Soccer Mommy’s grief is bittersweet

Alternative Press teamed up with Soccer Mommy for an exclusive “opaque custard” vinyl variant of Evergreen, limited to 300 copies. Head to the AP Shop to grab yours.

Soccer Mommy is living with ghosts — “the memories, feelings, and reminders that scream of a normalcy that is no longer there.” Those lingering things are at the forefront of Evergreen, an album that charts the experience of grief. And for Sophie Allison, grief is made of many feelings. 

The album is a series of vignettes: the all-consuming despair of loss, the familiar warmth of a memory, and everything that comes in the ongoing life shaped by someone who isn’t there anymore. On Evergreen, she is melancholic and in love and angry and full of joy. Sometimes, one feeling engulfs the rest. Other times, they exist at once. “People change all the time,” Allison says. “Our feelings change, our perspective changes, but I don’t think that voids out old feelings. It’s about going on living, clinging to the feeling of someone, seeing them in things. That can be comforting, and it can be painful. It’s bittersweet.”

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For Allison, seeing them in things meant seeing them everywhere. Even when she tried to run away from it, her grief would manifest — just in more unexpected ways. “Abigail” was supposed to be an exercise in escapism. The song is an ode to her purple-haired wife in Stardew Valley, a life-simulation game in which users inherit a farm, but somehow, it became much more than that. “It is escapism,” she explains. “But with a lot of the games that I like to play, you can have a  personality within it. It still reflects you, and it doesn’t feel like you’re escaping your life entirely.” She eventually realized that she wanted to confront those feelings and embrace their transient nature.

The album doesn’t offer a step-by-step depiction of the five stages that grief is “supposed to” take. It’s less precise, and perhaps more accurate, than that. Evergreen’s first track, “Lost,” was the last that Allison wrote. It’s intended as a preview of what’s to come: “It’s like in a book,” she says, “when they give you this snapshot of where everything is now, and then start back at the beginning.” “Lost” is the most obvious in her acceptance of those feelings, mapping her grief in plain language: “I’ve got her name/I’ve got her face and all these things/But I don’t know what’s in her dreams/It’s lost to me.” 

For a self-described private person, Allison opens up more than she lets on. Evergreen is hugely intimate — recreating what grief might sound like in short lyrical anecdotes and being vulnerable in their production, stripping songs to their purest form instead of burying them beneath flashy effects, allowing them space to really be heard. That’s not to say the album isn’t complex. Even a single track can encompass multiple states of mind. In “Changes,” each verse is a memory, each a reflection of the idea that if you look away, everything shifts. That’s palpable in the first memory, wherein Allison remembers the changing color of her mother’s hair (“The house is painted over, it’ll never feel the same”). The second explores that idea emotionally (“I couldn’t taste that kiss now even if I tried”). “It’s knowing how you felt about something and knowing how you feel now,” she says. “But not knowing when it became distant to you.” The final verse brings us to the song’s present, as she grapples with what it all means (“Look at where it’s left me, singing to myself/A lover in the next room who once was something else/Burning through the fifth year spent in my bed”).

But it’s an intimacy with her feelings that Allison offers, not her story. The lack of specificity makes it easy to reorient the songs as personal to the listener. The reality of life doesn’t take a linear form, and neither does Evergreen. The track order — though no doubt meticulously made and worth abiding by for at least one listen — is maybe best rearranged by the listener, to make your own story to the tune of Allison’s. She wants the album to belong to you, to feel like your own. A preview of it before its release was offered to fans on the condition that they went to a park to do so. The music could only be unlocked while in a green space, urging fans to venture out alone and sit with it. “When I’m writing a song, and living in it and working on making it exactly what I want it to be, it feels very emotionally close to me,” she says. “And it’s not that I lose the attachment of loving the song or am not feeling that feeling anymore, but once things are in the public eye, it’s a little desensitized and no longer just mine.”

Letting emotion lead is typical of Allison’s practice. “You have to lean in, let yourself feel the thing, and know that it’s going to pass, and tomorrow you might feel differently,” she says. The earliest form of Soccer Mommy emerged when she was a teen in Nashville, releasing songs on Bandcamp with the sort of sparse production and emotive lyricism the platform was built upon. After a brief stint at NYU, she signed with Fat Possum, dropped out, and subsequently released the critically acclaimed albums that preceded Evergreen.

Evergreen is more pared-back and mature than its predecessors — more “earthbound” and organic in its sound and complex in its themes. But each iteration of Soccer Mommy can be found in her latest release. It sees her returning to the acoustic guitar that defined her earliest music. The eerieness of Sometimes, Forever and the moodiness of Color Theory linger in lighter form. The ghosts of her old music live on in the new.

Evergreen doesn’t mean permanent. It doesn’t mean unchanging. If we’re going to get technical, it refers to trees that keep their green across seasons. Trees that still shed and grow leaves, trees that change in shape. The same is true metaphorically for Soccer Mommy’s Evergreen: Grief can be a hundred emotions. “The idea of something being there all the time is obviously in direct conflict with the idea of loss,” she says. “But it’s really important to me to view things as more than just the physical. Some things don’t fade.”