66 new york | march 2–15, 2020
TheCULTURE PAGES
utfitted in grungy fishnets, an array of glittery
hair clips, and a black satin slipdress layered atop a long-sleeved T-shirt,
Sophie Allison keeps the dream of the ’90s alive—never mind that the
22-year-old musician, who records as Soccer Mommy, was alive for only
about two and a half years of that decade. Actually, maybe that’s the point.
fully, I can find something tiny and goth
I can grab for the room,” she says.
Allison grew up in Nashville, and the
first song she ever wrote—on a plastic toy
guitar, when she was 5—had a title worthy
of that town: “What the Heck Is a Cow-
girl?” She graduated to a proper six-string
not long after but didn’t start sharing her
music until she was in her teens. “Releas-
ing to a wide audience feels so much less
like you’re naked than tweeting out a song
to all your high-school friends when you’re
15,” she says. “When I started putting stuff
on my Tumblr, I was definitely more wor-
ried about people seeing it and thinking it
was stupid.”
They didn’t, nor did the indie label
Orchid Tapes, which released her jangly,
lo-fi collection For Young Hearts the sum-
mer after her first year in college. Allison
had come to New York and was enrolled for
a time in NYU’s music-business program,
but she quickly found her own career was
outpacing what she was learning in school.
“We’d be learning how to book a show [in
class] and I’d be like, ‘I already have an
agent,’ ” she says, laughing. She never both-
ered graduating.
When writing a song, Allison sometimes
associates it with a particular color. It’s not
quite full-blown synesthesia, she explains,
but “I’ll kind of imagine in my head a music
video or album cover or something that’s
very mood and color based.” Color Theory
takes this one step further. The record
moves through three distinct sections, each
organized around a hue and what it signi-
fies: blue for melancholy and depression,
yellow for physical and emotional illness,
and, finally, gray for darkness, emptiness,
and loss. Heavy stuff, sure, but Allison’s lilt-
ing voice and buoyant melodies give Color
Theory an inviting atmosphere.
The gray and yellow sections in par-
ticular find Allison grappling with her
mother’s chronic illness. Ten years ago,
when Allison was 12, her mother wasdiagnosed with cancer. “It was a hard sur-
gery and a long recovery, and that was the
hardest part to watch,” she tells me. “But
when I was really young, I was very emo-
tionally stunted, and I was just like, I’m
not going to deal with this. So I just kind
of stuffed it down and ignored it.”
Her mother has been reacting well to
medication lately, but her condition is still
on Allison’s mind—especially when she’s on
the road. “There’s still this constant threat
that it could change at any time because it’s
never going to go away. So when I started
touring, it would pop up in my head more
often because I was gone all the time and
I wasn’t seeing her.”
She wrote her way through it. The cen-
terpiece of Color Theory, a seven-minute
slow burner called “Yellow Is the Color of
Her Eyes,” digs up all that buried emotion.
(Her Smell filmmaker Alex Ross Perry
directed the gold-saturated video.) “And
I could lie / But it’s never made me feel
good inside,” Allison sings. “I’m still so
blue.” By the final verse, Allison describes
the inevitability of her mother’s death in
language that’s both poetic (“I’m think-
ing of her from over the ocean / See her
face in the waves, her body is floating”)
and straightforward (“Loving you isn’t
enough / You’ll still be deep in the ground
when it’s done”). All the while, guitar
chords swell with the calming ebb and flow
of the tide. The effect is cathartic.
As we end our slow loop around the
antiques store, Allison has admired quite a
few oddities she’ll never be able to take
with her: a groovy 1970s TV, an entire
library-card-catalogue cabinet, and even
(with a combination of fear and interest) a
taxidermy tarantula. She settles on an
“amber”-scented candle. On our way out,
she eyes some kitschy 1950s-housewife
books that remind her of her mom’s ironic
sense of humor; she loves to collect all
sorts of outdated tomes “about how
women are crazy and stuff like that,” Alli-
son says. I ask if she has played the album
for her yet, and she indicates that she’s not
quite ready for that. “I gave her the album
and was like, ‘Have fun, uhhhh ... Don’t
talk to me about it!’ I just don’t like getting
sappy, especially with my family.”
In the multihued music she has come
to make as Soccer Mommy, though, Alli-
son has found a way to articulate and
expunge emotions that are more com-
plex than just “sappiness.” Perhaps a song
for her mother was easier—or maybe just
more expressive—than having a conversa-
tion with her. As this realization suddenly
seems to wash over Allison, she pauses
before adding, “I was like, ‘You can have
the album, and that’s all I need to say.’ ” ■“I love ’90s stuff, I love early 2000s stuff,”
she tells me one drizzly Thursday in mid-
February before we head out to go antiqu-
ing at Furnish Green, this shop that’s hid-
den away on the third floor of an old
building near Herald Square. “I feel like
that’s because that was the culture when
I was, like, a 5-year-old,” she adds. “I was
imagining being a teen and being a young
adult and how cool it was going to be. So
I feel like that’s why I, and a lot of people
my age, have this attachment and nostalgia
for that kind of stuff. It’s what we looked up
to when we were kids.”
It’s also a time in her life that Allison
found herself reflecting upon when writing
the songs on her new album, Color Theory
(which, like her look, harks back to the
days of dreamy, female-driven alternative
rock à la the Breeders and Liz Phair). “I was
thinking about being younger and how I’ve
changed, how I might have thought I’d be
and how I didn’t turn out that way,” she
says. The ten songs that compose the
record are even more ambitious and pan-
oramic than those on her 2018 break-
through, Clean, toggling from her child-
hood to her current reality and plumbing
the depths of her family history to better
understand her own mental health. “It’s a
half-hearted calm, the way I’ve felt since
I was 13,” she sings on the opener, “Blood-
stream,” a tuneful and raw reflection on
depression and self-doubt.
Over the years, though, Allison has come
to embrace—or at least aestheticize—her
dark side. She giddily describes her bed-
room in the house she shares with her boy-
friend in Nashville as a “gothic haven”: an
ornate black canopy bed, purple velvet
drapes, a vintage Dracula: Prince of Dark-
ness poster (1966), and “this really cool can-
delabra that’s all black.” She scored most of
these finds at antiques stores, which is why
she’s eager to check out the one we’re going
to. Although anything she buys has to fit in
her luggage, Allison is undeterred. “Hope- STYLING BY INDYA BROWN. DRESS BY MAISIE WILEN AT NET-A-PORTER