Soccer Mommy On 'Color Theory': 'I Want To Keep Growing Until I Hit The Ceiling'

There's an old writing exercise that involves describing a color without naming it; it challenges the writer to evoke the emotional primacy of a concept we often take for granted.

That task of refreshing preconceived notions of emotional experience is exactly what 22-year-old Nashville indie rocker Sophie Allison accomplishes with Soccer Mommy's sophomore album, Color Theory. She paints suites of songs in broad strokes, grouping three and four-song sets together according to color. Allison sequences them as blue, yellow and gray — like the bleeding light of an old box TV set left on overnight — with her descriptions of the blue swimming in her veins ("bloodstream"), the yellow of a sun that comes and goes ("yellow is the color of her eyes") and the gray of smoke and ghosts ("stain") as an attempt to capture difficult emotional states without naming them, too.

"I always think when I'm writing I want to be vague," she says. "It's not about telling my complete story; it's about capturing an emotion and often that is in strange details."

After gaining buzz on Bandcamp, Allison asserted her skill as a songwriter to a larger audience on her 2018 debut, . On songs like