Az Önce Konuştum — Teoman

Az Önce Konuştum — Teoman

TV100 — 25 June 2024
Interview by Candaş Tolga Işık

This conversation comes only a few weeks after Teoman’s long interview with Mirgün Cabas.

The same broad period is visible:

Teoman is writing more,

thinking increasingly about age,

looking back at the rock-star identity,

and trying to understand what kind of work still interests him.

But the tone is different.

Candaş Tolga Işık knows Teoman well enough to move quickly between serious questions and humor.

The result is a conversation in which the older Teoman appears increasingly comfortable with contradiction.

Music Is No Longer the Only Center

For most of Teoman’s career, new interviews began from music.

A new album.

A song.

A tour.

By 2024, that is no longer automatically true.

Books can now provide the central context.

Writing is not simply an activity between albums.

It has become one of the main ways Teoman organizes his creative life.

The Writer After the Songwriter

This transition makes sense when viewed chronologically.

For decades Teoman had already treated songs as small narratives.

He created characters.

He used dialogue.

He connected different songs.

He turned autobiography into fiction.

Long-form prose is therefore not a complete departure.

It expands an old instinct.

A Different Kind of Difficulty

Songwriting had become familiar.

Writing books creates new problems.

That is valuable to Teoman because familiarity has always been one of his enemies.

When a creative activity becomes too predictable, boredom appears.

A new form creates resistance.

Resistance creates attention.

Boredom Again

Boredom remains one of the most persistent subjects of later Teoman interviews.

He is not primarily afraid of professional failure.

He is afraid of losing interest.

This is a significant change from youth.

The younger artist needs opportunities.

The established artist needs problems difficult enough to remain interesting.

Projects Give Time Structure

A book or another creative project gives Teoman something to organize his days around.

Without projects, time can become shapeless.

This explains why he may describe himself as someone who works very little while simultaneously continuing to produce books, recordings and other work.

Continuous busyness is not the goal.

A meaningful project is.

Working Less

Teoman openly embraces a slower life.

He does not seem embarrassed by the idea that he works less than many people.

This continues what he said in Bir Bar Taburesi Üstünde.

Breakfast.

Cafés.

Walking.

Reading.

Thinking.

Writing when necessary.

The later Teoman has turned control over time into one of the main benefits of success.

Success as Schedule Ownership

This may be a better definition of success for the older Teoman than fame.

Fame creates obligations.

Money and a successful catalogue eventually remove some of them.

The real luxury becomes:

deciding what to do with Tuesday afternoon.

That is a very different dream from the one the young musician chased.

Aging Without Panic

Aging is again a major subject, but Teoman increasingly discusses it without catastrophe.

He has been calling himself old since his early thirties.

By now the vocabulary has lost some of its drama.

Aging becomes another condition to manage.

The body changes.

Energy changes.

Desire changes.

Attention changes.

The task is to adapt rather than pretend otherwise.

The Old Rock Star Problem

There remains one problem specific to celebrity:

how should a rock star age?

A conventional profession allows someone simply to become older.

A public performer has an image preserved in photographs, songs and audience memory.

The older body has to coexist with the permanently young version stored in culture.

Competing with Your Own Photograph

This is an unusual form of aging.

Ordinary people mostly compare themselves with memory.

Celebrities can be compared with thousands of archived images.

The younger Teoman is permanently available online.

The older Teoman therefore shares public space with earlier versions of himself.

This may partly explain his increasing use of humor.

There is no realistic way to defeat the archive physically.

You can only reinterpret it.

Self-Irony as Aging Strategy

Teoman does exactly that.

Rather than insist that he remains the same rock star, he jokes about the transformation.

This protects him from one of his oldest fears:

becoming a caricature who continues performing youth after youth has ended.

Self-irony makes change visible.

Relationships

Relationships remain part of the conversation, but again the tone differs from the tabloid mythology of earlier decades.

Teoman has already spent years explaining that romantic involvement does not automatically solve loneliness.

The older man is more interested in the mechanics of relationships than in their dramatic presentation.

Desire and Habit

One of the recurring later-life questions is whether desire remains genuine or becomes habit.

A person may continue seeking relationships simply because that behavior once defined him.

This is particularly relevant to the rock-star persona.

If the behavior is repeated only to maintain identity, freedom has turned into obligation.

Not Performing the Old Teoman

This appears to be something Teoman increasingly resists.

He does not need to preserve every component of the old character.

He can still enjoy aspects of nightlife, relationships and public attention without treating them as proof that Teoman remains Teoman.

The persona has become optional.

Fame Becomes Background Noise

This is another important late-career shift.

Fame rarely appears as the central psychological problem anymore.

It is simply part of the environment.

People recognize him.

Media quote him.

Old songs circulate.

The younger Teoman had to interpret fame.

The older Teoman has normalized it.

The Future

Teoman does not speak about the future with the grand ambition of his youth.

There is no enormous career plan.

That does not mean nothing will happen.

It means the future is increasingly modular.

Another book.

Perhaps another musical project.

Something interesting enough to justify the work.

No Need for Continuous Expansion

This may be one of the healthiest changes in his artistic philosophy.

A career does not have to become larger every year.

More albums are not automatically better.

More concerts are not automatically better.

More fame is not automatically better.

Expansion is no longer the default goal.

Enough as an Artistic Concept

The idea of “enough” appears indirectly throughout later Teoman.

Enough money.

Enough songs.

Enough fame.

Enough proof.

Once enough exists, artistic decisions can be evaluated differently.

Not:

Will this make the career bigger?

But:

Will this make life more interesting?

A Late-Career Freedom

This gives Teoman an unusual kind of freedom.

He can create something small.

He can stop.

He can disappear.

He can return.

The work no longer has to support a fragile identity.

The identity already exists.

Why This Interview Matters

This interview is not defined by one revolutionary statement.

Its importance lies in how normal Teoman’s later philosophy has become.

Ideas that once appeared as crises are now integrated into daily life:

• music does not have to remain the only creative center,
• writing provides new difficulty,
• boredom matters more than professional ambition,
• work can be selective rather than continuous,
• aging should be managed rather than denied,
• the old rock-star persona does not need to be permanently performed,
• relationships should not be confused with a cure for loneliness,
• fame has become background,
• and the future does not require endless expansion.

The young Teoman wanted to build a life.

The middle-aged Teoman repeatedly questioned whether the life he built was worth continuing.

The older Teoman increasingly does something simpler.

He edits.

He removes what no longer matters.

Keeps what still works.

Adds a new project when something interests him.

And leaves empty space when it does not.

That may be the most mature version of control in the entire archive.

In 1996, control meant:

I want to decide what happens to my album.

In 2024, it increasingly means:

I want to decide what happens to my time.

Source Note

Original program: Az Önce Konuştum
Original broadcaster: TV100
Date: 25 June 2024
Host / interviewer: Candaş Tolga Işık
Document type: Video interview
Verification: Primary source
Confidence: High

The complete Teoman episode remains publicly available online and is dated 25 June 2024. The program identifies Candaş Tolga Işık as host and Teoman as the guest. (youtube.com)

The interview belongs to the promotional period surrounding Teoman’s later writing projects and contains extended discussion of his current life, aging, work habits, relationships and changing relationship with the public identity built during his music career.

Contemporary Turkish media also reported statements from Teoman’s conversation with Candaş Tolga Işık, providing additional confirmation of the program and context.

Because the complete original broadcast remains available, the publication date, program, interviewer and interview context are primary-source verified.

This page is an archival summary and commentary. It does not reproduce the full video interview.