February 2020 | Rolling Stone | 17
For Clean, she teamed up with producer and
engineer Gabe Wax (Fleet Foxes, the War on
Drugs). “I hadn’t really recorded in a real stu-
dio, so I didn’t know what I was doing,” she re-
calls. “I was going on faith that Gabe could help
me make what I wanted. Fortunately, he did.”
Color Theory, too, mixes darkness with light.
Lead single “Lucy” playfully personifies heart-
break as the devil himself: “Hair like a feath-
er, black leather, with a charming smile/He’ll
touch you and burn you.” The seven-minute
“Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes” delves into
her mother’s battle with a long-term illness. Al-
lison worked with Her Smell director Alex Ross
Perry on an accompanying short film that cap-
tures her anxiety about being away from her
mom while she was on tour.
Allison wrote the new album mostly on the
road — “I like to write all the time, especially
when I’m bored in the car,” she says. In 2019,
she and her band went to Nashville’s Alex the
Great Studios, where Yo La Tengo worked in the
Nineties, to record. Allison wanted Color Theo-
ry to feel like “a dusty old cassette tape that has
become messed up over time,” and hidden in
the studio archives, she found a close approxi-
mation: floppy disks full of string arrangements
and samples. Elsewhere, she tracked down field
recordings from factories for a “gritty, disinte-
grated vibe,” inspired in part by Tori Amos.Soccer Mommy will be back on the road next
month, playing shows across the U.S. and Can-
ada. Allison’s got her eye on further experi-
mentation, with more demos in her back pock-
et, and an itch to get out of the “female indie
rock” genre box she’s often placed in. “I want
to make things that are more electronic, more
folky, more poppy, even,” she says.
That said, she won’t be shying away from the
brutal honesty in her lyrics anytime soon. “I
know that I can have these melodies that pull
some of the darkness out of it,” Allison reflects.
“But if I didn’t do that [darkness], it would just
be making fake songs, and nobody wants to lis-
ten to that.” CLAIRE SHAFFER“If I didn’t
[sing honestly
about dark
emotions], it
would just
be making
fake songs,
and nobody
wants to
listen to that.”PLAY BALL
Buying soccer
balls and outfits
for the kids back
in Trench Town,
Jamaica. “He
was an incredibly
generous man,”
says Morris.
VIBRATION
Onstage at the
Hammersmith
Odeon in London
in 1976: “At the
time, it was
the largest PA
system the venue
ever had.”STIR IT UP
An afterparty at a Paris club. “The
club had a reputation for being very
elitist, and many guests were in awe
to see so many Rastafarians in the
club,” Morris says. “Bob had a ball.”REDEMPTION SONG
Marley in 1981. “We sat, we spoke,
we reasoned as usual, but this time
it was different,” Morris says. “I
never knew how ill he was.... It was
the last time we would meet.”ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Morris took this photo not long after his first time meeting Marley, in 1973.
“He asked me if I would like to come on tour with the band,” Morris recalls.
“ ‘Yeah!’ I replied in my Cockney accent.”