INTERVIEW: Blondshell releases debut self-titled album: "I was scared that it wasn't going to feel accessible, and that people would think 'this is too much’. But the fear didn't win out."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Daniel Topete
American singer/songwriter Blondshell (real name Sabrina Teitelbaum) is an artist who has truly come into her own in the past years, and as she prepares to release her self-titled debut album on April 7 she has finally arrived as her true, authentic musical self.
A born and bred New York native, Teitelbaum moved to Los Angeles in 2015 to attend the University of Southern California, studying music in their Popular Music Program. Learning classical and jazz theory, as well as how to contract harmonies, she dropped out after two years and began writing pop songs as part of studio sessions.
Initially releasing more pop-orientated music, Teitelbaum came to the brutal realisation that she didn’t fit in the pop world she had become immersed in since 2015. When the pandemic arrived, she used the global shutdown to write the music she really wanted to write - music just for her, with no expectations or pressure. In the process, she found her musical calling and after showing her songs to collaborators and friends who all agreed this was who Teitelbaum was, Blondshell was born.
The nine tracks on Blondshell are an honest reflection of Teitelbaum’s life experiences: finding self-confidence and inner peace, battling social anxiety and her relationships with both men and women.
“There were a lot of things that I was running away from—mainly loneliness, self-esteem stuff,” she says. “I always want to make people feel like they have more power and control and peace because I know what it feels like to want that for myself. I know how music has helped me get there. What I’ve realised I need to do is write realistically, and try to not bring shame into the writing. Each song gave me more confidence. I hope the songs help people in that way, too.”
Sonically the album has taken inspiration from 1990s indie-rock music, in particular Britpop and grunge from the likes of Hole and Nirvana with a strong foundation of guitars and drums. Despite the references, it is far from a throwback album and Teitelbaum brings in beautiful melodies and harmonies as well as 2023 sensibilities in both the song structures and lyrics.
‘Veronica Mars’ opens the album, a short, sharp two minute long track full of buzzy guitar with displaced, stream of conscious lyrics which give way to an intense, squealing guitar solo. ‘Kiss City’ begins as a sweet, dreamy ballad which sees Teitelbaum reflecting on insecurity and neediness in a relationship - “my kink is when you tell me that you think I'm pretty” - before exploding into loud guitars as Teitelbaum’s vocals become more aggressive and frustrated, now expressing rage at the insecurity and the fact she feels so bad in a relationship.
Latest single ‘Salad’ begins with a music box tune before brooding drums and guitars enter as Teitelbaum fantasies about killing a man who has hurt her friend. “Look what you did / You’ll make a killer of a pacifist…God tell me why did he hurt my girl?”
‘Sober Together’ is a gorgeous, low key indie-guitar ballad and looks at a relationship that has been complicated by drugs and addiction - ‘I want to be there for you / But not in a way that lets you take me down with you,” she sings. Stripped of the more intense and rowdy guitars of other tracks, it really showcases Teitelbaum’s vocal and her ability to infuse her lyrics with emotion and tenderness.
‘Tarmac’ is a woozy guitar track that like on ‘Kiss City’ shows Teitelbaum becoming more frustrated, lost and angry about life as the song progresses ‘I’m in love with a feeing / Not with anyone or any real thing…I can’t make it feel better’.
The album ends on ‘Dangerous’, a highlight and also an outlier in terms of sound. A ballad which leans heavily into traditional pop music, a simple guitar is supported by subtle electronic swirls as Teitelbaum sings of social anxiety - “When I leave the house / Anything can take me down” - and feelings of being unable to cope in emotional situations. “He and I made out / And I think I hate it, but I initiated / Feeling all the shame / I want to take a break…a emotional vacation”
Blondshell is deservedly attracting a lot of attention and praise for her music, and her debut album is a vindication of that. Teitelbaum sings about the messiness of emotions and feelings, and while her lyrics lay open her insecurities and angst, she delivers it with such intelligence and emotional awareness that there is such power in her moments of weakness. In the process she is breathing new life into the indie-pop-guitar genre and on the strength of Blondshell she is surely destined for great things. We recently caught up with her to chat more about the creation of the album and her career to date.
Hi Blondshell, thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on the release if your debut album, it is really beautiful, as well as being intense and emotional. .You're incredibly honest with the way you write, are you quite candid as a person as well, in the sense that you just call it as you see it?
Yeah, doing something you love is a lot because everything matters to you. If I didn't care that much it would be easy, but I care about all of it.
Being a solo artist and caring a hell of a lot, do you have control issues with your work? Collaborative issues?
I wouldn't say I have issues with it. It feels nice to not have everything on my plate, to have somebody else or other people like Yves, who does all of the production. I wouldn't say that's a big struggle for me, actually, because I like having the people that I trust and working with them.
You also switched up your music during the pandemic. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
Yeah, I was always a big fan of indie rock. When I was growing up, that was the first genre that I found that wasn't like my parents music. So I always loved indie, but because of the friends I made and the circles I was hanging out in, I ended up in a more pop path. And then in COVID, since I was so isolated, it sort of shifted more to like, ‘what would I do if nobody was listening? And what would I do if this music was just for me?’ So that was how I ended up making all these songs that are really different from anything I was doing before.
I think that's incredible and I imagine if you just sing what you want to sing, it must be incredibly liberating as well.
Yeah, it is. Just getting to say everything I want to say during these shows, not just the recorded music, but saying all this stuff live is really great. It is definitely liberating.
You recently released a cover of The Cranberries ‘Disappointment’. It’s beautiful, really beautiful. Talk to me about this track and what it means to you?
I wanted to cover something by them, and I wanted to cover something off of that album [No Need to Argue] in particular, it's one of my favourite albums. But I didn't want to cover one of the big ones that everybody knows, I think for a couple reasons. One is they're just such iconic songs and I don't feel like I need to do my version, I just am so in love with their version and everybody has their associations with it and their relationship with those hits. I also felt there was room on ‘Disappointment’ to interpret it differently. When I initially listened to it, it feels kind of relaxed, the drums and the vocals, everything's really kind of airy and light. But if you listen to the melody and you listen to what she's saying, it's really intense and it's about heartbreak. I hear this song, and when I'm really paying attention, and I'm really listening, I'm hearing something that's so different than the surface level of it. So I feel like I have an opportunity to perform it how I hear it and show people this is the emotion that I hear under this song. I did it in a different way, and got to just show how I heard it as listener.
That's so true. I guess also the weight comes off when you're not doing a cover that a lot of people have done. I imagine there's a risk when doing a cover of either you either go so far the other way that it loses the power of the song, or you're in the karaoke bar.
Yeah, exactly, it really does feel that way. Everybody has their relationship, and those are such famous cherished songs, that it's almost like everyone just wants to hear the original. But I also also wanted to put some light on one of the songs that I love on that album that is less talked about.
Let's as well talk about January release ‘Joiner’. It has such a Pulp sound to it, and it doesn’t sound a lot like the rest of the singles that are that have come out. Can you talk to me about ‘Joiner’, because it's so beautiful.
Thanks. Yeah, ‘Joiner’ feels different to me too, because it feels more fun and less heavy. I was listening to a lot of music that I sort of glanced over in my life,. and in COVID, I was like I'm going to dive deeper into some sub genres that I didn't really know. So I went down a Britpop rabbit hole, and when I was listening to all of that is when I wrote ‘Joiner’, so you sort of have the acoustic guitar thing. I think so much of that music is really happy sounding acoustic guitar parts that are fast, and it just feels fun. But then you listen to the lyrics and you're like oh, they're talking about some like dark stuff.
I also wanted to talk about your debut single ‘Olympus’. That really was your turning point of making the music that you wanted to make, but you were scared to. Where did that fear come from?
I was born in 1997, and I think the era that I grew up in and where I grew up, all of the messaging was like, if you want somebody to hear your music and hear what you have to say, it has to be really accessible. It has to be this pop structure, and it can't be too sad, and it can't be too angry, and it can't be too morbid or any of these things. So this music was really intense for me, and it is all of those things, it's very heavy, it can be very dark, it can be light, too, but there's a lot. So I was scared that it wasn't going to feel so accessible, and that people would be like, ‘Oh, this is too much’ and then I would have put my soul on display and people will be like, ‘no thanks’. So that was the fear, but the fear didn't win out. I was like, whatever, I'm gonna put the music out.
Amazing. I wanted to talk to you about this rhetoric around the way you're written about and discussed, which is ‘angry’. Angry lyrics, she’s moody and angry and I feel like the subtext there is almost like ‘she's this beautiful young blonde girl what does she have to be angry about? Cheer up!’ As much as people may be saying they're celebrating it, there's still like an element of warning there. Have you ever been aware of that surrounding your music?
Putting any specific emotion on it is always difficult, because no song is just about one thing. There was a lot of anger, so I get why people talk about that, because there is a lot of anger in the music. That's something I didn't know how to express before these songs. So it's an important part of the music. I try not to be overly analytical about how people talk about the music, because I had the music just to myself for a long time, I wrote these songs in 2020 and then most of 2021. I developed my relationship with the songs and what they mean to me and where they came from for me. So for everybody else, that's your right to interpret it however you interpret it and talk about it how you want to talk about it, if you don't like it, that's cool, if you like it, that's cool. So I try not to think about it too much. But of course the way people talk about music, it's not just going to be the music in a vacuum, it's always going to be influenced by what I look like and what kind of boxes they can put me in and all of that stuff.
It's really interesting because I think bar Henry Rollins,, no one ever says ‘angry man’ when a man is singing, but you look at Courtney Love, Shirley Manson, PJ Harvey it’s always angry, miserable woman.
That’s so true and you know what, if you want to call me that I'm down with it. Because I was angry. I think I would have a problem with it if it weren't true. But it's true, so it feels fair.
I'm also a huge fan of rage. I think it's really important! Now tell me, you did not grow up in a musical family, can you tell me how you went from loving listening to it to making your own?
They were sort of happening at the same time. It was the tabloid era it was Tiger Beat and all of that stuff, other than just the drugstore magazines, in terms of music. It was just everywhere, pop stars were everywhere. Ashlee Simpson was everywhere. So I was very aware of the fact that that was a career path for people. It was just kind of natural when I'm obsessed with music that I would like to do this as my job and I would like to write songs about my experiences. It was sort of an instinct, and I did it pretty quickly when I started being aware maybe I'm reacting to music more than other people in my family.
Beautiful I love that. Did you start on a guitar, did you start singing? What was your pathway from thoughts and words and emotion to constructing a song?
The intro was definitely singing just because you have it with you all the time. So singing and then I think lyrics after that. I remember trying to write out lyrics in a notebook or something and then I got a keyboard when I was like 10. I didn't take it that seriously until I got older though, but I liked doing it and it always meant a lot to me.
Obviously, you have debut album out now, everything I'm hearing off it is so beautiful. What else have you got coming up?
It’s crazy, I remember hearing the release date for the album when we picked what day it was going to come out, and I was like that will be forever. But the album is here! I'm going on tour in Europe in May and in the US in July. That's the plan, just play the album for a lot of people.
Blondshell is out April 7 via Partisan Records/Liberator Music. You can pre-order and pre-save here.
To keep up with all things Blondshell you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
