It is dinnertime at Allie Teilz’s house, and the music is already playing. A film score courtesy of Italian classicist Ennio Morricone might be drifting through the rooms, or perhaps some Italian disco is easing in behind it. One of her three-year-old twins is already dancing to the rhythm. Phones are deposited into a ceramic cow on the counter for the remainder of the evening, a rule established because her nearly eight-year-old prefers a tech-free family time. The home is equipped with a projector, a record player, and a wall of vintage VHS tapes featuring favorites like Yellow Submarine and The Land Before Time in heavy rotation. Teilz jokingly refers to her living space as a “90s-electronics household.”
For the record, Teilz is a prominent figure in the contemporary creative landscape. As a vinyl DJ and producer who cut her teeth in the vibrant Los Angeles nightlife scene—sharing DJ booths with icons like Grace Jones and Daft Punk—she now spends her time scouring thrift stores and estate sales for rare VHS tapes. Yet, despite her impressive music industry credentials, she describes herself simply: “a mother first and an artist second.” As a mother of four, she manages to weave those two distinct versions of her identity authentically into one cohesive life.
In a recent extended conversation exploring her creative journey, the depth of the childhood she is curating for her children—one richly steeped in art, music, and unhurried curiosity—highlights a deliberate approach to parenting. Her debut album, Come to Mommy, released recently, serves as the auditory manifestation of her reclaiming the artist within after welcoming children. The record is atmospheric, irresistibly danceable, and laced with an electronic vibe that feels simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic.
The album’s title brilliantly turns the familiar phrase “come to daddy” on its head. While cultural narratives have long asked what fathers want or expect, Teilz flips the script to ask what mothers want, answering without a hint of hesitation. “Mommy wants joy,” she asserts. “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 obstacles to work around or background noise to her creative process, Teilz views them as the very catalyst that deepened her artistic output. “Becoming their mom,” she reflects, “only made everything bigger, not smaller.” Motherhood provided her with a profound realization: that the deepest creativity can often emerge from having very limited time while knowing precisely what matters most.
There is a distinct surrender inherent in becoming a parent, she notes—an experience where a soul hands itself over to guide another human being through life. For Teilz, this monumental shift cracked her work open rather than closing it down. It liberated her in creation, offering a much deeper well to draw from. In fact, she has taken to calling motherhood “the highest form of art I’ve ever experienced.”
This paradigm shift inevitably altered the type of work she wanted to produce. She now evaluates her creative output through the eyes of her children, holding her projects to a single, unwavering north star: What does she want to see more of in the world? Certainly not, as she terms it, “AI art and lobotomy chic”—her sharp encapsulation of the soulless, machine-driven content that has increasingly infiltrated modern culture.
Instead, she wants her children to experience the awakening she had when hearing Talking Heads for the first time: a profound sense of freedom, the permission to flail around in an imaginary version of David Byrne’s giant suit, and the luxury to remain in “that beautiful state of play.” Her album Come to Mommy is her attempt to reintroduce that organic feeling into the world, an endeavor for which she credits her children as the ultimate inspiration. “They’re the greatest teachers,” she says.
We don’t have to choose a singular version of ourselves
Most women are intimately familiar with the identity shift that occurs upon entering motherhood. The sense of self often shrinks to accommodate everyone else’s needs. For a period, Teilz felt that gravitational pull, sliding dangerously close to the kind of motherhood she had watched other women vanish into—the mom groups where endless giving occurred without anyone pausing to address their own fundamental needs, the careers set down and never picked back up, and the inability to answer the basic question, “Who am I?”
She points a critical finger at the insidious cultural artifacts woven into early childhood literature. “We’re indoctrinated by The Giving Tree and The Rainbow Fish,” she observes, referencing classic children’s books that subtly market self-erasure as the ultimate form of generosity. The underlying message—that making oneself a stump brings love, or giving away one’s sparkles ensures acceptance—is something Teilz views 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 instituted a flip phone policy for the hours she refuses to be reachable, embracing the sharp online adage, “have boundaries or get an autoimmune disorder.” It was her physical health that finally forced her to pump the brakes. “My kids don’t need a mom who disappears into anything,” she reflects. “Even motherhood.”
We get to decide what their childhood feels like
Teilz constructs her children’s upbringing much like she builds a musical record: out of specific, deliberate, and slightly magical details. When her daughter earned a school leadership award and was granted the choice of how to celebrate, she asked to make “ice cream mountains”—scoops stacked into towering castles on parchment paper, modeled after a beloved local shop Teilz frequented as a child. It was a gesture delightfully ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous.
The memories Teilz cherishes most from her own youth are not grand vacations or luxury cruises, but rather simple moments, like living in a modest one-bedroom apartment and being allowed by her mother to pick a favorite ice cream flavor before the first day of school. Now, she curates that same impactful brand of simple nostalgia for her own children.
This intentional environment is balanced with a healthy dose of everyday wonder. Her children are regularly sent out to the garden to pull fresh parsley or pluck a ripe tomato, ensuring their hands are actively involved in the preparation of family meals. For years, she has taught them to cultivate life from seed to fruition, recognizing that watching a baby artichoke push up through the dirt from a seed they watered themselves represents the kind of small, grounding miracle she wants them to appreciate.
Books occupy a similar space of reverence in their household. Teilz frequently recalls an image from her pre-motherhood days: a woman reading quietly beside her young daughter on a churning, noisy subway car. That snapshot of shared, quiet engagement stuck with her for years. Today, one of her proudest milestones is watching her own daughter climb onto the couch to become completely lost in the pages of Harry Potter. “Stay curious about the world,” she advises fellow mothers. “Keep reading. Stay interested in what matters to you.”
None of this journey came without immense challenge. 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 brink. The final track, “Back From the Dead,” was written specifically for the twin she almost lost. It serves as her message to all her children that human beings can recover from the worst imaginable hardships. Channeling that trauma into art was a necessary processing mechanism, and for her kids, it remains living proof that one can take an experience that shatters them and “make something beautiful out of the ashes.”
Reflecting on the broader message of her work, Teilz imagines a universal scene: a mother pulling into her driveway, sitting in the car in the quiet for just one minute before heading inside, with music still playing softly from the dashboard. 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 hardest at her thirteenth birthday party, to feel held, and to remember that she has every reason to dance. Mostly, she wants that mother to feel more fully like herself.
In a cultural landscape that routinely demands women shrink themselves to accommodate the vast responsibilities of caregiving, Allie Teilz has spent an entire album arguing precisely the opposite.
