Soccer Mommy (aka singer-songwriter Sophie Allison)
Photo: Sophie Hur
What seems to strike most listeners as they encounter Soccer Mommy’s music is what’s being said. The singer-songwriter behind the nom de tune, Sophie Allison, has been lauded for her arresting lyrics. But just as attention-grabbing are the music videos she’s had a hand in, particularly for songs from her third and latest LP, Sometimes, Forever.
The clip for “Bones,” directed by acclaimed indie auteur Alex Ross Perry, unfolds as an unedited, single take for nearly three minutes, before dissolving into a riot of jump cuts and manipulated images, climaxing in a visual frenzy to match the serrated cloud of electric guitar at the song’s denouement.
“I really like to come up with a lot of the video ideas,” the 25-year-old Allison said recently, from a Phoenix tour stop. “Most of the time, it’s something that I thought of, and a director took it and got some ideas with it. In my mind, if you’re going to do a video, it should reflect what you personally imagined [when writing the song].”
That clean, clear through-line from the Nashville-based Allison’s fertile mind to her audience is a big reason why Soccer Mommy has enjoyed a breakout year, headlining a national tour on the strength of Sometimes, Forever. She’ll wrap up her current U.S. tour Saturday at Dallas’ House of Blues.
Despite lyrics which read as viscerally vulnerable — “And I’ve got a heart that beats too fast/And a shake in my hands and a pain in my back/And I’m just 22 going on 23/Already worn down from everything,” she sings on “Feel It All The Time” — Allison maintains a healthy boundary between art and life.
“I like writing to have a confessional nature,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s telling things that are personal to me; sometimes, it’s completely making things up. … I also like pulling … both extreme specificity and vagueness mixed together. … I find it’s easy to write something that feels, to you, very personal and very specific, but it’s not actually going to be that revealing.”
As 2023 dawns, Allison will be heading Down Under for a brief tour of Australia, where her expectations for an audience will just as they are Stateside.
“I want them to get whatever they want from it,” she said. “I want people to be able to listen to the music, and just be having fun. … I want people to like the musical aspects that are going on in the songs. I want people to connect with the lyrics, whether that’s in the same way I do, or in a completely different way. But really, I want people to pay attention to all of it.”
Soccer Mommy at House of Blues, Dallas. 8 p.m. Dec. 17. $25-$39.50.
Preston Jones is a North Texas freelance writer and regular contributor to KXT. Email him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter (@prestonjones). Our work is made possible by our generous, music-loving members. If you like how we lift up local music, consider becoming a KXT sustaining member right here.
