Female Friday: Allie Colleen
Allie Colleen wears her heart on her sleeve – literally. In the middle of our interview, she pulls down her bottom lip to reveal a tattoo that reads “cool kid,” matching the sleeves of symbolic ink that covers her arms. “Cool kids” is what she affectionally calls her fanbase, the tribe of people who are just as connected to her music as she is. Though she is the youngest daughter of one of country music’s icons, Garth Brooks, Allie is intentional about carving her own path, mastering her voice with a growing collection of songs that reflect her evolving identity. In this edition of Female Friday, Allie opens up about her upcoming debut album, how music has saved her life and how she always knew she’d form a tribe of “cool kids.”
When did you realize that you had a passion for music and wanted to make it your life’s work?
I don’t think there was a time where that wasn’t the case. I don’t remember some big moment that happened when I was a kid, I just remember always singing in my closet or somewhere wonky singing by myself. I loved the storytelling of songwriting. I remember being 12-years-old and knowing that I could make up a song, I thought that was the coolest thing on the planet, and I didn’t understand why all my friends weren’t doing the same thing. I was writing songs or jingles all the time, and I loved it. I’ve never felt the way that I do singing doing anything else, so I think it’s just my thing. I had this song that I wrote when I was little and I remembered that the first line was ‘don’t come knocking on my door ‘cause I’m not going to be there anymore.’ I remember eight years later hearing a Jo Dee Messina song off the album that I would listen to every night that started the exact same way. I was just ripping off songs as a kid. I was piecing together lyrics unknowingly. But I think that was such an interesting thing that without even thinking, music grabbed me. But the songs I remember the most would be when I started playing guitar. That was when I officially had a song start to finish that I could play and sing at the same time.
You can ask anybody who’s known me since I was a kid, my answer has been the same since I was three. Singing was just as crazy to me back then as it is now. That was my crazy dream as a kid to be a singer, and for some reason never changed. I started looking for colleges probably around fifth or sixth grade. By eighth grade, I already knew that I was going to Belmont University. I knew that I was going to Nashville and that I was going to try and get into the songwriting program and if I couldn’t get it in the songwriting program, then I would do music business. Now I have a degree in songwriting. It was awesome, I loved it. I met a lot of kids that were the weird music kid in their town and all of a sudden, we’re all weird music kids at our college. It was really cool. I didn’t tell somebody I wanted to sing and they weren’t like ‘good luck,’ they were like ‘me too.’ So it was really cool coming to Nashville and realizing that you are the weird music kid, but so were a lot of other kids.
There’s something so unique about your voice. It’s crisp and modern, but also classic. How do you shape your voice?
I would give a lot of kudos to the artists that I was trying to be as a kid, which was not the artist that the other girls that I know in country music were wanting to be. A lot of my friends here in Nashville wanted to be like Sheryl Crow or Dolly [Parton] or even Carrie Underwood. I was listening to Papa Roach and Evanescence and a lot of more pop-rock stuff like Annie Lennox and Cher, those kind of females growing up. My mom loved 2000s R&B and pop. I felt like I loved all of those things, so I have just as much an impressionable voice from Ariel from singing Disney songs all day long as I do from throwing out Papa Roach songs all day long. I feel like I had such a weird cauldron pot of influences, and when I say I love to sing, I love to sing. Since I was a kid, I think I’ve set aside anywhere from eight to 12 hours a week to sing. I think somewhere in there I found this really cool, weird voice that I wonder sometimes if it has a place anywhere because it is kind of wonky, but I love it. I think it’s very me. It’s not what a lot of people expect to pair all those together, and then to grow up and find Hayley Williams. She is like an Alison Krauss for me because if you go and listen to her record all the Paramore settings and you listen to vocal track tuning, she’s perfect, and Alison Krauss can do that same thing in a totally different way. I think having a lot of females like that growing up to listen to and to rock out to I think really shaped whatever this thing is that I do.
One of my favorite songs of yours is your debut single, “Work in Progress,” which feels very raw and open. One of the lines in the song that stood out to me is “I have faith in the things I can’t see.” What are some things that you have faith in that you can’t see, but you can feel or experience?
I think a lot of the times, it’s just the purpose of it all. I’m a faith-driven person and I am a huge fan of Elevation Church and Steven Furtick and he has this really amazing phrase that ‘it’s just for purpose and not popularity,’ and that’s been a big driving factor for me and my music. There’s so many ways for people, fans and the industry and social media to tell you whether you are being successful or not and I think having faith in the things that I can’t see was a really big thing for me in the sense of learning what’s important. For me, having faith in things that I can’t see is I have faith in every song I write is reaching whoever it’s supposed to reach. It’s whoever heard “Work in Progress” and wasn’t sure that they were at one point going to be the best they’ve ever been. That’s been a really big driving factor is the affirmations of shows and you get to hear a 72-year-old woman say that she heard “Work in Progress” and finally decided to do the hobby that she’s had her whole life and make a small business for herself as a retired woman. Or you meet a 12-year-old at a show who tells you that she’s not like all of her other friends, but she’s really proud of herself. Those are the moments that are so special for “Work in Progress” and all the songs. I think having faith in the things that you can’t see is a constant reminder to find faith in things that you can’t see because life can kick your butt. So “Work in Progress” has been a really big reassuring thing for me. Even if no one else ever heard it, it was special. That’s the purpose, that it would find somebody, and that’s the case with all my songs. A lot of my songs have personally saved my life, so hopefully they can do the same thing for somebody else.
How have your songs saved your life?
There’s this really special song that we have on YouTube, it’s this beautiful song called “Close Enough.” It was one that I wrote by myself in a couple minutes at school. I was a sophomore at the time and I was sitting in my dorm room and I just hit a wall. I’ve never really questioned my purpose here on earth. I’m supposed to be here and I’m going to be here, I don’t have a say in that and I refuse to have a say in that. But there were times when not even that that was questioned, but if you ever felt like the one thing that kept you together wasn’t working, and that for me is music. For God to come through and use music to [reiterate] to me that this is what I’m supposed to do come to me in things like “Close Enough.” That song took just as long to write as it took to think about. There’s purpose in everything, and so I’m very lucky to have a couple of songs that I do truly believe that the Holy Spirit wrote for me and wrote through me not for mass popularity or success, but literally to just save your life sometimes. That’s what “Close Enough” did for me and that’s what “Work in Progress” did for me. Music, it’s really special, and it’s always felt like something bigger than me. I think that’s why I wanted to be a part of it.
Tell me about your upcoming debut album.
We are bringing everybody 12 brand new songs. I’m so excited, the album is called Stones. All I’ve heard from everybody is how sweet I am, and I cannot wait for a song like “Stones” to show another side of me because I get a lot of ‘sweet,’ which is never a word I would use to describe myself. So I’m excited for the album to come out and to show a little more Allie. Our first single from the album is a spooky one called “Playin’ House.” It’s going to come out [on April 2] and I cannot wait. I don’t think that we knew that we were writing for an album when we wrote these songs. I didn’t know until a month ago that I was ever going to have an album because the amazing creators and curators at Spotify and Amazon and iTunes, they’re not making algorithms for albums. I really thought I lucked out, I was born too late and I don’t get to have an album. I was really nervous about it, but then 2020 happened and we saw how quickly things can change, and I decided that I still do what I want to do and that’s put out a dang album, and I can’t wait.
When it came down to an album, it was ‘what are the songs that I can’t let go of? What are the songs that I have to give a life before I can give other songs a life?’ and it was these 12. The album is a lot of new stuff for me in a sense of I did get back to writing by myself in 2020, which I hadn’t done for a really long time. There’s one song on the album that’s a solo write, it’s just mine, it’s called “Blame it on the Weather.” It has been a very surprising track off the album. All of my band mates, it’s our favorite one to play, which no one anticipated. Then there’s one song on it called “Pink Lemonade” that I did not write on at all. It’s the only song on the whole album that I didn’t write on, so it’s my very first cut as an artist. The writers did not even ask me to sing their song, I literally went up to them and asked them if I could have it. I loved it so much. It was something that I could never write if I wanted to. So [there’s] a lot of new stuff for me personally as an artist; a lot of new sides of Allie that I didn’t really see before this in the sense of I’ve always played with the guitar. Now I have a full album with all this instrumental stuff that I wouldn’t have chose to put on it, but then as soon as you hear it, it’s like, ‘that’s me.’ So I’m genuinely excited.
I think this album has really showed me a lot about how people will take my songwriting, coming from where I come from. The title track is called “Stones” and the inspiration from it was I saw a meme on Facebook that had this awesome looking throne of rocks and it said “build an empire with the stones that they have thrown at you,” and I was like ‘hell yeah, that’s what we’re going to do’ and so we wrote “Stones.” It’s cool, it’s sassy, it’s fun; it’s everything I’ve ever wanted to tell people, but don’t because I’m ‘sweet.’ I’m really looking forward to that one and see how it’s taken because it’s definitely more of that Evanescence side of me than anything else. I love every single song on it, it was really special. The album has really shown me the cool kids and who are the big Allie supporters and what they care about, how they care about it. It’s been a really huge couple months of affirmations after this wonky year of 2020, so I’m really looking forward to sharing this music with everybody. I think if somebody remembers Allie Colleen songs down the line, what’s important to me is I do want to put songs out there that feed people and have nutrients and supplements in them that we can’t get anywhere else.
What inspired you to get the “cool kids” tattoo on the inside of your lip?
My tattoos mean the world to me. I got really bored in class one day and I had just finished my sleeve or was in between sessions and was itching for one really bad. My best friend that was in class with me that day was like ‘I want one too. Where’s somewhere we could get it where it’s not going to matter?’ We were trying to think of things and we’re like, ‘people do the inside of their lip, right?’ I knew that four-year-old Allie wanted to have a tribe of cool kids one day, and this is how I was going to do it, so I got “cool kid.” One day, someone will have a “cool kid” on the inside of their lip just like me – and we’ll be cool kids.
