Blondshell Showcases Rolling Stones-Inspired ‘T&A’ on ‘Kimmel’

Blondshell appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live to perform her recent single, “T&A.” The musician, Sabrina Teitelbaum, showcased the mid-tempo number alongside her band, offering an impassioned performance infused with emotion.

Teitelbaum dropped “T&A” in January as the first listen off her new LP, If You Asked for a Picture, out May 2 via Partisan Records. The album will mark her first new release since her self-titled debut.

“There’s a Rolling Stones song on Tattoo You called ‘Little T&A’ and at one point in the song, he says ‘tits and ass,’ so I’m borrowing that,” Teitelbaum explained of the song. “I think in music, it’s easy to see things as either more sexualized or more romantic, and I wanted this to be both. I see it as a love story — maybe not the most fairy tale love story — but I wanted it to feel like a really narrative song, where one thing leads to another and then you end up somewhere you didn’t expect. Normally that’s not how I write, but I wanted a song like that.”  

The title If You Asked for a Picture derives from a line in Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem “Dogfish”: “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.”

“There’s a part of the poem that says: ‘I don’t need to tell you everything I’ve been through. It’s just another story of somebody trying to survive,’” Teitelbaum said. “Something I love about songs is that you’re showing a snapshot of a person or a relationship, and showing a glimpse into a story can be just as important as trying to capture the entire thing. Sometimes it’s even truer to the entire picture than if you tried to write everything down.”

Blondshell has shared several songs from the album so far, including “What’s Fair” and “Two Times.” She explained the difference between her two LPs, noting, “The first record feels really black-and-white to me. This record has more questions.”