Popsonas, California(s), and Anemoia: A Conversation With Geo Valentine.
Written by Nick Van Lente
The first line in Geo Valentine’s new album is a tad ironic. Make Me Love U begins with a simple declaration: “You’ve got me dancing like I'm still young.” Not the thing one would expect to hear from a 22-year-old. But what Geo lacks in age, he supplants with an instinctual understanding of pop music—a genre that allows artists to inhabit emotions before, after, and beyond their lived experience.
To say he’s dancing like he’s still young is funny because he’s not. What it does mean is that he’s using drama, cliché, and irony to translate his imagination. What is it like to dance with someone and feel young again? We may not know, but somehow the feeling of a pop song brings us there, even if we don’t know that feeling from experience. This kind of wistful imagination is what I love about Geo’s music.
When I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to chat about his new album and his artistry, I mentioned the album’s first line. He laughed. “I imagined that I was the main character of a movie.” Through his debut’s twelve tracks, Geo leads his audience through a romantic epic worthy of the cinema: the throes of a budding romance, the pain of disappointment, the anger of betrayal, and the levelheaded realization that our experiences make us who we are, even if life doesn’t always go to plan.
Geo communicates this journey through masterfully engineered synth pop; he is as much of a producer and engineer as he is a songwriter and performer. His R&B sentimentality and interpretation of 2010s dance pop make you want to dance. That’s part of why saying he’s “dancing like [he’s] still young” works—we may not have been old enough to go to the club in the 2010s, but his understanding of the neon, candy colored aesthetic of 2010s pop reveals a vision of what that may have been like; the main character of Make Me Love U danced at those clubs. When we imagined being grownups, that was the sound, that was the vision, and the cliches were real because they were aspirational. I think that’s why Geo noted that people often find his music nostalgic. We listened to pop music to imagine what romance could be, how we could look and feel as adults going through the emotions that make life special. More importantly, we were doing so from the perspective of outsiders: those not there, not old enough, not mature enough. We may have been too young to know the 2010s dance floor firsthand, but we sure imagined it.
During my interview with Geo, I spent a lot of time talking with him about his track “California,” one of the album’s lead singles. This track, for me, encapsulates the album’s central tension of embodying pop cliches without the lived experiences required to call those cliches autobiographical. For Geo, California is an idea, not a place. “I’ve never actually been to California,” he told me, laughing. To him, California is more of a myth— “California is where you can be a singer.”
I met Geo in middle school in a small town outside of Fort Worth, and we quickly became good friends and partners on the tennis court. Much of my memory of that place—cut short by my abrupt move to Austin a few years later—evokes feelings of longing.
I was always dreaming of another place, another life. Geo described having a similar relationship to our Texas upbringing. The idea for California didn’t come from top-down drives on Rodeo.
“I get most of the ideas for songs while I’m working; I’ll be scrubbing a table, flipping paddies, cooking fries, and when the idea for a melody hits me, I’ll run to the bathroom and record the idea in my voice memos.”
What I suggested to Geo—who agreed, though he said he’d never thought about it—is that maybe positionality is one of his creative strengths; not having the “California life” gives him the opportunity to creatively imagine what that world might be like. Maybe being from Saginaw gives us the opportunity to dream, to imagine what life might be like in mythic spaces. When I asked Geoff if he’d like living in a big city like Los Angeles, he said that “[he] is a suburban kid” and that he doesn’t think he could live in a big city. He told me that not being in a city gives him a necessary quiet and peace. In this sense, “California” has nothing to do with place.
I think that quiet and peace partially explains why Geo is such a successful artist. From his bedroom, he’s taught himself to write and record using software on his computer. Thankfully, we live in a time where being a recording artist doesn’t require us to move to Los Angeles; with a MacBook and some plugins, anyone can create a studio.
For Geo, the journey to recording music has been a long time coming.
“I’ve always sang. My aunt is into musical theatre, and as a kid, she exposed me to Disney. Lemonade mouth, Victorious. Every time I would visit my grampa's house, we would sing karaoke, sit and sing for an hour. I kept it to myself.”
I must admit, when I heard that Geo was recording music, it came as a big surprise. I’ve always known Geo as an exceptionally talented visual artist. “I thought you were going to become a famous courtroom sketcher or something.” While we were in middle school, Geoff ran a viral art account where he would post celebrity portraits, mostly in colored pencil, that looked as real as photographs. It never occurred to me that his talents extended into other art forms, but looking back, it makes sense. Geoff accomplished everything he set his mind to–besides beating me in tennis, that is.
Perhaps what makes Geo’s music so endearing is his polymathic approach to art. Every element of this album—the writing, the performances, the production, the engineering, and the visuals—acts as a different pillar to one artistic vision. Unlike most musicians nowadays, Geo has exclusive control over his craft. Unsurprisingly, he told me that he has trouble finishing songs. “The longest song on this album took four years. I would just keep laboring over each mix, trying to make everything perfect.” For his sake, I’d like to see him learn how to reject perfection and lean into more unfinished, vulnerable sounds. But as of now, I think his meticulous control is what makes his tracks feel so polished.
Despite Geo’s immaculate production and attention to detail, the aspect of his artistry that keeps me returning is his nuanced pop-sona: the dramatized version of himself that inhabits Make Me Love U. Geo speaks fluently in the language of pop cliché while personally rejecting much of what those clichés promise. California is where you can be a singer, yet he does not seem eager to leave behind the suburban quiet that fuels his creativity. The same artist imagining neon-lit dance floors and Hollywood romance is also recording melodies into his phone while flipping burgers at work. Geo isn't trying to become the fantasy he's singing about. He's using fantasy as a creative medium.
For some artists, that gap might feel like a contradiction. For Geo, it feels like a creative engine. California is powerful precisely because it is not a real place to him. It is a myth, a projection, a stage onto which he can place hopes, anxieties, and aspirations. Make Me Love U is not a document of the life Geo has lived—or even necessarily the life he wants. It is a document of the feelings that life produces. The California of Make Me Love U may be imaginary, but the longing that animates it is real.
