Music

Soccer Mommy: 'My fear of vulnerability was exhausting'


Indie singer-songwriter Sophie Allison, better known as Soccer Mommy, on how her new album grapples with anxiety, death, and growing up

Thursday, 27th February 2020, 9:55 pm

Updated Thursday, 27th February 2020, 9:56 pm
Sophie Allison, Soccer Mommy (Photo: Brian Ziff)

“It’s a half-hearted calm – the way I’ve felt since I was 13,” sings Sophie Allison, on “bloodstream”, the first song on her new album color theory. “Cause I may not feel it now, covered up the wounds with my long sleeves, but I know it’s waiting there, swimming through my bloodstream.”

The 22-year-old, best known by her stage name Soccer Mommy, writes lyrics that capture that unsettled space between adolescent self-consciousness and adult self-awareness. “Writing helps illuminate things that are kind of taking a toll on me,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘Boom, I’m done, I don’t have a problem with thinking about dying any more.’ But it helps to get what you’re feeling out.”

Allison, from Nashville, adopted her moniker when she started making music in her bedroom. Her 2018 debut album Clean, finely wrought indie-rock that snared the anguish of infatuation, was named the best album of the year by The New York Times. Today, she releases its superb follow-up.

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Instead of the angst of her first record, on color theory she is contemplative, and confronts the longer-term issues that surfaced when the space she once used to think about relationships freed up. The songs are divided into three colours: yellow is sickness, blue is sadness, grey is death. She explores each in bracing, self-deprecating detail. “This is something that was solely in me. I’m not even sure I needed to get it out to the world, but I needed to work through it myself.”

Sophie Allison, Soccer Mommy, says: ‘I was sleeping so litter, I started hallucinating’ (Photo: Brian Ziff)

She lists the things that were disturbing her when she wrote: anxiety, paranoia, insomnia. “I was sleeping so little, I started hallucinating, it was making me really terrified. It was a constant feeling of being ‘on’, and I was obliterated.” She pauses for a moment. “I was having a lot of trouble coping, I guess, with my mom’s illness.”

When Allison was 12, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “It started affecting me when I was touring a lot, I started to get really anxious about losing all the time [with her], and not being at home.”

At the end of the seven-minute “yellow is the color of her eyes”, she sings one of the most peaceful, but eviscerating, refrains about loss – and its anticipation – I have heard. “Loving you isn’t enough, you’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done. I’ll know the day when it comes, I’ll feel the cold as they put out my sun.”

The sophistication with which Allison grapples with bleak emotion and grief can make it easy to forget she is so young. But it is not just her early experiences with her mother that have forced her to consider mortality, she thinks: it is underestimated how confusing a period one’s early twenties are. “I think it’s a big time of transition where people are realising: ‘Oh, life is starting’.” You don’t have time to think about your dreams or what your life will become, you just have to get on with it. “You’re in it now: you’re being pushed into the real world.”

Sophie Allison, Soccer Mommy (Photo: Brian Ziff)

Disquiet runs through color theory, even in the titles alone: “up the walls”, “royal screw up”, “crawling in my skin” and “circle the drain”, on which she ponders the ennui of depression: “I’m trying to seem strong for my love, for my family and friend, but I’m so tired of faking. ‘Cause I’m chained to my bed when they’re gone, watching TV alone, until my body starts aching.” The chorus pleas for someone to notice: “Hey, I’ve been falling apart these days”.

‘I was nervous about seeming lame. I didn’t want to be thought of as the girl they were being nice to, but who sucks’

Allison started playing the guitar as a child, and wrote songs as a teen, but was scared of using her voice – of being made fun of, mostly, by the boys on the music scene in Nashville. “I was nervous about seeming lame. I didn’t want to be thought of as the girl they were being nice to, but who sucks.”

Her confidence grew a little in high school, but even now, she is modest about her talent. “I never wanted to be an amazing guitarist, I thought I was pretty good, and capable, and I like parts of stuff that I wrote. And I didn’t think I was a good singer, I still don’t, but I’m fine with that.” Once Soccer Mommy took off, she was telling the same guys she wasn’t asked to play with before, “I’m gonna do my thing, and y’all can back me up.”

Sophie Allison, Soccer Mommy, says: ‘Part of the draw of New York was that I found more music like I was making there’ (Photo: Brian Ziff)

At 18, the summer before she started studying music business at NYU, she began uploading songs she recorded in her dorm to the music website Bandcamp. When she moved, she found it difficult – and escaped home whenever she could. “I f**king hated it, it was claustrophobic.

“Part of the draw of New York was that I found more music like I was making there – there were a ton of musicians at home, but I didn’t know many people making indie-rock.”

She grew to love it, but still moved home two years later: her small shows across Brooklyn had got her noticed by a label and landed her a record deal. Soon, she was opening on tour for artists such as Kacey Musgraves, Paramore, and Vampire Weekend. “The main reason I dropped out of NYU was that it was so expensive – I could only afford to tour because I quit school and came back to live in my parents’ house for free.” Now, she lives close by, with her boyfriend and her sister.

‘Knowing that people are giving their unwanted opinion about you eats at you a little bit’

Her level of fame is just about what she can cope with. “Having a big fan base is, I’m sure, destructive to your health,” she says. “Having people wanting your attention, giving their unwanted opinion about you… Even if you don’t look at it, there’s a paranoia of knowing that it’s out there. Even some comments about you that are good are inherently invasive. It eats at you a little bit – I can’t imagine being like Charli XCX, or someone even bigger.”

She bargains a little to protect herself. “I don’t like being photographed, but if a fan wants one, it’s gonna take two seconds and I’ll probably never have to see it. But I’ll also say, ‘I really hate hearing anything about my body. Take pictures but please try not to tag me, because it’s hard for me.’” For a long time, Allison has struggled with body dysmorphia. “Being in the limelight, it takes a bigger toll.”

Sophie Allison, Soccer Mommy, says: ‘Now I don’t have romance problems – I don’t have to be angry about that any more’ (Photo: Brian Ziff)

Allison is nakedly confessional in song – and forthcoming in person. But it hasn’t always been that way. “I’m not very good about talking about my feelings unless I’m prompted to – deeper stuff is not what I’m willing to share with people. I had a big problem with it when I was a teenager.” She was encouraged to go to therapy after her mother’s diagnosis, but “I was always very, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

“It was pretty exhausting for my friends. I could have fun with them and I was close with them and they could tell me anything, but I knew I hadn’t told them anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel comfortable – it was a fear of vulnerability. And that’s changed. I can totally do that now.”

Vulnerability trembles through every song – especially on Clean, on which her self-worth lay in the hands of bad men. It was despondent on its opener, “Still Clean” – “left me drowning, once you picked me out your bloody teeth” – and furious on “Your Dog”, with its irresistible guitar riff recalling early REM, as she cried, “I don’t wanna be your little pet, at the edge of every bed, you sleep in, body stretching out, guess I’ll curl up on the couch.”

The anger was directed as much at herself, exhausted, than at the men who hurt her. “It was looking back and wishing I had been different, wishing that I could change. That’s where the anger came from. Just… stop being a weak bitch over boys,” she says now. “But now I don’t have romance problems – I don’t have to be angry about that any more.”

In anger’s place is a kind of unresolved distress. I ask which lyric from color theory expresses her feelings most precisely. She says it is from the closing song, “gray light”: “I cry to the moon, and beg it to change me or rip me in two.”

‘color theory’ is released on Friday



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