Foto-© Hannah Bon
Der Titel des zweiten Albums von Sabrina Teitelbaum alias Blondshell stammt aus einem Gedicht der amerikanischen Schriftstellerin Mary Oliver aus dem Jahr 1986 mit dem Titel Dogfish. In dem Gedicht setzt sich Oliver mit der Idee auseinander, die eigene Geschichte zu erzählen: Wie viel sollte man teilen, wie viel sollte man für sich behalten – alles Fragen, die sich Teitelbaum beim Schreiben von If You Asked For A Picture stellte. Das zweite Album der Künstlerin erscheint am Freitag via Partisan Records.
Wir haben im Vorfeld mit Teitelbaum per Zoom gesprochen. Über genau diese Frage von: Wie nah ist zu nah? Und welches Verhältnis hat sie als Künstlerin zu ihrem Publikum, wenn es um intime Themen wie Mutterschaft oder Körperbilder geht? Außerdem sprechen wir über die Entstehung der Platte, warum sich die Songs immer noch neu anfühlen, sie sich eigentlich mehr Rockhymnen gewünscht hätte, dann alles anders kam und wie sie gelernt hat, Fragen zuzulassen und Nuancen zu zelebrieren.
If You Asked for A Picture is your second album and after the big success of your debut I wonder how the different situation physically – being on the road, playing shows – changed the way you work.
It changed in a lot of different ways. The writing, for example, was different. There are a number of songs on this new album that are inspired by being in different places and not being at home and not being in my routine. When you’re physically in different places, it gives you a different perspective on your life and your choices and the people or places you miss or the people you don’t miss. It had a big impact on the writing of the record.
It puts things into perspective and raises questions that you wouldn’t ask if you were at home doing the things you always do. One thing I noticed is that the themes on the album are very nuanced. You said that you wanted to evolve from the strictness of the first album. How did you manage that? It’s not easy to allow yourself to question everything and to leave that question at the end.
It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t think about what I wanted to write about before I wrote any of the songs. I always find out what I’m writing about as I’m writing. It was a big surprise to me that I had all these questions. Writing is a really good way to find out how you feel about people because you’re just saying stuff that you wouldn’t normally say to people.
Was it the same with the decision to make another album? How did you put the songs together? You recorded your debut in a short amount of time, was it a similar process with If You Asked For A Picture?
Making an album can take a long time, especially when you’re touring. And then once you have the album finished, it takes a long time to put it out. It was important to me not to have a lot of time between the first album and the second one, so I wanted to get an album done right when I put out the first one. But I didn’t know what it would look like. I didn’t know how long it would take. So I just wrote and I wanted to get a ton of songs and then demo a bunch of them and start refining them. It was important to me not to take forever.
What do you get away from the songs when you listen to them now? You have this time gap we don’t. How does it feel?
It feels new to me because I haven’t played the songs live. There’s a couple that I’ve been playing, but for the most part, the music’s all still really new to me. I don’t know those songs in the way that I know the first album because I toured the first album for the last two years. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel like I wrote them long ago.
Did playing live influence the sonic vision of If You Asked for A Picture?
Whenever I make music, I have the show in mind. So, maybe a little bit during the recording. But during the writing process, it’s totally different. The recording should be true to the song. The song is always the primary thing. During production and recording, the question is: how can we best serve the song? What’s the song asking for? There are a lot of acoustic songs on this album that I would have liked to be big rock songs. Ideally, I would have chosen twelve huge rock songs and one acoustic song. But that’s not the record that I got. I had to defer to the songs a lot of the time.
Is it hard to let go or do you just give in to what the song wants from you?
You have to give in to what the song wants because otherwise it feels like there’s a disconnect between what it is and what it’s supposed to be. If I try to force them all to be something else, it would be obvious and it wouldn’t sound right. That’s also what’s exciting. You don’t have control over everything in art.
The theme of control runs throughout the record. How controlling are you when it comes to your art?
I’m very controlling of the things that I can be controlling of. Every choice that I can make, I make myself. But. I work with other people; living, breathing people who have their own opinions and have their own thing that they’re bringing to the table. I’m choosing those people because I like what they do, not because they’re facilitating what I do. If you’re going to work with other people in some way, you don’t have 100% control. And 100% control doesn’t exist. Music is such a living, breathing thing. Even if I felt like I wish I could control this completely, it’s impossible. There’s a certain element of acceptance in making music for that reason.
It’s a lot of responsibility, though. Your job involves many factors, especially nowadays when bands can’t just show up and play like they used to. You wear so many hats. For the debut album, you were relatively new. Did the hats become less or more? How do you feel about your role as an artist in this process?
I think it’s the same number of hats. There’s just more work under all of them. If you’re an artist in today’s landscape, you have to do so many different things. But the biggest thing you could do is choose who you trust. You can’t do everything on your own, there’s not enough hours in the day. And on top of that, there are other people who are better at some of those things than I am.
Another big topic is parenthood or motherhood. Was it hard to put it out in the world, because it is very personal? It is made such a core part of the female identity by society; how do you feel about it now?
It can be hard to talk about it. I’m not an open book about everything. There are some topics I’m comfortable discussing openly, but there’s also stuff I want to keep private. I think that’s something that I would have chosen to be private about, but I would never write a song that I was proud of and then be like, “Oh, I’m not going to put this on my album because I don’t want to talk about it.” I feel proud of those songs, and I feel like that’s an important part of who I am. It’s an important part of my experience: figuring out my relationship with my mom, figuring out if I want to be a mom, and figuring out how fucked up it is that the world tells me I have to be a mom, otherwise something’s wrong with me. All of these things are such a big part of my identity. So, it would be weird to not include them on the album just because I want to keep them private. But I do feel private about it. It’s a weird balancing act.
You also discuss body image. This topic comes up between mothers and daughters, but it has a much broader impact, especially for female artists in the public eye. How do you feel about sharing these with a live audience? Is it different to perform them on a record or in front of an audience?
No, because I’m not looking for anything from them. I’m not looking for them to tell me my body is great or that it’s okay for me to talk about this. I’m not looking for them to tell me they accept me in that way. If I were looking for something, then I would be nervous if I’m going to get that or not. Putting out an album is intimidating because I worked so hard on it and it matters to me. So, I hope people like the album as a whole. I want people to enjoy the music, and I think it would be disappointing if they didn’t. I want people to like the record, but I’m not like, “How are you guys going to react to me talking about my body?” That’s my truth. That’s how I feel about my body. I don’t need to hear anybody’s response other than if it’s about them. I love that people connect to the music in that way. But I don’t give a fuck about somebody’s opinion about my body.
When we talked about your debut in 2023, we spoke about the power of being able to express rage, especially female rage. Where lies the power in If You Asked for A Picture?
I think the power is in the nuance. I had to be brave and try different things, not just do the one thing that I felt comfortable with. I went out on a lot of limbs and tried a lot of different things and tried to follow the path with all these songs. And that took a lot of courage. What’s brave for you is different than what’s brave for me or somebody else. But for me personally, it took a lot to put everything that I had into an album: all of the color in it and all of the nuance and the fact that it’s not just one thing, it’s all these different sides of me. That’s where the power is.
Blondshell Tour:
20.09.25 Hamburg, Reeperbahn Festival
23.09.25 Berlin, Hole44
25.09.25 Köln, Helios37
