Blondshell On If You Asked For A Picture and Masculinity

It’s not often that an artist’s first album skyrockets them to immediate notoriety, but for Blondshell’s Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum it was almost inevitable. It would be misleading to see Teitelbaum’s debut, the self-titled Blondshell, as her first foray into music — as she already had a lifetime of work under her belt — though this project was catalyzing, the exact moment she caught the eyes, and ears, of millions. Two years past the 2023 release, Teitelbaum has returned with her sophomore album If You Asked For A Picture, an album that is notably full of life’s biggest questions, but without any weighty answers. I had the honor of sitting down with Teitelbaum to discuss these big questions ahead of her show on June 6 at Soundwell.

SLUG: You are about to begin a pretty big tour. Is it nice to be able to have more than a single album of music to play on stage?

Teitelbaum: Yeah, that’s one of the things I was looking forward to. I think it’s nice to be able to jump around and play some of the older songs and [be able to] play some of he newer songs. I think it just makes for a more exciting set. 

SLUG: You’re able to draw on people’s memory with your older music and it’s not like just everything that’s right at the surface. 

Teitelbaum: Totally, totally. I think it’s exciting. People want to go see songs that they just heard for the first time, but they also want to see stuff that they’ve known for a couple of years. So it feels good to be able to have variety in the set. 

SLUG: I want to ask you about the namesake of the album, the Mary Oliver poem “Dogfish.” How did you discover that poem and what do you love most about it?  

Teitelbaum: I read some of her stuff when I was younger and I was angsty in high school. I didn’t really study it, though. I just had some of [her] books around. I really fell in love with one of her books called Dog Songs. 

SLUG: I love Dog Songs. 

Teitelbaum: It’s so good, right? 

SLUG: It’s so good. It is equal parts heart-wrenching and tender in a way that I am astonished by. Huge envy.

Teitelbaum: Me too, huge envy. I get a lot of peace from her poems. I just feel, I don’t know, grounded and whatever. So that was something I wanted to have on this album, and I think the album is so much about trying to find that sense of peace. There’s so many more references to domestic life and trying to be healthy, peaceful and find relationships and what you want your life to look like.

That’s sort of what the whole album’s about. So it felt nice to have that tribute to her and I also love this idea of songs and albums being little snapshots of an artist and your life at a given time. It doesn’t have to be an album tells the entire story, beginning to end — it’s a little slice, and I think that [albums] don’t have to be anything more than that. 

SLUG: Yeah, that relates back to previous interviews that you’ve given about asking more questions instead of trying to answer them, which I feel goes hand in hand with snapshotting. You brought up the idea of domesticity. Does that tie into your themes of being an object of desire? Do you desire domesticity or is it something you’re trying to channel? 

Teitelbaum: I think I’ve found myself trying to make a home in the last couple of years, probably because I was traveling more than I have before. Also, I just turned 28 and I think maybe it’s the age, [but I’m] not feeling so excited about bouncing from place to place as much as I am about building a life. There’s so much stuff about sobriety and [domesticity is] a big piece of sobriety also. I don’t think I have a formed opinion on domestic life. This was just me being like, “What is this thing? I’m gonna write a little bit about this thing that’s new to me.”

SLUG: Domesticity is sometimes marketed as an end goal, especially for young women. It’s marketed as something that you try to achieve, but not something that you explore, so it is interesting to try to explore that.

Teitelbaum: Yeah, that’s so true. 

SLUG: Sobriety and the painful parts of being sober show up really consistently as themes in your work, especially in the first, self-titled album. Is that still informing your work? Is that still a pillar of something that you’re reaching back to? 

Teitelbaum: I don’t know that it’s such a pillar. I think things can feel sort of black and white. For people who are sober, I think it can be easy to have that binary of “life before I was sober” and “life after I was sober” so sometimes that can come up in the sounds, but I never think about themes or anything like that. It’s not that intentional when I’m writing. It’s just urgent. I can look back at an album after the fact and be like, “Oh yeah, this is what was coming up a lot.” But I definitely didn’t sit down to be like, “I would like to continue writing about sobriety.”  I just think it probably just comes up because of that binary. 

SLUG: You’re saying it’s more holistic to who you are and how it informs other things in your life, too? 

Teitelbaum: Yeah, I think so. 

SLUG: Do you feel sobriety has changed your creative process in the way that you approach it, or is it just its own element outside of it? 

Teitelbaum: I think it’s sort of outside of it. My creative process has pretty much been the same since I was a kid. I always write with a guitar. Sometimes I write on a piano. I always write alone. The recording process has changed — recording this album looked a bit different than recording the last album, but I try to keep it the same because there’s so many other factors that changed so much, especially with touring. I always wear the same stuff on stage that I would wear at home, because I think it’s really important for me personally to feel like I’m not putting on a character on stage, [that it’s] just me, and I think it’s the same with my creative process. For me, it has to feel as everyday to life as possible. 

SLUG: Is it about authenticity and normalcy? 

Teitelbaum: I think so, yeah. 

SLUG: Within the genres of rock and pop, a character or a persona is usually really big for musicians. It’s often the thing that artists lead with. Is that something that doesn’t suit who you are? 

Teitelbaum: I think to trying to be something curated would not come off well, because that’s not who I am. [For] some people, it suits them really well to have this superhero version of themselves, but I think my power as an artist is in everyday life. 

SLUG: Sometimes you get lost in all of the elements of a persona in music. I bet it has to feel nice not to feel like you have to curate every single element. 

Teitelbaum: Totally. 

SLUG: You talked with Line Of Best Fit about how sometimes you don’t know how you feel about someone or something until you’re writing about it and then you make a big discovery. Did that happen on this album too, with any particular subject? 

Teitelbaum: It happened with a lot of things, even little details. I kept writing about somewhere and then I realized it was my grandma’s house. I kept writing about my grandma’s house and I didn’t realize until after we recorded the album. And then I was like, “Oh, that’s what all that is about.” I didn’t say, “This is my grandma’s house” in the song. I was just talking about a lemon tree and then I was like, “Oh, the only place I know that has a lemon tree is my grandma’s house.” So I think sometimes there are things that don’t feel like an important sensory thing for you, but then I’ll be like, “Oh, this thing is so in my subconscious that I write about it all the time.” Realizations like that. So much of the album was just about the asking itself. 

SLUG: It sounds like the subconscious the images bubbling up to the surface were not as explicit as you wanted them to be. 

Teitelbaum: Yeah, true. 

SLUG: You have talked about the sonic masculine and sonic feminine and leaning in and out of those things. Is that an explicit choice that you’re making? Is that a form of individual gender expression or a tool you’re using? 

Teitelbaum: It’s definitely individual because I don’t think there’s any sort of objectivity around what’s masculine and what’s feminine. There’s no way for me to be like, “This is a masculine tone and this is a feminine tone.” So it’s 100% all of my own identity stuff and life experience projected onto it and being like, “When I hear this, it feels masculine to me.” But there also is a history of certain genres being more occupied by bands that are just all dudes. I did find myself coming with a lot of references that were really dude-heavy bands.

One of the ways that I could communicate with other people for what I wanted [the album] to sound like was by saying, “I want these really masculine records. I want to have the low end from those records and this heavy bass and drums.” I think that was an internal conversation we were having when we made the record — me, the producer and the band. It is a communication tool with other people you’re working with, but it’s so subjective. 

SLUG: I know that you’ve called upon some California standards on this record, notably Queens of the Stone Age and their album Rated R. Tell me about your love for that band and the moves you made to translate some of their sound onto the record. 

Teitelbaum: I just love their tones from a production place and there’s also really great melodic baselines. Also, The Strokes have some of the best melodic bass parts. [I was] listening to a Room on Fire a lot. It’s sort of a tone thing on the one hand, but then also base parts. I just like the music and that album, and [they have] some of the most tasteful production choices on such a big stadium rock record. So many stadium rock bands that play huge can get so corny so fast but they make such tasteful choices and [that’s] rare. 

SLUG: That era of rock music, especially in California and New York, doesn’t say a lot but invokes so much.

Teitelbaum: I think you have something there. It that’s sort of the magic of the whole thing. Everything for me is so much about lyrics, which makes sense for [why] I would be obsessed with that because I’m like, “How do you do this? You guys don’t even care about lyrics, but you’re still getting the same thing across.” I love that so much. 

SLUG: You played Kilby Block Party last year — tell me a bit about the festival. 

Teitelbaum: I thought it was so fun. I thought it was really beautiful. That stage that we were on was facing a bunch of mountains with snow. I just remember being like, “This is so insanely scenic,” and I love playing festivals. So that was a really fun show.

Blondshell is playing at the Soundwell on June 6. Get your tickets here.

Read more interviews with national artists here:
Black Country, New Road’s Charlie Wayne On Continuity
“Most of Your Life is Boring”: Lime Garden is Romanticizing the Mundane