Once she knew that her new album was going to be about grief and longing for closure, Sophie Allison rethought the way she was writing songs. Her last album Sometimes, Forever, produced by Oneohtrix Point Never, was heavily based around creepy electronics, and the two albums before that (Clean and Color Theory) were defined by murky production and moody guitars. But for this one — her fourth studio full-length, titled Evergreen — she wanted light and space. She wanted earthbound instruments: acoustic guitars, flutes, violins. Along with producer Ben H. Allen, a guy who works with titans of indie rock including Washed Out, Deerhunter and Belle and Sebastian, she crafted a sound that envelops the record in a gentle, dreamy cocoon.

“Usually I have a lot of ideas and I have an overall wide-view vision of what I wanna make, [but] this time I had a really specific vision of the type of sound that I wanted to create,” Allison tells Stereogum. “I had such a specific sound in my head of what the songs made me feel like. They’re very personal, and I just wanted it to be really natural and raw and beautiful and pristine. And I think there were specific sounds that really held that in my head, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t get distracted by all of the excitement and veer off from them too much, and find myself making something cool that I liked but isn’t that exact kind of memento.” That said, there are still traces of those gloomier Soccer Mommy instincts in there, but Allison’s finding new ways of translating them: “I was talking a lot about Nico and PJ Harvey, and how there are so many really cool, organic sounds that can also be so strange and creepy. I wanted to find my own way to do those sorts of things.”

At the time of Evergreen, Allison was reeling from a deep personal loss (which she, understandably, declines to elaborate on). That’s present across almost all of these songs, as is the heavy weight of memory, and the helpless feeling of getting further and further away from a time that can never be again. Allison’s meditations on it, combined with the thoughtful instrumentation, are incredibly moving, and all in all the album is some of her best work yet.

In our track-by-track interview she discusses those lyrical themes, her newly focused instrumental choices, and more.

1. “Lost”

The album is very much about loss, and this song is one where it just, in the simplest terms, is like, “This person is gone and there’s things that I can’t ask them now and I’ll never get to ask them.” Tell me about writing about that idea.

SOPHIE ALLISON: It was actually the last song I wrote for the record, like right before I was going in to record. And I think that’s why, at least from my standpoint, I can see a different viewpoint from some of the other songs, which are more engrossed in certain moments. I think this one is really kind of taking a moment to look back at things you did, things you didn’t do, things you wish you did. And also I guess for this specific thing for me, there’s like a sense of realizing selfishness, that isn’t ill-intentioned, but just seeing everything that happens through your own viewpoint and not having any true understanding of the other point of view.

It’s such an impossible idea to grapple with. Did writing this song help you with that?

ALLISON: I think when I was writing it, it felt really bittersweet, but also it felt like clarity. So I think it did give me some of that letting it go. Or I guess just realizing that everything in life is… things are so much bigger than just what you think or feel, or what you have left from a situation. It’s like feelings that are very deep and personal and can be heartbreaking, but they’re also just very common really.

I really enjoyed the violins that come into the song when it starts building up. What was it like working with strings or flutes or instruments that maybe you aren’t as used to?

ALLISON: It was awesome. I mean, the flutes, I was very specific that I really wanted flutes. I had been, when I was demoing, using flute patches and stuff for the synth stuff, and I just really wanted that to be part of the sound of the record. And it was cool to be able to have a flute player come and play some parts, and then also having the option of being able to sample them and edit them and just kind of do whatever we wanted from there with these real flute sounds. ‘Cause it’s so different than like a patch or the Mellotron, it’s so much more just imperfect and beautiful-sounding. And the strings, oh my god, I don’t even know how that happened. I didn’t really have that much to do with the strings. I said I wanted them, and we brought them in for certain songs and had some arrangement ideas, and then Raven who did the strings just arranged all the stuff and made it exactly what we wanted. And honestly, [such a] game-changer. We had really simple Mellotron strings sitting in the tracks before then, and it really brought them to life.

It sounds like there’s some kind of bird sound or field recording sound going on in the background of the track. Am I hearing that right?

ALLISON: Yes. So it’s not actually a nature sound, it’s something that I made with a Microcosm, which is like a guitar pedal, synth pedal type thing. It’s got like a looper on it. But I would just put a microphone in and kind of hum stuff with the effects all the way up and the send mix down, and get this kind of ambient washy stuff. I’d do whistling, which is what the bird sound is, it’s like little whistles, which sound more birdlike on the thing than when I do it. That and like blowing into it, like wind kinda sounds. But you can make a really cool soundscape with that. And I think there’s also a weird little subby moving synth thing that’s not melodic at all, but it sounds like some kinda like croaking in there. So we really got a bit of a nature scene in the background, just from kinda making weird sounds and looping them.

2. “M”

ALLISON: That song is one of my personal favorites. It really kind of set the inspiration, I think, for the rest of the album when I was writing. ‘Cause it just felt really different from the last album I made, the last stuff I was working on. It felt really different and really fresh, and just very light sonically. Obviously there’s a lot of specific stuff in the lyrics that is heavier, but it feels really breathy and light. I really wanted it to have that kind of sound. Especially, obviously, the outro of it has this flute solo and strings and all this stuff, and I just wanted it to be very light and lifting and wispy. Which I think we nailed at the end.

I wanted to ask about that little flute outro. I thought that was so surprising and cool, it sounds like Pet Sounds or something like that. How did that part of the song come together?

ALLISON: I had this outro that was just the guitar chords basically, and on the demo I think there’s some bass and a little bit of synthesizer, but it’s really basic. But I wanted it to be this kind of longer outro, just kind of a little end piece that felt really beautiful and emotional. And it was one of the big moments where I was like, “It’s flute time. This is gonna be where the flute is going crazy.” I think it feels very attached to me to a song like “Yellow Is The Color Of Her Eyes” [from Color Theory], which obviously has a big outro to it. I wanted it to be this similar moment of having this kind of pause and secondary movement to the song, that just feels really beautiful and ties everything together and has a lot of nice, simple melodies going on.

This is one that you put out as a single. Why did it feel like a single?

ALLISON: I mean, I know it’s one of my favorites if not my favorite. I was kinda surprised they wanted to put it out as a single, I wasn’t gonna push for it, just because I was like, it’s fine, I get it, it’s a little stranger, it’s not necessarily the poppiest song on the record. But I do think it really, really presents the record in the way it needs to be presented. Same as “Lost.” I think even just starting with that, you get this instant view of what the record is supposed to sound like and feel like.

3. “Driver”

Despite the album having that softer sound, this is more of a heavy, rocking one.

ALLISON: I Yeah, I feel like there’s two rockers really on the record, ’cause I can’t help myself. I love to rock, I guess. It’s one that I was really excited about from the moment I wrote it. It just felt fun and upbeat. I think what we made with the production was really interesting. Rather than just going about it straightforward rock and keeping it really heavy the entire time, I think having those moments of flutes and acoustics and kind of light, suspended chord progressions really sets the tone and gives it a vibe that fits with everything else on the record. But yeah, it’s a really fun one for me. It’s obviously not about the same subject matter as a lot of the rest of the record. It’s really just kinda a love song, like a fun love song about having someone in those moments that I guess accepts your flaws, and you can have somebody to lean on. In kind of a goofy, metaphoric way, being someone who gets lost driving all the time like I do.

I wanted to ask about this one being a love song, in the context of a lot of songs about grief and loss. What did it mean to write a love song in the context of those songs?

ALLISON: I think honestly, it’s just like anything else, there’s ebbs and flows. I think writing songs about very specific content or stuff that’s heavier, there’s moments in your life where you’re not feeling it as much. It’s so easy to turn any sort of pain in your life into something that’s so constant and eternal, and it can be something you are gonna have forever, but also it’s okay to have escapes from that and have levity in the midst of it.

4. “Some Sunny Day”

ALLISON: Yeah, that one’s really fun. I feel like it really captures the kind of light, wispy, airy thing I was talking about. Obviously it’s a song about seeing all of this darkness surrounding you and not being able to see a way out, but knowing that there will be better days. And I just wanted it to feel like that kind of sunlight, and feel the wind and the wispiness in the sonics of it. I think it was one of the ones that we did super early on when we were recording and doing pre-production, to kind of figure out the sonic world of the album, and I feel like that one really hit it on its head. And it’s different I think, for a Soccer Mommy song, like it has a different airiness to it that isn’t always present.

The vocal melody to this song is really interesting. It’s like you were saying about having those basic instruments, but adding in a darker vibe that wouldn’t necessarily come naturally from just having those basic elements. Did you push yourself to do something interesting in the vocal melody there?

ALLISON: I think it was just kinda how it came out. I was playing with songs in drop D guitar tuning, and it made it so I was playing all these strange suspended chords. You could play the song in a simpler way, but it has this different tone to it because of the chords, and I think that’s what led the melody into what it became. And I think also when I was writing I was just a lot of times tired, and laying on the couch playing guitar half-heartedly, and I think that kinda stuff really does come through in songs sometimes, where you’re feeling a certain kinda way and it makes you sing differently, makes you find different melodies because your head is in a different place. So I think it just has this nature of kind of like, tired, wispy depression in it. But with these moments of sunlight, that have kind of like a painful lightness to it rather than it being this [pure] elation.

5. “Changes”

I read that this is one of the earlier songs you wrote.

ALLISON: Yeah, it’s actually really the earliest. I actually wrote it when we were still doing Sometimes, Forever. I had kinda tossed it aside just thinking, this doesn’t fit with Sometimes, Forever. And then once I started writing this record, I came back to it and was like, this really fits here, I think I’m gonna put it on.

The song is about memories and how things change and the utter sadness of looking back on a memory and knowing it’ll never be like that again. What inspired you to put that feeling into song?

ALLISON: I think that in particular with “Changes,” obviously it was way, way older of a song, but it does have this nature of nostalgia, [which is] something I’ve always been interested by. Each verse is a different specific scenario, a different specific memory. And looking at it and seeing the change, or with some of them being afraid of the change happening — at one point fearing it and now realizing that it kind of means nothing, or just doesn’t hold the same significance anymore. And all of those things that you are so attached to and felt so powerful, somewhere along the way they’ve lost the same level of attachment, and here you are in the final verse with things that you want in your life and that you wanna keep, and fearing that reality of like, things fade. Whether it be love or whether it be places that you were attached to, whatever. They do fade over time, and you’ll find yourself in new places with new interests and new loves. So I think that just really fit with everything that was being talked about on this record. It’s a very connected kind of theme despite being about, in a literal sense, different things.

The chorus feels like a really big centerpiece chorus. What is your approach to writing choruses or hooks?

ALLISON: I don’t have a specific thing that helps me find my way every time. I always prefer if I can write a chorus when I’ve already written a verse. I think that helps the flow a little bit better for me, inspiration-wise. I do try to a lot of times make sure that I am changing the chords, because I think that is a really easy way to inspire yourself to change the melody and get out of the same melodic mode that you’re in. But there are also times where I’m writing something and there’s no chorus at all, and it just is what it is. But I think the real trick to big choruses is making sure that you are shifting in a very specific way. And a lot of times a really easy thing is sending the melody up higher than it was. That’s a pretty good trick. But I think it’s just pushing yourself to actually work for it a little bit, rather than just singing and finding your way through a song. It can be easy to find things that are just pleasant and easy listening, but I think big choruses and exciting choruses can come from really making sure you’re pushing yourself to let people feel the change and feel the shift and feel the grandness of it.

6. “Abigail:

This one is a love song to a Stardew Valley character, right?

ALLISON: Yeah.

What made you wanna write that?

ALLISON: Honestly, I love Stardew Valley. That’s my wife on the game, it’s my favorite character to marry. I’d been playing the game a lot, I kinda had some writer’s block. I think I’d written a bunch of songs for the album and was kinda hitting a wall where I had nothing new to say, I guess. So I was just kinda messing around playing guitar and I decided to sing her name at the beginning of the song, and kinda made it a writing exercise. I was just messing around, thinking, can I use all this about this fictional character to write a love song, as you would if you were writing about someone that you actually loved? And I ended up liking the song, so I just decided I would record it and just make it a fun one. And I still think that sonically it fits nicely with the rest of the record.

How much are games a part of your life?

ALLISON: You know, I don’t actually play a lot of video games, I just play the same games over and over. I play Stardew a lot. Harvest Moon, which is very similar to Stardew as many people will probably know, it’s like an older video game that was a farming game. I grew up playing that, and I’ll still play that. And then I’ll play old Pokémon games, and that’s pretty much all I play. So I do game a bit, I’ll get into it. But it’s like if I’m in, I really wanna be focused in on the world and my escapism.

7. “Thinking Of You”

ALLISON: This one’s really cool. It came really fast, like I wrote it in 10 or 15 minutes. I remember I was out driving and I just had one thought about how to start the song, starting with these mundane activities that are just simple, quiet moments. And having this refrain of like, “But I’m still thinking of you,” or whatever. And I came home and instantly went and sat down and started playing guitar and just wrote it really fast. I obviously edited it a bit and tweaked verses a little bit afterwards, but the initial thing came really fast. And I just wanted it to be this reflection of this idea of, I think when you’re going through something — it doesn’t even necessarily have to be loss — you can have this thing in the back of your head that’s following you through your life, that’s coming with you all the time. And you can be doing these small things and it’s the sudden realization, sudden popping back into your head and kind of returning to this thought. It can seem like you’re fine a lot of the time and then other times you’re doing the simplest thing and you’re back in that headspace. So I really wanted it to capture the simplicity of these little things that you’re doing all the time that for some reason pull you back to a moment or a person or a place or whatever.

8. “Dreaming Of Falling”

ALLISON: That one I remember very specifically. I wrote it when I had COVID after the Charli XCX show. I remember that because I actually recorded the demo with COVID and my voice sounds awful on the demo, it’s really quiet and super raspy and just sounds super bad. But yeah, honestly, I feel like it had this feeling of depression and hopelessness, probably because I was writing it laying in bed with COVID for an extended period of time, and just sitting there feeling like it was never gonna end and feeling like I was rotting away a little bit. But the song really has this sense of being stuck between two places. Being stuck between the past and all these things that you wanna hold on to, and also feeling yourself being pulled forward all the time whether you like it or not. Kinda grappling with that. And also this idea of everything is behind you and everything in front of you will never be the same, and having all of this pain that you want to cling [because it’s] keeping you as who you are and who you were. So it’s very melodramatic, and very kind of drowning in those feelings of not being able to move forward and also not being able to go backwards.

I feel like instrumentally this feels like an older Soccer Mommy song to me, like something that could have been on Clean. Would you agree?

ALLISON: Yeah, I think it’s really straightforward. It’s just really simple, it has this big-feeling hook that would make me at least personally wanna sing along. And a pouring-my-heart-out type of feeling that I don’t think I always go to anymore. I think it’s still there oftentimes on Soccer Mommy stuff, but there’s a little bit more, I guess, nuance and afterthought built in, and it’s a little bit more complex. And this just feels very — I really like the song, this isn’t a dig on it to call it simple, but it really is just coming from this very pure, specific space of feeling like I’m just drowning in all of the sadness, and not really having that sense of maturity or afterthought about any of the feelings. It’s really just very specifically like, “I’m stuck here, I can’t stand it, everything is awful.”

That feels like a jumping off point to ask, how would you say you’ve progressed as a songwriter since Clean? Is there anything you feel like you do now as a songwriter that you couldn’t have done earlier?

ALLISON: I think I still write the same. I like to think that my lyrics have gotten better, just purely out of continuing to push myself to work for better ideas and better lines and not be satisfied with things that just work or fit. But I think honestly a lot of it is just growing up. When I wrote some of the songs for Clean I was like 18 years old. And just in a really crazy time in my life, just like anybody else at that age, going through a lot. And I think it’s just, sometimes you get more complex ideas as you get a little bit more mature. I think about things to a different extent. And the problems that I deal with in my life are more complex and bigger, and even the relationship that I’m in versus relationships that I’ve been in when I was younger, there’s a lot more to it and it’s a lot more complex and a lot more depth. So I think you just have more to pull from the older you get.

9. “Salt In Wound”

ALLISON: That’s the other rocker, I guess. It’s kind of similar in a way to “Thinking Of You,” this idea of these simple things that remind you of someone. But it’s kind of taking it in this way of, you’re trying to move past something and you get reminded of these little things in moments, and it’s something that you don’t wanna have to deal with, something that you wanna look away from. It’s just painful out of nowhere. I’m definitely someone who, if I’m dealing with something, I’m not showing it to everyone I know, I’m not broadcasting it. And it’s that thing of running into those walls and feeling confronted with an emotion that you don’t wanna deal with and that you don’t wanna work through anymore, and you don’t wanna have to keep feeling this way. Rather than taking the time to see the beauty in being reminded of certain things. So it’s a little bit of a flipside I guess, where it’s like, you can either cherish those things or you can be hurt by them or both. And I think “both” is usually the more realistic idea.

Like you said, this is another rockier one. I know all of these songs feature your full live band. In general, how important would you say is your band to these songs?

ALLISON: Yeah, they’re definitely important. I mean, this album in particular has less live tracking, so it’s not exactly the same as it has been at other times. It was much more pieced together, I guess. I think on some songs we had a lot of previous stuff that I brought in from the pre-production with Ben Allen, that we were kinda putting to the side and getting rhythm tracks and then bringing stuff back in and building from there. So it was a little bit more like how I made Clean, or how I made even Color Theory. But I love working with my band, I think it’s so much better to have people that you play with regularly than to have random people show up and play the parts. I think that, for example, a drummer or a bass player, if they know how you play and how you sing, building parts with them is a lot easier and it’s gonna mesh a lot better just from the get-go.

10. “Anchor”


This one is different, it’s got a gnarlier, kinda dark, electronic vibe. It kinda sounds more similar to the stuff you did on Sometimes, Forever to me.

ALLISON: Yeah, I think that one did definitely feel writing-wise more like some of the horror stuff that I did. And I’m never gonna stop doing that; it’s not my constant headspace to write like that but I really like writing stuff like that. And I wanted to put it on the record because the theme of the actual song fits so well with the album. And I was like, I feel like we can do something here that is still using a lot of the sounds that are on the record, but making something really weird with it. Kind of like what I was saying about PJ Harvey or something. It’s pretty organic type of sounds, but they’re very eerie and weird and it’s making it spooky. That’s kind of what I wanted to do with it, was get a kind of very tight, soft drum thing going and have a lot of space and a lot of just eerieness I guess in the song. With kind of like weird, drunken acoustics and stuff. It’s a really weird song, and it’s kind of a strange choice for the record, but it actually I think fits really well, with the lyrics and just kind of with what we were able to do with the production. It still works with the rest of the sounds on the album.

11. “Evergreen”

Obviously this is the title track. What does that word mean to you, evergreen?

ALLISON: I mean, obviously there’s the connotation of the thing that is everlasting, that’s gonna be around forever and not die, which is why I used it in the song. It’s kind of almost like a codename, the way that I used it. It’s like, calling this person evergreen, calling this memory evergreen, because it just sticks around and it survives all of these different seasons of emotion in my head. It lives through all of these, and it just kinda keeps standing there, unwavering. And I think it’s a really good kind of idea for the variety of things that you feel through something like [loss]. There’s passion and there’s coldness and depression, and there’s times where it’s joy and there’s times when it’s anger, and all of these different things. So I was kind of using it as this nickname, I guess, a little bit. And for other specific reasons that are just for me. And that’s why I named the album after it, is it’s just this kind of nickname in a sense for a specific person and this specific idea.

It’s such a beautiful moment, where you sing that word and the strings and the electric guitar and the harmonies come in. It’s this sparse instrumentation and then in that moment it all kinda comes in at once. Tell me about crafting that moment.

ALLISON: When I demoed the song it was just guitar and vocals, and I think just the chords that I had that led me to the melody had this eerieness and this bittersweet feeling to them, with the lifts and then the more minor-y turns of it. And for me, I was thinking of stuff like Nico or something, where there’s these really beautiful songs that have these eerie, slightly off-feeling strings or instruments that give them a haunting feeling underneath it. So that was very much the idea, get these gentle, beautiful sounds and then accentuate those kind of minor turns that give it this hauntingness underneath, and make it really a little bit ghostly, a little bit eerie and frosty.

Why was this the one to end the album with, and what kind of place do you think that it ends the album in?

ALLISON: Well, for one, I always really like ending on a slower one [or] a more stripped song. I think it’s great when you can have heavier stuff, more like rock stuff towards the end, and then end on a soft note. I always love that when I hear other albums too, I don’t know why, I think it just makes you kind of know the album’s ending. It’s like an outro, it’s like a final goodbye. And I think the note that the song itself ends it on is like, there’s so much talk of things fading and being afraid of things going away and losing things to the past and maybe not even recognizing when you lose them. But I think the song itself is very much like, there’s no moving something like that. That will always be there, haunting you. Whether you like it or not, whether it’s a bad haunting or a good haunting. It’s always going to be part of you, and it’s always going to be ever-present. So I think that’s kind of where it ends, in a “this will always be here,” bittersweet kind of way.

Evergreen is out now on Loma Vista.