In an era when artists are reckoning with the nature of their relationships to their fans, pouring your heart out on a record — in every gruesome, emotional detail — takes guts. Blondshell, a.k.a. Sabrina Teitelbaum, doesn’t hesitate to get vulnerable on her second album, If You Asked for a Picture.
From top to bottom, it’s packed with razor-sharp lyrics that will, without warning or permission, cause you to instantaneously teleport to your last emotional hangover. Take the rollicking ’90s alt-rock guitar banger “Arms,” when Teitelbaum bemoans the all-too-familiar experience of asking a man for the bare minimum: “I don’t wanna be your mom.” Or later on the poppier “What’s Fair,” when the 28-year-old songwriter from L.A. describes hanging up on a dead-end phone call with an absent parent: “You’d want me to be famous, so you could live by proxy / You always had a reason to comment on my body.”
These lines are gut-wrenching snapshots that, put together, give you an entire picture.
“Showing a glimpse into a story can be just as important as trying to capture the entire thing,” Teitelbaum tells Boulder Weekly ahead of her June 8 show at Denver’s Gothic Theatre. “Sometimes it’s even truer to the entire picture than if you tried to write everything down.”
‘To be with my people’
This kind of visceral honesty creates a bona fide connection between artist and listener, which makes performing live feel electric. Her creative process is dynamic, imperfect and organic, wherein lyrics come first and production comes second, creating a sentient energy that’s nearly impossible to adequately capture in a studio recording.
“I want to connect with people through music. But when it’s just digital, you can’t really feel it,” Teitelbaum says. “Playing the music live is closer to the original form of the music — it’s a living thing — so it feels really natural to go be with people.”
Teitelbaum made her mark on the indie-rock scene in 2023 with her debut self-titled record, which featured the same unambiguous, indelible writing style. Compared to her most recent release, its reserved sound and uncompromising perspective feels obvious. If You Asked for a Picture, released earlier this month via Partisan Records,takes everything memorable about her debut and expands on it, with more dynamic sound and a nuanced point of view.
Teitelbaum says this change in perspective was driven by a more relaxed, self-assured ethos in the studio, compared to the apprehensiveness and insecurity that came with the first one.
“My advice to that past self would be to try to focus on how the music makes you feel, and not so much on the rest of it — how it’s mixed, the art, if people give a shit,” Teitelbaum says. “This time around, it was a lot more, ‘The process is what I want it to be, and it’ll take as long as it takes.’”
‘Like talking to a friend’
The honest look inward and venture into self-empowerment chronicled by this record was unexplored territory, Teitelbaum says.
“So much of the album is about me trying to figure out what kind of relationship feels right for me, and what kind of friendships feel right for me — the music is always an exact reflection of what I’m going through,” she says. “The way I write is like talking to a friend or talking to family or like somebody you would tell everything to. There’s never any distance between my life right now and the music.”
A new LP and an upcoming global tour means she’s got plenty on her plate, but for Blondshell, the future is never too far ahead. The noise of the industry and labels’ expectations is loud, but as far as she’s concerned, the focus is on the work.
“I think it’s so important as an artist to try to stay focused on building a body of music, rather than ‘I need to sell this many tickets and this many records.’ It’s just never-ending. I think it can be really easy to get lost in that,” Teitelbaum says. “When I think about the future, the only thing I really want to picture is continuing to make records and play them live.”
ON THE BILL: Blondshell with Jahnah Camille. 8 p.m. Sunday, June 8, Gothic Theatre, 3263 S Broadway, Englewood. $38