Electro soul singer Geoffroy lets his grief get worked through on 1952
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2020 19:00:16 +0000
When: Feb. 15, 7 p.m.
Where: The Fox Cabaret
Tickets and info: $18 at livenation.com
Montreal electro soul singer Geoffroy lost his mother in 2017. He doesn’t mince his words describing the effect her death had on him. Even after a lengthy illness, it was a jarring loss for the man born Geoffroy Sauve.
To work through his grief, he set about writing an album that explored the nooks and crannies of childhood memories, adult longings and — most importantly — the sense of place that parents provide.
Revisiting his youth in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, or NDG, neighbourhood in the city’s West End, he penned the material that makes up his new album, 1952.
The title was the year of his mother’s birth, and many songs relate directly back to her passing.
“I was very close to my mother, and as an only child I stayed home until I was 27,” said Geoffroy.
“My work means I travel a lot and, when I was home, being close to my mom in her condition was important. She lived for a decade longer than was expected and that meant there was time to actually talk about death, about all the things you have on your chest, so there was luck in this bad luck.”
The opening tune Fear of Falling Apart directly addressing personal loss.
Over washes of vintage keyboards and distant echoing wooden percussion, the song outlines how hard the long demise of his mother was and its effects on him: Got me scared of getting older/But my luck got stolen/Lost my mother to the devil, I’ll get by/But lost a part of my soul/And it feels like I’m wandering off.
“About five or six songs on the album really are about the effects of her passing, with none as direct as the Fear of Falling Apart,” Geoffroy said.
“The after effects are there in When Everything is Gone and Talking Low, but I didn’t want anything to be directly evident or obvious for the listener who didn’t want to go deeper. That’s why I liked the name 1952, it’s evocative without being obvious.”
The captivating cover art, designed by Montreal tattoo artist Dan Climan and based on an old photo of Geoffroy’s mother, also manages to be beautiful and evocative without being obvious.
Finding the positive in the negative goes a long way to explaining how 1952 manages to possess a sonic stoicism and make you want to dance.
That a former contestant on La Voix (the Québec franchise of The Voice TV singing competition) would go on to make music as smart and non-obvious as what appears on 1952 is surprising. This critic would even consider the word stealthy to describe the way the songs work their way into your consciousness.
Geoffroy stresses that he doesn’t like being “in your face” as a person or in his music.
What his goal was with 1952 was to grind through emotional issues and create emotionally reactive material. Judging from the reception to singles such as 21 Days or Woke Up Late, fans are hungry for more of Geoffroy’s round, breathy vocals, classic instrumentation, and tasty arrangements. 1952 features the same production teams as 2017’s Polaris Prize longlisted debut Coastline.
That album garnered over 25 million streams and established Geoffroy as a bonafide star in Quebec and in Europe.
Now the mix of layered percussion, jazzy guitars, cool woodwinds and plentiful analog synthesizers and keyboards that Geoffroy, Gabriel Gagnon, Clément Leduc and Max Gendron have crafted is getting its “rest of Canada” rollout. Fans may be surprised how the sounds aren’t generated by pushing a button. This is live music performed by live musicians.
“I’m not a computer geek and I don’t engineer much, and I just love the warm, soft sounds that comes with using analog,” Geoffroy said.
“It’s the long way to go to get to the end product, but I think that you can hear when the results are reached with the digital short cuts. I guess it’s just another layer of professionalism, and I’m a firm believer that if you are going to do it at all; do it right.”
This opinion is shared by his studio collaborators. Leduc is a member of the touring band.
“Having Clément in the band allows us to easily export the sound we’ve done in studio to the live arena,” said Geoffroy.
“He brings along a big station and will play the Moog, the Prophet, the bass and as many other instruments as he can to make the music full. I usually bring a skeleton with ideas of where I want it to go to the guys, and then we flesh it out in studio and determine where it’s really going to go.”
Besides Leduc and Geoffroy, the band for this western Canadian tour also includes a live drummer. The singer says that this configuration adds so much to the sound that he can’t imagine doing it any other way. Larger shows are fleshed out to a five piece with an additional guitarist and vocalist.
One of the immediate draws in the music is that while it is soft, there are layers of active percussion throughout. Given the rabid embrace of all kinds of drum crazy styles in the Quebec electronic scene, is it safe to say that Geoffroy raved in his youth?
“Not really, I’m just a big fan of all musics and genres, drawing inspiration from African and Haitian rhythms as well as deep house and even folkies,” he said.
“Most of the material starts with a traditional singer/songwriter guitar and voice approach.”
Geoffroy is “happily surprised” to see sell out shows in markets across Canada where he hasn’t performed before. Even though he chooses to write in English rather than French, there are challenges for Quebec artists to break into the rest of Canada.
Many of the excellent acts that are on the Bonsound label he records for have massive followings in their home province and across the world, but they couldn’t sell out Saskatoon, let alone Vancouver.
“Streams are one thing, but no one has any idea how well things are working until you are actually selling tickets and going to those places,” he said.
“I can tell you that 8 million streams for a new song won’t fill my pocket, or anyone else’s, once you split it all around. You have to tour.”
While Geoffroy will accept that the music on 1952 is informed by “hard nostalgia,” he doesn’t agree that his music is brooding, pensive or sad. He says he’s a happy, positive person who makes music that is ultimately intended to hit the listener in those places too.
“It’s very important to differentiate softness, or melancholy and sadness,” he said. “Damien Rice makes sad music, I don’t.”
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