Soccer Mommy began as a bedroom-to-Bandcamp exercise, with teenage Allison posting her plaintive songs as demos. Over the years, though, she has enhanced that sound, using endless production possibilities at her fingertips to outstrip singer-songwriter stereotypes. The records would start with songwriting kernels of truth, and she would then imagine all the unexpected shapes they could take. Every Soccer Mommy record has felt like a surprise.
On her fourth album, the tender but resolute Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life. But that life’s different these days: Since making 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and also very personal loss. New songs emerged from that change, unflinching and sometimes even funny reflections on what she was feeling. (Speaking of funny, this is a Soccer Mommy album, so there’s an ode to Allison’s purple-haired wife in the game Stardew Valley, too.) These songs were, once again, Allison’s way to sort through life, to ground herself. She wanted them to sound that way, too, to feel as true to the demos — raw and relatable, unvarnished and honest — as possible. The songwriting would again lead where the production would follow.
Evergreen is the absorbing result, an 11-track seesaw of articulate feeling that suggests Allison is driving you through the streets of her native Nashville, the Tennessee sun bright as she plays you a tape of songs she cut to document those very dark days. The mission for the album was to take life’s moments, frame them without obfuscating the emotional burdens or gifts that anchored them, and to let the lyrics and moods speak for themselves. Allison rendezvoused in Atlanta with producer Ben H. Allen III and told him she wanted to elide synthesizers and digital flourishes this time, favouring acoustic guitars, rich drums, and interweaving flutes. They built basic tracks for half the album as a pair in Allen’s Maze Studios before ushering in her touring band to add more. There were real flutes and real strings, just as Allison had imagined. As the layers and ideas mounted, Allen and Allison focused on peeling them back, on leaving subtle touches that never crowded the sentiments. The songs retain the spirit of the demos, candid and direct.
Allison assembled Evergreen as she crept into her late 20s, that tenuous time where the travails of adulthood suddenly look much closer than the playground of childhood. And during the three-year span since finishing Sometimes, Forever and beginning Evergreen, Allison learned loss is not a monolith. Some days are brutal and others are beautiful, as you take what you have gained from someone who is no longer here and try to carry it ahead, a talisman for whatever may come. “She cannot fade / She is so evergreen,” Allison sings in the devastating but strangely affirming title finale, strings sighing beneath the brush of her acoustic guitar. It feels like a lucid note to self. And that, after all, is where these songs started — Allison, writing songs for herself that documented what it was she was going through, just as she’s always done.”
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