Musician Allie Teilz says becoming a mom made her “bigger, not smaller”
Neil Krug
The DJ’s debut album, Come to Mommy, is a refusal to pick one version of herself, and a reminder that we don’t have to either.
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It’s dinnertime at Allie Teilz’s house, and the music is already on. Perhaps a film score courtesy of Italian classicist Morricone, maybe some Italian disco easing in behind it. One of the twins, age 3, is already dancing to it. The phones go in the ceramic cow on the counter for the remainder of the evening, where her almost-8-year-old likes them. There’s a projector, a record player, and a wall of VHS tapes with Yellow Submarine and The Land Before Time on heavy rotation. Teilz calls it, half-joking, a ’90s-electronics household.
She is, for the record, impossibly cool. A vinyl DJ and producer who came up in Los Angeles nightlife sharing booths with the likes of Grace Jones and Daft Punk, she now scours thrift stores and estate sales for those VHS tapes and describes herself as “a mother first and an artist second.” She is a mother of four who weaves those two versions of herself authentically into one.
We talked for an hour, and I could have gone three more. Somewhere in the course of our call she made me wish, for a second, that I could do the whole motherhood thing over again. My kids are grown and nearly grown, and I am not in the market for a redo. Still, the childhood she is building for hers, steeped in art and music and curiosity, had me calculating.
Her debut album, Come to Mommy, out now, is the sound of her reclaiming the artist within after the babies arrived. It’s atmospheric, irresistibly dance-able and laced with an electronic vibe that’s both throwback and futuristic. The title turns “come to daddy” on its head. The culture asks what Daddy wants. Teilz would rather ask what Mommy wants, and she answers without flinching. “Mommy wants joy,” she says. “She wants to have fun and dance. She wants pleasure and joy.”
We can let motherhood deepen the art
Teilz doesn’t treat her kids as the thing she makes art around. She treats them as the reason her art got deeper. “Becoming their mom,” she says, “only made everything bigger, not smaller.” Motherhood taught her that “the deepest creativity can come from having very little time and knowing exactly what matters.”
There’s a surrender in becoming a parent, she says, a soul handing itself over to lead someone else through life, and for her it cracked the work open instead of closing it down. It “liberated me in creation,” she says, and gave her “a deeper well to pull from.” She has taken to calling motherhood “the highest form of art I’ve ever experienced.”
It changed what she wants to make, too. She looks at her own work through her children’s eyes now and holds it to a single north star. What do I want to see more of in the world? Certainly not “AI art and lobotomy chic,” her encapsulation of the soulless, machine-driven work she’s watched creep in. She wants her kids to have what she had, the feeling of hearing Talking Heads for the first time and being free, the permission to flail around in an imaginary version of David Byrne’s giant suit and stay in “that beautiful state of play.” Come to Mommy is her attempt to put that feeling back into the world, and she credits her kids as the inspiration. “They’re the greatest teachers,” she says.
We don’t have to choose a singular version of ourselves
Most women are familiar with the shift that happens when you become a mother. The self gets smaller to make room for everyone else, and for a while Teilz felt it, sliding toward the motherhood she’d watched other women vanish into. The mom groups where everyone gave and gave without ever taking their own needs into consideration. The careers set down and never picked back up. The inability to truly answer the question, “Who am I?” She calls out the insidious culprits that get woven into culture. “We’re indoctrinated by The Giving Tree and The Rainbow Fish,” she says, the children’s books that sell self-erasure as generosity. Make yourself a stump and you’ll be loved. Give away your sparkles and you’ll be accepted. “That’s such a dangerous thing,” Teilz observes.
For a long stretch, her own priorities became submerged. What pulled her back was simple. Boundaries. A flip phone for the hours she refuses to be reachable. She points to a line she saw online, “have boundaries or get an autoimmune disorder,” and says that her health was what finally made her stop. “My kids don’t need a mom who disappears into anything,” she says. “Even motherhood.”
We get to decide what their childhood feels like
Teilz builds her kids’ childhood the way she builds a record, out of specific, deliberate, slightly magical details. When her daughter earned a leader award at school and got to choose the celebration, she asked to make “ice cream mountains” with scoops stacked into a castle on parchment paper, modeled on the shop Teilz loved as a girl. Ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous. The memories Teilz recalls most fondly from her own childhood aren’t the cruise or the big trip. They’re the one-bedroom apartment and her mom letting the kids pick a favorite ice cream before the first day of school. Now she makes the small, arguably more impactful kind of memories for her own crew.
There’s also a healthy helping of wonder. The kids get sent out to the garden to pull parsley or a tomato so their hands are involved in making dinner–she’s been teaching them to grow things from seed to fruition for years, because watching a baby artichoke push up from a seed you watered is the kind of small miracle she wants them to appreciate. Books work the same way. She still talks about a woman she once watched on the subway, reading beside her small daughter while the car churned around them, the two of them just reading, an image that stuck with her long before she had kids of her own. Now one of her proudest moments is her daughter climbing onto the couch to get lost in Harry Potter. “Stay curious about the world,” she tells other mothers. “Keep reading. Stay interested in what matters to you.”
None of this came easily. Come to Mommy was written through a brutal stretch that included a traumatic birth, one that nearly cost Teilz and one of her sons their lives, and the album is partly the record of her finding the way back. The final track, Back From the Dead, was written for the twin she almost lost. It’s her way of telling all of her kids that they can come back from the worst thing. Making art out of it was a way to process, and she says, proof to her children that you can take something that breaks you and “make something beautiful out of the ashes.”
Near the end, I painted an image for her. A mom pulls into the driveway and sits in the car a minute before going in, the album still playing. What does she want that woman to carry inside with her? Teilz didn’t hesitate. She wants her to “steal the fire” of her own passion, to think of the song she danced hardest to at her best friend’s 13th birthday, to feel held, to have a reason to dance. Mostly she wants her to feel more like herself.
Not many people tell women that the self doesn’t have to shrink to make room for mothering. Teilz spends a whole album saying it.
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