S
ophie Allison is at the wheel of her Toyota Venza, a quarter-sized translucent crystal dangling from her rearview mirror. Cruising through Nashville’s Berry Hill area, she decelerates to gaze at a suburban house framed by artfully landscaped flowers. “I used to get so annoyed with my mom,” she says. “She would be driving and she’d slow down and be like, ‘This house is so pretty. That bird in that tree is so pretty.’ And I’d be like, ‘Drive, bitch!’ And now, that’s me. Aging: You turn into your mother.”
It’s a realization that some people spend a lifetime arriving at, but Allison, who records as Soccer Mommy, seems to have it figured out at 27. The concept of adulthood comes up frequently during our sunny October day in her hometown, and it’s all over her new album, Evergreen, too. “Half of my life is behind me, and the other has changed somehow,” she sings on the devastating “Dreaming of Falling.”
“It’s really melodramatic to put it that way, but that’s how it goes,” she admits to me later that day, over a large, steamy bowl of chicken pho. “You were in this place and that’s over, and you can’t go back. There’s nothing you can do to change it. But in time, we find happiness in the way things are now.”
This is the duality of Soccer Mommy: The same person who drops lightning-fast zingers like “Drive, bitch!” is also the songwriter who crafts eloquent songs about irrevocable change and loss. It’s why she’s amassed a fiercely loyal fanbase, ever since she started uploading songs onto Bandcamp from her bedroom as a teenager. It’s also why, nearly a decade into her career, Evergreen is her most honest album to date, a classic singer-songwriter record in which the artist offers a vulnerable documentation of their pain, holding very little back.
While Allison has been known to experiment sonically — dabbling in everything from distorted synths to floppy discs on her past albums — she strips it all down on Evergreen, with only some cozy flutes and string arrangements to lean on. For the first time, she’s putting her strongest weapon at the forefront: Her voice.
“The thing that is so great about Sophie is she’s very direct,” says Ben H. Allen III, who produced Evergreen in Atlanta. “Her feelings are just right out there. They’re not hidden. This is a record about loss, grieving, and vulnerability. What do those kinds of songs need to feel honest and real, and how do you get the listener to connect with what she’s going through?”
ALLISON USED TO DRIVE a 2002 Ford pickup, but it died last summer. She thought about buying a new hybrid truck, but it didn’t feel like the right choice — she was concerned they’re “macho,” “gnarly,” and “kind of ugly.” She could have pulled it off, though. “I could be rolling up in this big muscle car,” she jokes. “But I decided to turn away from that opportunity.”
Instead, she bought the Venza in June, to go with her old Subaru Outback. She shares both vehicles with Julian Powell, her partner of eight years, who is also Soccer Mommy’s lead guitarist. “Neither of us want to drive [the Subaru] now that we have a newer car and it has better gas mileage,” she says. “This car’s got a perfect balance.”
It’s a very reasonable statement, level-headed and responsible — which makes it contrast all the more with “Driver,” Evergreen‘s guitar-heavy single, where Allison dials up the tension using her car as a metaphor for a relationship. “I’ll be the driver if you choose,” she sings, before her tone turns darker: “He’d never leave me now/Even if he could, there’s no way out.”
“Driver” is a rare rock song that treats long-term love as something worth singing about — as dramatic in its way as any reckless crush. (Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It,” from earlier this year, is another example.) “I am constantly getting lost. I’m constantly missing turns,” she tells me, extending the relationship-as-car metaphor. “And it’s so different when somebody can move through it with you, and not judge you for it.”
She continues: “I love watching disastrous love stories, but that’s not what we actually want out of our lives. I think everybody actually wants understanding. You want to feel like someone gets you and can connect to you on that level.”
We wind through residential roads as Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” blasts through the speakers, followed by several cuts from the Juliana Hatfield Three’s Become What You Are. Allison gives me a tour of the places where her story began: the middle school she describes as “a living hell,” the graveyard where she’s almost certain she saw a ghost once, and the Lucky Bamboo, a now-closed Chinese restaurant where the owner’s son used to throw “crazy-ass rave parties” in high school.
After a while we stop at Sam & Zoe’s, a woodsy, charming cafe. Allison has been coming here for years, usually to get an iced dirty chai. (She normally takes almond milk in her coffee, but this particular drink tastes best with regular dairy.) We sit outside on the front porch, with Allison in all-black attire, from her sweater down to her Doc Martens. She’s wearing her signature cat eyeliner with lavender sweeping across her lids, and when I eventually ask her to break down the meticulous makeup process for me, she pulls the mini liquid eyeliner from her purse and explains the routine she’s been doing since high school.
She sips her prized beverage and picks at a blueberry muffin, describing the gorgeous trail we’re about to hit at the nearby Radnor Lake. There will be herons, she says, but don’t mistake her for a birder. “It’s cool, but I don’t give a shit about that,” she says. “Maybe one day when I’m older.” Later, when I ask about marriage and children, she gives a similarly open response, possibly indicating that these topics have been on her mind lately.
“I’ve changed as I’ve gotten older, been interested in things I wasn’t interested in when I was younger,” she says, so casually and eloquently it sounds like a future lyric. “It’s hobby time. I have so much free time when I’m home. I get to live the busiest life and also the mostly lonely life, which is honestly the best way for me to operate. Focus in, or be completely free. One of the two.”
During those free hours, Allison loves to stargaze with her telescope, jokingly calling herself an amateur astronomer. She also watches a significant amount of movies, sometimes several within a day, either at the indie Belcourt Theatre or at home. She recently saw the new Beetlejuice sequel, My Old Ass with Aubrey Plaza, and the visceral horror film The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.
“They could have trimmed a lot at the beginning,” she says of the latter. “I would’ve just chilled on the whole feminism, women-aging thing. It’s just not a fresh enough idea that you need to hammer it in that hard. It got better once it got more body horror. That’s when I was like, ‘OK, yeah, this is actually really good.’”
She’s much less critical when it comes to the 2006 teen comedy John Tucker Must Die, which she recently reviewed on her new Letterboxd account, awarding it five stars and a simple “Yes.” “It’s actually perfect,” she says. “I watch it three times a year. Not a single flaw. 10 out of 10.”
Cedrick Jones Photography
WE ARRIVE AT the west parking lot of Radnor Lake, walking through the visitor center that contains everything from Civil War artifacts (160-year-old bullets, mildly eerie photographs) to educational videos of red-tailed hawks and a bathroom with bird sounds. The weather is classic fall — freezing in the shade, warm in the sun. Allison comes here frequently, despite being “allergic to every tree that exists.” We set out on a two-mile walk, encountering deer, turtles, and, yes, plenty of herons.
Seeing one majestic coastal bird triggers a memory for Allison. “My mom would be here, sending a zoomed-in photo,” she recalls, breaking out in laughter. “And I’m like, ‘That is the worst picture I’ve ever seen! He’s not even that far away!’”
While grief looms over much of Evergreen, Allison prefers not to go into detail about the experiences behind it. She’s discussed her mother’s battle with cancer many times over the years, particularly on 2020’s Color Theory. (“Loving you isn’t enough/You’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done,” she sang then.) Listening to Evergreen, hearing heartbreaking lines like “Two years gone and I’m still pondering it all” (from the stunning title track) and “I miss you/Like a loyal dog/Waiting by the door to hear the lock turn” (“M”), it’s easy enough to infer what she’s been through.
Thankfully, Soccer Mommy’s devoted fans are giving Allison space to grieve. “I don’t want to draw a bunch of conclusions since it’s not my business as a total stranger, and I respect her privacy immensely,” one fan wrote on Reddit. “Losing a parent is a horrible ordeal, and if she is gone, may she rest in peace and may Sophie and her family find their healing.”
Allison tells me she appreciates her fans: “They always want to hear what I have to give them.” Still, negotiating what she shares with the world can be complicated. Though she’s always been open about her anxiety and depression, in interviews as well as in her music — on 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, she sang about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and told me, “I literally had the thought, ‘I could imagine why you would want to do that’” — she tells me she has mixed feelings about the honesty that’s expected of musicians.
“People want to talk about those kinds of things, but if you need help, nobody has the understanding for that,” she says. “Mental health problems in the music world have become something that people talk about a lot, but anytime I’ve talked about it, I don’t feel good about it, personally. You shouldn’t have to disclose very personal, private shit to get people to listen.” She’s also very aware of the potential career costs that could come with taking a step back: “You’re not getting any more successful by deciding to take that mental-health break,” she adds. “Mental illness doesn’t really fit the schedule.”
Allen, who was already a Soccer Mommy fan when Allison approached him to produce Evergreen last year, recalls that she was clear from the start about what she wanted to do. “She and I got on the phone for an hour, and talked about the album and about her mom,” he says. “I really felt the intensity, the emotion behind all of the loss for her. And that hit me really hard. I felt this deep sense of humility in the face of the songs.”
Ultimately, what makes her happiest is writing and performing songs about those same intense emotions, as she does on much of Evergreen. “I feel very proud of the songwriting at the core of it,” she says. “In the past, I was always really excited about production, trying weird things and stepping out of the box. That’s great, but this time I really wanted to make sure it felt like me. Really honest.”
With its sparse sound, bolstered only by comforting woodwinds and strings, Evergreen feels almost like a call-back to her early Bandcamp days, before she dropped out of NYU to become a full-time musician and record her stunning 2018 debut, Clean. “There’s a lot of people who still request songs from Bandcamp days, who want to hear those songs,” she says. “I feel like this new album connects to that. It feels very straight from me in the same kind of way, where I don’t have ambitions of doing stuff beyond just writing songs. It feels very pure.”
DESPITE BEING ONE of the most beloved voices in indie rock, Allison leads a fairly normal life. She’s often noticed by fans in Nashville, but not to the extent that she can’t go about her day in public. “I wouldn’t be like, ‘I don’t want to get any bigger,’ or anything,” she says. “But at this level, I can still exist as myself.” Most of her friends, she notes, pre-date her music career. “If I’m not hanging out with someone at 9:30, I’m lighting candles, taking a bath, and putting on rain sounds and going to sleep really early,” she says.
She doesn’t keep in touch with many musicians in the industry, except for artists she’s toured with, including Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan, Sasami Ashworth, and Phoebe Bridgers, whom she brought onstage last summer for a cover of Elliott Smith’s “The Biggest Lie.” “I don’t live in one of these cities where people live,” Allison says. “What, would I just be FaceTiming a bunch of people? I’m not a communicator in [terms] of the phone. I don’t text a lot, I don’t call people up a lot.”
But since Bognanno is also a Nashville native, the duo see each other when they’re not on the road. “When you tour for a living, it’s difficult to maintain local friendships,” Bognanno says. “It’s really nice to have somebody to be like, ‘All right, I’m leaving for two months, but when I get back, let’s go to the movies.’”
Those movie dates include a routine, Bognanno says: “She gets a Coca-Cola Icee and I get a blue raspberry Icee, and we have a debate because she says that blue raspberry Icees are for kids who have food all over their face, and Coke Icees are more sophisticated. And I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit.’”
During our seven hours together, Allison and I make several stops along West Nashville’s Charlotte Avenue. We get vegan dessert at the coffee shop Headquarters (though neither of us are vegan), and browse inside Rhino Booksellers, where she checks out a copy of the 2002 Sheryl Crow biography No Fool to this Game. She admired the songwriter growing up, along with early-2000s pop stars like Spears, Kelly Clarkson, and Hilary Duff (the latter, she reveals later over drinks, was her first concert at seven years old).
Over at the massive Great Escape — a store that sells everything from vintage video games to vinyl records to Season One DVDs of The Kids in the Hall — Allison rifles through shelves of old movies and leads us to the horror section, one of her favorites. “This is the second time I’ve seen The Mummy in horror,” she says, picking up a DVD of the 1999 blockbuster. “I don’t agree with that. I would put it in fantasy. Like, you’re not putting Indiana Jones in horror.”
She turns next to 2006’s Pulse, starring Kristen Bell. “I might have to buy this one,” she says of the widely-panned techno-horror film. “Julian and I keep joking about it, being like, ‘What if it’s really good?’”
We end our day over an order of chips and queso on the back patio of Otto’s, a swanky cocktail bar with hot pink picnic benches. Allison faces me, her money-piece strand of hair tucked behind her ear. It’s a style that takes some maintenance — she has to get the bleached blonde section dyed every six weeks — but she’s feeling a change coming on. Possibly back to the Color Theory pigtails from 2020? “No,” she says, laughing. “I was in a certain head space to be doing that all the time.”
Evergreen is her fourth album as Soccer Mommy, a stage name that began as a jokey pre-fame Twitter alias. Allison says she can envision a future where she releases records under her own name. “As I get older, I’m sure eventually it’ll change,” she says. “It’s not like I’m going to be forever going down as Soccer Mommy. It’s a little youthful. I’m, like, picturing 40-year-old me: ‘Yeah, I’m Soccer Mommy!’”
In a few weeks, she’ll kick off 2025 with a huge world tour, but she sounds far from stressed about it. Just like her brand-new car, she finds balance in being on the road. She’s usually the first one in bed every night, hunkering down in her bunk on the bus, reading or playing her Nintendo Switch. “I like for my job to be this kind of work where I don’t actually have to be thinking about working,” she says. “All I have to do is go and play a show everyday. All I have to do is be here.”
Production Credits
Photographic assistance SINATRA JONES
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