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Last October, 22-year-old Sophie Allison was strumming and singing on one of country music’s most legendary stages. Her musical outfit, Soccer Mommy, opened for Wilco at a sold-out Grand Ole Opry House.
But while it was their debut at the Nashville venue, it wasn’t Allison’s first time on that stage. Four years earlier, she’d walked across it to receive her high school diploma.
For Allison when growing up, Music City wasn’t a mecca — it was home.
Her parents are American, but she was born in Switzerland, where her neuroscientist father briefly worked. Before she was 2 years old, they had settled in Nashville. She started playing guitar when she was 5, after seeing the western group Riders in the Sky at a school fundraiser.
“You could buy a toy signed guitar, and after watching them play, I wanted that guitar so bad,” she recalls.
“It was probably like $20, and that’s why my parents were like, ‘Fine, sure.’ And then I wouldn’t stop playing it. I went home and I wrote my first song, and I was just playing it all the time. … In my memory, it feels like it was a week before they were like, ‘We’re going to get you a guitar, an acoustic that you can tune, at least.’ They were like, ‘We can’t listen to this anymore.’ ”
And if you’ve spent any time in Nashville, you shouldn’t be surprised that Allison — who came of age with country’s legacy all around her, and literally under her feet — is a rock musician.
A widely acclaimed one, at that. Soccer Mommy’s 2018 debut album, “Clean,” was named by dozens of outlets as one of the best of the year — and the decade. On Friday, she’ll release the follow-up, “color theory,” which is her most dense and ambitious work yet, but also her most immediate and accessible.
The 10 tracks move through three color-assigned themes: blue (“representing sadness and depression,” per the album notes), yellow (“physical and emotional illness”) and gray (“darkness, emptiness and loss”).
With or without that context, however, it’s easy to wade into the album’s wash of guitar fuzz and surprisingly lilting melodies.
The resulting effect (as many have noted) has echoes of a brief, specific era in the mid-1990s — when alternative rock and chart-topping pop were almost one and the same, and frequently led by female voices.
“I’ve been falling apart these days,” she croons on “Circle the Drain,” the album’s catchiest moment. “Split open, watching my heart go round and around … circle the drain, I’m going down.”
The flashback effect isn’t a coincidence: On her phone, Allison has a go-to playlist with favorites by Liz Phair, Hole, Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow. Most of the songs hit the airwaves before she was alive, but they still fill her with a sense of nostalgia.
“It just reminded me of being young and wanting to be 16 when I was like 7 years old or something,” she says with a laugh.
“(Imagining) this song’s playing at my prom. Romanticizing that, seeing it in movies, rom-coms and all this stuff. It holds this pure joy in my heart (laughs), this lifting feeling.”
She also explores painful memories on “color theory.” More than one song touches on her mother’s battle with cancer. She was diagnosed when Allison was 12.
“Loving you isn’t enough,” she sings on “yellow is the color of her eyes.”
“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.”
“Honestly, being a 12-year-old and being faced with a more visceral image of your parent — and you immortalize your parents a little bit — being very sick and bedridden … that’s definitely one of the things that made me have an outlook on life of, ‘Bad things can happen at any time. Things being good doesn’t mean bad things aren’t coming.’ ”
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Even as she delves into darker thoughts, Allison’s music favors sincerity over cynicism. She happily shares that she listened to “color theory” constantly through the mixing and mastering process.
“I kind of get obsessed with it a little bit. Because I’m like, ‘Wow. We did this. This is amazing, that we all worked together and made something, and it sounds great.’ And then that fades,” she says with a laugh. “That wears off, and you have about six months of waiting left to do.”
That’s not an exaggeration. Nearly all recording for “color theory” wrapped last March at Nashville’s Alex the Great studio. Much of Soccer Mommy’s 2019 was spent on the road, opening for one big act after the next, including Kacey Musgraves, Vampire Weekend and Wilco.
Days after our interview, another big name joined that group — Bernie Sanders. On Sunday, Allison and her band performed before he spoke at a campaign event in Houston.
At long last, the band will shift gears next month, headlining an extensive tour of its own through the U.S. and Europe. But spending months on end as an opening act came with its own rewards.
“If someone (in the audience) is really into it, and had no clue who you were when you came out, you know that you got a new fan purely off of your music — not what anyone had to say about you or blogs or anything like that. You got somebody who didn’t even want to really hear what you had to say and had to sit there anyway and was pleasantly surprised. I think that’s a great feeling, to get to win someone over like that, because it’s so genuine.”
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