Marissa M. Conner 
NASHVILLE — Last spring, in a charming, overcrowded, shabby house-turned-recording-studio tucked away in a nasty industrial sprawl a few miles from Music Row, singer-songwriter Sophie Allison was gently leading four baby-faced dudes because, from somehow it had become his full-time job.
There was a raccoon on the ceiling and apple cider by the jug as Allison, who is 22 and performs emotionally incisive indie rock as soccer mom, took breaks to chat about Lil Uzi Vert or sing songs by Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson to record his new album, “Color Theory.” Almost a year before its release next month, his second studio album – and the first for a major label – was already shaping up to be his most accomplished work to date, the next stop on his steady journey to budding indie-rock celebrity.
Alongside Allison, and swayed by her creativity, four friends have enlisted to help her execute her plans: a young producer energized by the vintage studio gear at his fingertips; a good-natured guitarist (who also happened to be Allison’s boyfriend); a lanky bassist; and an old friend with a video camera, hired to document the process. It was like a slumber party without parents at home.
Allison, who can get giddy when discussing video games or “The Vampire Diaries,” but who usually defaults to deadpan self-deprecation, knowingly leaning into her sad girl persona on the internet, was obviously the ringleader. She wore pigtails, a Harley-Davidson t-shirt, maxi skirt, Doc Martens and cat-eye makeup as she languidly tried out vocal takes over old fuzzy microphones and sampled sound effects from a stack of dusty floppy disks.
“On the last record, I had no studio experience, so I didn’t know how to bring ideas,” she later said of her debut album, “Clean,” which did both. from the New York Times. lists of pop critics’ top albums of 2018. “This time, I had basically learned how it works. I had so many thoughts about how to match my vision of the song itself to the recording.
But even as Allison blossomed in real time, gaining technical confidence and becoming a professional musician with real ambition and intentionality – a far cry from the raw, heartbreaking chamber demos that sent her down this path – she also spent the last two years adjusting to her role as an employer, decision maker, adult with an itinerant lifestyle and public figure with an expectant, intimately engaged and growing audience. It may go unnoticed, but the life of a moderately successful rock singer, especially these days, can be as managerial as it is glamorous.
“I’m on tour for a living and I run a small business, basically,” Allison said last month in the cozy home in her hometown of Nashville that she rents with her older sister and boyfriend, Julian. Powell.
“It’s a very isolating existence,” she admitted. “You left all the time. The friends you make are also gone all the time. And much of her life and career takes place online, where she can’t help but obsessively read just about anything any random person says about the group that is now her world. .
While Soccer Mommy’s fanbase remains intimate enough that listeners are generally supportive and adoring, “none of them really know you,” Allison said. “A lot of them don’t understand what you’re going through.”
The work is meant to help with that, and “Color Theory,” released Feb. 28, while very personal, is also a connection offering. Meticulously crafted as a three-movement cycle divided by mood and theme, each represented by a color – blue for sadness, depression and grief; yellow for paranoia and illness, mental and physical; and gray for death – the album can be piercing both in its clear-voiced specificity and also in its expansive view of personal trauma and suffering.
“It’s an unenthusiastic calm – what I’ve felt since I was 13,” Allison sings on “Bloodstream,” the crushing opener, “because I might not feel it now, I ‘ve covered the wounds with my long sleeves / but I know he’s waiting there, swimming in my bloodstream / and he’s coming for me.
The self-proclaimed “princess of shit,” Allison could only laugh at the heaviness of her new songs, which camouflage their dark illustrations of physical and mental decay in a lush, even energetic 90s alternative musical packaging. (“Color Theory was conceived and produced by Gabe Wax, known for his work with Big Thief, the War on Drugs and Frankie Cosmos.)
“I feel like it really hits,” Allison said with a shrug of the finished music.
Although “Color Theory” departs from the prickly irreverence of previous Soccer Mommy songs as “Your dog” Where “Cool,” Allison tells a trickier story, deftly connecting her own stockings to those of her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer when Allison was a teenager. On the seven-plus-minute centerpiece, “Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes,” and closing song “Gray Light,” she’s unafraid of the cold indifference of mortality (“loving you isn’t enough not/you still deep in the ground when it’s done”) and she ends the album with a line no more upbeat than where she began: “I watch my mother drown”.
“It all kills you over time,” Allison said of her chosen subject, “or it makes you a shell of a person, almost.” She added: “At least it came out. Before, it was just sitting in my heart, weighing on me, and I constantly felt like that, having to act happy and excited.
Yet the sorry version of Allison in the Soccer Mommy songs, suffering from hours spent watching depressed TV in bed, is at odds with the self-assured performer and goal-oriented overseer she is. has become since dropping out of New York University to pursue music hard. -time after his dorm records took off online. “Clean” placed Allison in a league with a growing crop of independent, assertive musicians and led to opening gigs for Liz Phair, Paramore, Vampire Weekend and Wilco.
Paramore lead singer Hayley Williams said in an email that she felt like a “proud big sister” to Allison and Soccer Mommy, a band she discovered at a time when she “craved of a connection to a community of women – really to any expression of femininity, especially in music and art,” after years in a male-dominated scene.
“I felt drawn to the sincerity and simplicity of the way she tried to assert her worth while exposing a weakness and a desire,” Williams wrote of Allison’s songwriting.
She recalled that after a Soccer Mommy performance on tour, “Sophie would point out the mistakes each of them had made during their set and what needed improvement. It wasn’t ridiculous and it wasn’t even selfish. I was actually really inspired by how cool she was leading her band. To be honest, I’ve never been like that in my own band. I still am not.
Through her closeness to successful career artists, Allison has honed the drive she’s nurtured since she told her parents around age 5 that she was going to be a rock star. Raised on the crafty work — and work ethic — of artists like Taylor Swift, Lavigne and Phair, Allison is candid, if a little taken aback, about the scope of her ambitions for Soccer Mommy.
After a year of touring behind “Clean”, the band jumped a level, leaving the Fat Possum label for Loma Vista Recordings, and setting out to make an album that could live up to Allison’s must-play list. from “bops” – ’90s and early 2000s pop-rock hits like “Complicated” by Lavigne, “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia or “If It Makes You Happy” by Sheryl Crow.
“My dream – and it’s a far cry, if ever possible,” Allison said, with a pile of extra qualifications, “would be that I could get, like, even one of my Soccer Mommy songs into the Top 40” – a crossover hit by a girl with a guitar reminiscent of when Allison fell in love with music as a child.
“It’s not going to break my heart if I can’t do it,” she added, “but I have the ambition to maybe be really big one day.”
Compromise, however, is out of the question at this time. Allison said she would never work with a pop-oriented co-writer, and she even refused to do a shorter radio edit for “Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes”, the de facto lead single from “Color Theory”. .
Alex Ross Perry, the Brooklyn filmmaker who directed the song’s music video, marveled at how strong Allison’s instincts were. “You kind of have to be young and with such unconditional confidence in your decisions to start your new album with a seven-and-a-half-minute song,” he said, adding, “What she’s doing is so forged and almost conceptual. These are great power moves for someone barely drinking age doing it early in their career.
At her home in Nashville before the release of her album, Allison oscillated between youthful exuberance – as when she described how she arranged a meeting with Robert Pattinson while hiding in a restaurant bathroom – and practical sobriety. which is now required of him.
Back when she uploaded her diartic song sketches to Bandcamp, where listeners could throw a few bucks at her if they felt like it, music “wasn’t a career,” she said. “I was just happy to receive something. Now I know that I have to work to earn money, not only for me, but to better pay everyone who works for me.”
“That’s one of my big goals,” she continued, “to be able to pay guys more money. Whenever it’s in the budget, I want to go up for them until be it at an extremely decent salary, where they don’t have to have other jobs when we’re away for a few months.
His own goals are equally modest. “I don’t want to have millions of dollars and be rich and famous,” Allison said. “I want to be able to have a home like this very one, for my life, and be comfortable.” She recently went from a ramshackle Subaru Outback (bumper sticker: “silly trucks are for girls”) to a Ford Ranger pickup (“the one with the big Buffy sticker on it”) that isn’t much younger than her.
That she can dig into her emotional demons in order to achieve such a lifestyle is still something she’s getting used to – a reality that can be as daunting as it is thrilling, especially as she comes to terms with who is in charge.
“It’s definitely on me,” Allison said. She couldn’t help but look prepared.
