Dreaming of Falling: Grief, Loss, and Soccer Mommy.

MUSIC

Jun 2

I often wake up with Soccer Mommy stuck in my head (today it was Driver.) But I wouldn’t call her music catchy. Instead, Sophie Allison writes songs that burrow deep: into your brain and into your heart, leaving a long lasting imprint. For me, a certified millennial, Allison’s music captures the essence of the coming-of-age music I recorded off the radio onto cassette tapes for my Walkman, alone in my room, wondering if anyone else felt the same way that I did.

I discovered Soccer Mommy, a little late to the game in 2020, and immediately felt like I had found a sonic-kindred spirit. To me, she is an amalgamation of so many musical women I love – Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, of Liz Phair, Avril Lavigne in her Let Go era, Michelle Branch, Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow; Natalie Imbruglia in her Left Of The Middle days. Introspective and raw, her lyrics search for and expose the deep, dark and grim bits to examine them with refreshing honesty, exploring themes like loneliness, heartbreak, depression, and self-doubt – but woven through much of her music are quiet, steady messages of resilience, personal growth, and self-acceptance. These are songs that shimmer and sprawl, drenched in brain-tingling guitar fuzz and cinematic Main Character melancholy, like sunlight filtered through closed curtains.

Allison’s latest album, Evergreen, is a meditation on grief and loss, held together with a gentle but persistent throughline of hopefulness. You can hear it in the sweep of the violins, and in the soft edges of her voice, even when it catches with emotion. It’s another near-perfect record from an artist who understands how to navigate Big Feelings with grace. To allow the waves to come, experiencing them in real time while having the wisdom to trust that they’ll pass, eventually. Allison has a way of seeing, feeling, unpacking, and sharing the dark, sticky bits of life in a way that doesn’t feel dangerous, but is honest and relatable.

Here, Astrophe speaks with Allison about the creative process that is songwriting, the making of Evergreen, and her all-time favourite guitar pedal.

I'd love to start off by talking about the new album. I think it's an especially beautiful record, because your relationship with melancholy … from my perspective, anyway, is so relatable. This album obviously is coming from some deep emotional feelings. Can you talk a little bit about your creative practice ?

I think for me, writing songs has always been kind of a place where I take my feelings and my thoughts and I try to make them into something concrete – instead of just a bunch of craziness that doesn't make any sense. It's really personal, and that's something that is present with all of my albums. And obviously with this record, it was a little bit more centered on a specific kind of feeling and the specific thing that I was going through. A lot of change and loss. So it's always very personal to me, but this album is even more so.

But it's interesting – I've been doing that since I was a kid and it's still the same process for me. It's just sitting down, playing guitar and kind of … seeing what comes up and what comes out, and rolling with it. And then trying to take that initial feeling and initial idea and craft it into something more specific and more, you know, structured.

You write all of your music with a guitar?

Yeah, I never write without a guitar.

You play a lot acoustically as well. Is it hard to switch a song out from acoustic to electric or is it kind of just like a different way of expressing the same thing? How do you choose which one is right for the song?

To be honest, I don't really like playing acoustic live. I am always switching them over. There's a lot of stuff that I write on an acoustic guitar, that we record on an acoustic guitar, and then when it comes time to play it live ... I just don't want to do it. It's just honestly kind of an annoyance in my opinion. They never sound as great. They're more awkward.

You do have to think about it though, and occasionally you have to change things a bit, but most of my songs I don't find hard to switch from acoustic to more of a reverbie, dreamy electric-guitar-thing that's more clean. I’ve just been doing it that way since I started doing any Soccer Mommy stuff, even in the really early days. I would just play things on electric and it works. It works fine.

Has writing and performing started to feel like one continuous process for you, or do you try to keep them separate? Are you writing with the stage in mind now that touring is such a big part of things, or does it progress from one to the other pretty naturally?

I never write with performing in mind. And that can be super annoying at times. There's definitely times that I've written songs and it's come time to figure out how we're going to perform them and it takes a lot more work. But mostly it's fine. I don't like to write with any thoughts outside of: this is the core of this song. The guitar and vocals are just what I could play alone – like if for some reason the band wasn't with me and I was going to play a solo set. Like, what I would play if I wanted to sit down and play the song for myself. I always want songs to be something that I could sit down with just a guitar and play for myself and it feels like a whole song.

I wonder if that's why your music feels so intimate. Like even when I'm listening to some of the arrangements on the new album – there's some flutes, and violin, yeah? It's so beautiful, but it doesn't lose the intimacy that your music has had since the beginning – that's very invitational, it feels like just you and the listener alone, which is also why it feels like such a profound listening experience.

That is something that's really important to me when I'm working on songs. Even if I'm going to take a song and it's gonna end up having drums, bass, and all these guitar and synth parts and production and everything ... I want there to still be a song at the core of it that is its simplest form. I think if you have that going into recording, you can't mess anything up that bad, because you've got the whole song right there and it doesn't really need anything else to feel complete. It's more about fulfilling a vision from that point. So I really like to have that. Honestly, I don't think I could handle the anxiety and the self-doubt of coming into the studio with a song that is kind of up in the air and unfinished, and we have to figure out all of these extra things in order for it to be something that you can sit down and actually listen to. That would make me spiral out of control [from] anxiety, but, you know, it's different for everybody.

I think that I like to have something at the core that's mine and is re-creatable without anybody else.

Do you feel like there's joy in the creative process ? Does it still feel like it did at the beginning?

Yeah, I mean there's joy. There's, you know, sadness, there's a lot of different things, but for me, I guess writing is and always will be … like breathing.

Like, it's not “writing songs”. It's not something that I even think about doing or think about having to do. Even once I finish working on an album, I'm just right back to writing and it's not something where I'm like, I gotta get started on this next album. It's just something that I will always do – regardless of what I do for a living, or whether people are going to hear it, or anything like that. It's kind of compulsive. It always has been. Nothing has really changed in that sense.

What's your most treasured possession?

Oh that’s so tough. My most treasured possession. Um, maybe … my Strat. I have a purple Strat and I think that's one of those things that if I lost it, I would never be able to replace it. And it's definitely very special to me for that reason. So, maybe that.

I feel like a lot of the other things that I love and hold dear I could replace if for some reason they were ever taken from me. But [the Strat] is definitely very nostalgic for me. I got it pretty early on in my career and it's very special.

I kind of believe that musical instruments become imprinted with the music that's played on them – so that guitar would hold everything you've given it over the years. I'm sure it's a really special object.

Yeah, and I think guitars in general are something that really inspire me – to get excited and make new things, because I'm excited to have something different to play and to mess around with. So it's definitely very special.

A somewhat related, nerdy-music question just for me, do you have a favourite pedal?

You know, I think the most consistent pedal I've had in my board is the Météore pedal from Caroline, which is a reverb. I have never not had that on my board. I just really love it.

Lastly ! Do you have a favourite band that you've toured with?

Oh, so many. There's so many. I don't think I can say a favourite because then I’ll feel bad to whoever I didn't say, it's literally been so many. But, someone that I was just listening to her new album, that I had an amazing time touring with years ago and is still a good friend, is Sasami. I really love her new album [Blood on the Silver Screen] and she's so awesome – she's always been awesome. Getting to watch her on the tour that we did was so much fun and I completely fell in love with all of her music.

Words by Isabelle Webster / You can catch Soccer Mommy June 12 at the City Recital Hall as part of Vivid. Tickets are available here / as well as 13 June at the Forum Melbourne / Evergreen is out now via Loma Vista Recordings / Evergreen stripped is out on June 6, pre-save here /