doesn’t naturally lend itself to that.’
Comparisons have been drawn between Allison and Nineties indie rocker Juliana Hatfield. I would compare her to the much-missed Elliot Smith. She herself says she is influenced by among others Avril Lavigne. That may mystify many when they hear Allison’s deeply personal songs such as Circle The Drain, Bloodstream and the aforementioned Yellow.
‘I would say less Juliana Hatfield and more Elliot Smith. He is someone I’ve delved into a lot more,’ she says of the singer who ended his own life in 2003.
‘I think with Elliot Smith and Avril Lavigne, weirdly, there are some similarities. I don’t think anyone else in the world thinks that. Her sound was a new 2000s pop thing, a mix of heavier, kinda punk rock and acoustic guitar. She is very confrontational. Even if her lyrics are awful there’s some draw there for me.’
Allison herself was drawn to music at a very young age.
‘I got a toy guitar at a charity sale at my brother’s school. I think I would have played music regardless but being in Nashville, it got me started,’ she said.
She talks candidly about her battles with depression and concedes that in any case it’s all there in the songs, perhaps most pointedly in Circle The Drain.
‘That song is all about me,’ she laughs, almost incongruously.
‘It’s like I am destroying myself and I am getting sucked down into misery because of myself. I had been in a very dark place to the point where I wasn’t even leaving my room, not seeing anyone for a week. I felt like I was almost lackadaisically falling apart and becoming completely unsalvageable.’
She laughs again, perhaps at the scale of her own statement. Speaking to an artist who is becoming one of the musical names to drop in 2020, you sense that music is not her salvation and it is incidental to her if listeners take some form of comfort from her songs.
‘I don’t think about it at all. But I don’t not hope that people get something out of it. If they do, good for them,’ she says.
‘I’ve never found that music is going to cure something for me. I’ve never personally thought that anything can fix me when my depression recurs. I am happy to be a musician and it definitely relieved the anxiety about what I was going to do with my life but it didn’t fix the problems I have with depression. Finding love and some other things does help to fix it though.’
Color Theory by Soccer Mommy is out on February 28