Click for simple, affordable ways to make the most of what's left of summer. DJ Allie Teilz says becoming a mom made her “bigger, not smaller” The DJ’s debut album, Come to Mommy, is a refusal to pick one version of herself, and a reminder that we don’t have to either. It’s dinnertime at Allie Teilz’s house, and the music is already on.
Perhaps a film score courtesy of Italian classicist Morricone, maybe some Italian disco easing in behind it. One of the twins, age 3, is already dancing to it. The phones go in the ceramic cow on the counter for the remainder of the evening, where her almost-8-year-old likes them.
There’s a projector, a record player, and a wall of VHS tapes with _Yellow Submarine_ and _The Land Before Time_ on heavy rotation. Teilz calls it, half-joking, a ’90s-electronics household. She is, for the record, impossibly cool.
A vinyl DJ and producer who came up in Los Angeles nightlife sharing booths with the likes of Grace Jones and Daft Punk, she now scours thrift stores and estate sales for those VHS tapes and describes herself as “a mother first and an artist second.” She is a mother of four who weaves those two versions of herself authentically into one. We talked for an hour, and I could have gone three more. Somewhere in the course of our call she made me wish, for a second, that I could do the whole motherhood thing over again.
My kids are grown and nearly grown, and I am not in the market for a redo. Still, the childhood she is building for hers, steeped in art and music and curiosity, had me calculating. Her debut album, _Come to Mommy_, out now, is the sound of her reclaiming the artist within after the babies arrived.
It’s atmospheric, irresistibly dance-able and laced with an electronic vibe that’s both throwback and futuristic. The title turns “come to daddy” on its head. The culture asks what Daddy wants.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
