Musician and DJ Allie Teilz on Her Debut Album, Motherhood, and Refusing to Shrink

It is dinnertime at Allie Teilz’s home, and the music is already playing softly in the background. Perhaps a film score courtesy of Italian classicist Ennio Morricone, or maybe some Italian disco beginning to ease in behind the orchestration. One of her 3-year-old twins is already dancing to the rhythm. The family’s smartphones go into a ceramic cow on the kitchen counter for the remainder of the evening, a rule her almost 8-year-old appreciates. The household features a projector, a classic record player, and a wall of VHS tapes featuring staples like Yellow Submarine and The Land Before Time in heavy rotation. Teilz jokingly refers to her domestic setup as a "90s-electronics household."

To those familiar with her background, Teilz remains effortlessly cool. A vinyl DJ and producer who cut her teeth in the vibrant Los Angeles nightlife scene, she once shared DJ booths with cultural icons like Grace Jones and Daft Punk. Nowadays, she spends her time scouring thrift stores and estate sales for those VHS tapes, grounding her daily routine around a deliberate prioritization: she describes herself simply as a mother first and an artist second. As a mother of four, she has managed to weave these two distinct facets of her identity into a singular, authentic existence.

Her debut album, Come to Mommy, serves as the auditory manifestation of her journey to reclaim the artist within after welcoming children into her life. The record is atmospheric, irresistibly danceable, and laced with an electronic vibe that feels simultaneously retro and futuristic. The title itself intentionally flips the classic cultural phrase "come to daddy" on its head. While modern culture routinely asks what fathers want or expect, Teilz prefers to examine what mothers want, answering the question without hesitation. "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 refuses to treat her children as mere obstacles or background elements around which she must squeeze in her creative work. Instead, she treats them as the very catalyst that made her art deeper and more resonant. "Becoming their mom," she reflects, "only made everything bigger, not smaller." Motherhood taught her a profound lesson about time and focus: that the deepest creativity can often emerge from having very limited hours while knowing precisely what matters most.

There is a necessary surrender inherent in becoming a parent, she explains—a soul handing itself over entirely to guide another human being through life. Rather than closing off her creative outlets, that surrender cracked her work wide open. It liberated her in the creative process, providing a deeper well of experiences to pull from. Today, she has taken to calling motherhood the highest form of art she has ever experienced.

This profound shift also transformed the type of work she wants to produce. She now evaluates her creative output through the eyes of her children, holding her projects up to a clear guiding star: What does she want to see more of in the world? Her answer certainly does not include soulless, machine-driven trends like artificial intelligence art. She wants her children to experience the unadulterated freedom she felt when she first heard the Talking Heads, along with the permission to flail around in an imaginary version of David Byrne’s giant suit and remain in that beautiful state of uninhibited play. Come to Mommy represents her attempt to put that specific feeling back into the universe, and she credits her kids as her greatest teachers and inspiration.

We don’t have to choose a singular version of ourselves

Most women are intimately familiar with the identity shift that occurs the moment they become mothers. The sense of self often grows smaller to accommodate everyone else’s needs, and for a period, Teilz felt that familiar slide toward the kind of motherhood she had watched other women vanish into. She witnessed mom groups where women gave endlessly without ever considering their own needs, careers that were set down and never picked back up, and a pervasive inability to truly answer the foundational question: "Who am I?"

She points an analytical finger at the insidious cultural narratives woven into early childhood literature. "We’re indoctrinated by The Giving Tree and The Rainbow Fish," she observes, pointing to children’s stories that routinely sell self-erasure as the ultimate form of generosity. The underlying cultural message suggests that if a woman makes herself a stump, she will be loved, and if she gives away her sparkles, she will be accepted. Teilz describes that cultural conditioning as deeply dangerous.

For a long stretch, her own priorities became submerged beneath domestic demands. What ultimately pulled her back was the establishment of firm boundaries. She adopted a flip phone for the hours she refuses to be reachable, referencing a popular online maxim that advises people to "have boundaries or get an autoimmune disorder." She notes that her physical health was what finally forced her to put a stop to the depletion. "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 constructs her children’s childhood the way she builds a vinyl record: out of specific, deliberate, and slightly magical details. When her daughter earned a leadership award at school and was given the choice of how to celebrate, she asked to make "ice cream mountains" with scoops stacked into a castle on parchment paper, modeled after a local shop Teilz had loved as a girl—an intentionally ridiculous and joyful endeavor for its own sake. The memories Teilz cherishes most from her own upbringing are not grand vacations, but rather simple moments like her mother letting her siblings pick a favorite ice cream flavor before the first day of school. Now, she focuses on creating that same impactful brand of nostalgia for her own family.

There is also a heavy emphasis on wonder woven into their daily lives. Her children are regularly sent out to the garden to harvest fresh parsley or tomatoes, keeping their hands directly involved in the preparation of meals. She has spent years teaching them to grow things from seed to fruition because watching a baby artichoke push up from the soil is the kind of small miracle she wants them to appreciate. Books serve a similar purpose in their home. She often recalls a memory from long before she had children, when she watched a woman on a noisy subway car reading quietly beside her young daughter. Now, one of her proudest moments is watching her own daughter climb onto the couch to get completely lost in the pages of Harry Potter. "Stay curious about the world," she advises other mothers. "Keep reading. Stay interested in what matters to you."

None of this came without immense difficulty. Come to Mommy was written through a brutal period that included a traumatic birth—one that nearly cost both Teilz and one of her twin sons their lives. The album stands, in part, as a sonic record of her finding her way back from the edge. The final track, "Back From the Dead," was written specifically for the twin she almost lost. It functions as her personal way of assuring all of her children that human beings can recover from the worst possible hardships. Transforming that trauma into art was a method of processing the pain while offering proof to her children that you can take something broken and make something beautiful out of the ashes.

Reflecting on the overarching message of her journey, Teilz envisions a mother sitting in her car in the driveway for a few moments before walking inside, the music still playing. When asked what she wants that woman to carry inside with her, Teilz does not hesitate. She wants her to reclaim the fire of her own passion, to remember the song she danced to most intensely at a pivotal moment in her youth, and to feel a sense of self-ownership. Above all, she wants her to feel more like herself.

Few cultural voices explicitly tell women that their sense of self does not need to shrink to accommodate the demands of mothering. With her debut album, Teilz spends an entire record proving that it doesn’t have to.