‘Bury Me at Makeout Creek’: The Mitski album that made Soccer Mommy want to record music
The wave of so-called sad girl music, which has slowly emerged over the last decade or so, has, quite literally, changed lives. For many listeners, hearing their own experiences sung back to them over a soft strum and a quiet kick has proven to be a source of real comfort. For Soccer Mommy, the impact of this music extended beyond healing and into inspiration, particularly when she discovered the unofficial monarch of the genre, Mitski.
Since making her debut with the self-released Lush back in 2012, Mitski has become a defining figure in the creation of contemporary sad girl music. In every release since then, her words have ached with love, with longing and with loss, as she surrounds them with warm swells and art pop flourishes, but there is one album that had a particularly formative influence on Soccer Mommy, also known as Sophia Regina Allison.
During a chat with Tidal, Allison remembered discovering Mitski through her sister. After inquiring about what she was listening to, she quickly fell in love with the talented songwriter. She trawled through her back catalogue, through her debut and its follow-up, but it was the third full-length offering from Mitski that she found resonated with her most.
Bury Me at Makeout Creek was released in 2014, marking Mitski’s first release with a label rather than alone. It also marked our first glimpse at the Mitski we know and love now, shaping her sad girl sound far more than the records that had preceded it. With gritty guitars and poetic admissions, it would begin to shape the genre, too.
It also shaped Soccer Mommy, inspiring her to take her own ventures into music more seriously. “This record changed my life, I guess,” Allison remembered, “It made me want to record my own music. Before that I was kind of playing for fun. I’d been just playing for a long time. That was definitely a very formative record for me.”
The record included a blistering lead single in ‘First Love / Late Spring’, which remains one of Mitski’s most well-known and well-loved songs, and it’s easy to see why. Making desperate declarations of love over subdued twangs and sudden swells, it’s a track that has become typical of Mitski’s catalogue and one that shows off her songwriting prowess.
The record also includes the gorgeously simple ‘I Will’, the spirited ‘Townie’, and a devastating opener in ‘Last Words of a Shooting Star’, but Allison named one of her ever-changing favourite tracks as the record’s penultimate offering, ‘Carry Me Out’. She deemed the song “pretty amazing,” a description it’s certainly worthy of.
As Mitski sings of plastic chairs on rooftops and nighttime drives in the rain, cymbals brew beneath her words, reinforcing their reflective nature. “And carry me out,” she sings, her words wavering at will, “carry me out.” An understated opening quickly devolves into a clashing crescendo, as so many Mitski songs do.
Bury Me at Makeout Creek is certainly a life-changing record, one that seems to have maintained an influence on Allison’s own sound. As she pens her own tender tales, accompanying them with indie rock guitars every step of the way, it’s easy to hear the ongoing influence of Mitski in her output.
