For her second album as Blondshell, L.A. singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum is figuring out how much of her life story she wants to tell the world — how much she needs to tell — and how much to hide away for herself. On her acclaimed 2023 self-titled debut, she was really letting it all hang out, in searing confessional indie-rock. But on If You Asked For a Picture, Teitelbaum’s more ambivalent, more questioning, reckoning with her painful past, from childhood misery to dysfunctional young-adult romance. These are the songs of an artist who wants to figure out who she is by singing about it.
Teitelbaum takes her album title from the Mary Oliver poem “Dogfish,” with the key line, “I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country.” That’s her approach in these songs — she sorts through her secrets and memories, wondering how much of her damage to take with her into the future and how much to leave behind. As she laments in “What’s Fair,” “I didn’t grow up/And it spilled over/Now I’m left open/When I’m in love.”
She sets the tone with “T&A,” as she finds herself stuck with yet another worthless man-boy lover, recalling, “I said if you stop drinking maybe I could find you attractive/Maybe I could let you have it/And it happened.” She can’t even tell her sister she’s still with this guy — “she knows about that fight, remember?” — but she can’t let go of him either. She winds up asking herself, over and over, “Letting him in, why don’t the good ones love me?”
The album flows in a mellow folk-rock groove, close to the Cranberries or Sheryl Crow or (for you really deep Nineties pop connoisseurs) early Duncan Shiek. She combines her moody-blue guitar and spiky lyrics — shimmeringly pretty on the surface, but with a bite. With producer Yves Rothman, she piles on the vocal overdubs, inspired by her love for the Beach Boys. She digs deep into adolescent identity crises in “Event of a Fire,” singing candidly about body image and social anxiety, with piercing lines like “Part of me still sits at home in a panic over 15 pounds.” In tough family songs like “What’s Fair” and “23’s a Baby,” she goes into mother/daughter tension with anger that cuts both ways; she takes her share of the blame, admitting, “I said something when I was ten that I take back.”
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Like her debut, If You Asked For a Picture has a rogue’s gallery of disposable menfolk — when Teitelbaum sings “You’re a thumbtack in my side,” that’s the closest she gets to an upbeat love song. The standout tunes come when she gets nasty, as in “Toy,” with its New Order-style guitar hook, where she compares the relationship to a Wendy’s (she doesn’t mean it as a compliment), and the slow-burning “Man,” where she admits, “I needed the world from just one man.”
That Mary Oliver poem has the lines, “If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile/Under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin/Which was rough/As a thousand sharpened nails.” That sums up the album — Teitelbaum might be willing to show the world a smile, but there’s no mistaking the sharp edges behind it.
