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 in the background. Perhaps a cinematic film score courtesy of Italian classicist Ennio Morricone, or some smooth Italian disco easing in behind it. One of her three-year-old twins is already dancing to the rhythm. The family rules are established for the evening: smartphones go straight into a ceramic cow on the kitchen counter, where her nearly eight-year-old prefers to keep them for the remainder of the night. The household features a projector, a pristine record player, and a wall of stacked VHS tapes with childhood staples like Yellow Submarine and The Land Before Time in heavy rotation. Teilz jokingly refers to her living space as a “90s-electronics household.”

To those familiar with her trajectory, Teilz is undeniably cool. A vinyl DJ and producer who cut her teeth in the vibrant Los Angeles nightlife scene, she once shared DJ booths with cultural heavyweights like Grace Jones and Daft Punk. Today, she spends her time scouring thrift stores and estate sales for vintage VHS tapes and describes her modern life simply: “a mother first and an artist second.” As a mother of four, she has managed to weave these two distinct facets of her identity authentically into a single, cohesive life.

In a recent interview exploring her creative journey, the conversation offered a rare, compelling look into the modern balancing act of art and parenting. Teilz is building a childhood for her children that is deeply steeped in art, music, physical media, and intellectual curiosity.

Her debut album, Come to Mommy, which is out now, represents the sound of her reclaiming the artist within after welcoming her children. The record is atmospheric, irresistibly danceable, and laced with an electronic vibe that feels simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. The title itself intentionally turns the familiar phrase “come to daddy” on its head. While popular culture has historically centered around what fathers want, Teilz prefers to ask 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

Rather than treating her children as an obstacle to be worked around, Teilz views them as the 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 stem from having very little spare time while knowing precisely what matters most.

There is a unique surrender inherent in becoming a parent—handing your soul over to guide another human being through life. For Teilz, this profound shift cracked her creative work wide open rather than closing it down. It liberated her in the creation process and provided her with a much deeper well from which to draw inspiration. She has increasingly taken to calling motherhood “the highest form of art I’ve ever experienced.”

This personal evolution also fundamentally changed what she wants to produce. She now looks at her own work through her children’s eyes, holding it to a singular, unwavering standard: What does she want to see more of in the world? Her answer certainly does not include the soulless, machine-driven creations she describes as “AI art and lobotomy chic.” Instead, she wants her kids to experience the visceral feeling she had when she first heard Talking Heads—the sense of absolute freedom, the permission to flail around in an imaginary version of David Byrne’s giant suit, and the ability to linger in “that beautiful state of play.” Come to Mommy is her attempt to put that specific feeling back into the cultural ether, and she firmly credits her children as her primary inspiration. “They’re the greatest teachers,” she notes.

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

Most women are intimately familiar with the identity shift that occurs upon becoming a mother. The sense of self often grows smaller to accommodate everyone else’s needs. For a period, Teilz felt that familiar pull, sliding toward the traditional archetype of motherhood she had watched other women vanish into—the local mom groups where women give endlessly without ever considering their own needs, the careers set down and never picked back up, and the inability to answer the fundamental question, “Who am I?”

Teilz points out the insidious cultural narratives woven into early literature that contribute to this phenomenon. “We’re indoctrinated by The Giving Tree and The Rainbow Fish,” she says, referencing classic children’s books that often market self-erasure as the ultimate form of generosity—teaching that if you make yourself a stump, you will be loved, or if you give away your sparkles, you will be accepted. “That’s such a dangerous thing,” she observes.

For a long stretch, her own priorities became submerged beneath the daily demands of family life. What ultimately pulled her back was the establishment of firm boundaries. She adopted a simple flip phone for the hours when she refuses to be digitally reachable. Referencing a popular internet aphorism about having boundaries or developing an autoimmune disorder, Teilz acknowledges that her physical health was what finally forced her to halt the cycle. “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 children’s childhood much like she constructs 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 an old ice cream shop Teilz adored during her own youth. It was a gesture delightfully ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous. The memories Teilz cherishes most from her childhood are not grand vacations or luxury trips, but simple moments, like living in a small one-bedroom apartment and being allowed by her mother to pick a favorite ice cream flavor before the first day of school. Now, she creates that same impactful brand of nostalgia for her own family.

There is also a strong emphasis on everyday wonder woven into their routine. Her children are regularly sent out to the garden to harvest parsley or tomatoes, keeping their hands directly involved in the preparation of family meals. She has spent years teaching them to grow things from seed to fruition, believing that watching a baby artichoke push up from soil they watered themselves provides the kind of small, tangible miracle she wants them to appreciate.

Books play an identical role in their household. Teilz frequently recalls a woman she once observed on a crowded subway train reading quietly beside her young daughter amidst the urban chaos—an image that stuck with her long before she had children of her own. Today, one of her proudest moments is watching her daughter climb onto the living room 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 journey came easily. Come to Mommy was written through a brutal period that included a traumatic birth, an experience that nearly cost both Teilz and one of her twin sons their lives. The album serves, in part, as a sonic record of her finding her way back from that trauma. The final track, titled "Back From the Dead," was written specifically for the twin she almost lost. It functions as her personal way of telling all of her children that humans can recover from the worst possible hardships. Channeling that pain into art was a method of processing the ordeal and providing living proof to her kids that you can take something that shatters you and “make something beautiful out of the ashes.”

Reflecting on the overarching message of her work, Teilz envisions a mother pulling into her driveway at the end of a long day, sitting in the car for a quiet minute before walking inside while a track from her album still plays. What she wants that woman to carry inside is the fire of her own passion, a reminder of the song she danced to hardest at her thirteenth birthday, and a renewed feeling of self-worth. Above all, she wants mothers to feel more like themselves.

Few cultural voices explicitly tell women that their sense of self does not need to shrink to accommodate the responsibilities of mothering. With her debut album and her daily life, Allie Teilz spends her time making sure that message is heard loud and clear.