Teddy Geiger Rediscovers Her Voice

By Harron Walker


Teddy Geiger entered March of last year the same way she spends most of her time: squirreled away in the studio making music with other artists. She was playing around with some old, unfinished demos she recorded over a decade prior, back any time once she was living in Queens in the early years of her career. The musical group she was working with, the indie foursome Arlie, passed on the song that came out of these writing sessions — an echoey, guitar-driven pop track called “Sharkbait” about seeing the danger in what you want and going right after it anyway — however Geiger contained onto it, later releasing it herself.


“That’s how I was feeling [at the time],” she tells me over Zoom per year later. “Like, this is who I am. What else am I going to do?”


She is sitting at a table outdoor of Henson Recording Studios, on break from sessions with rising bedroom pop star Chloe Moriondo and the producer Evan Voytas, a longtime friend and collaborator. It’s a sunny day in Los Angeles on her end of the screen, so bright that the specifics of her pixelated visage occasionally vanish, leaving just a mouth, some black Prada frames, and dark brown bangs. Defying the desert weather in a Rag and Bone hoodie layered under a roomy Gucci cardigan (which is missing two buttons, she notes) Geiger is animated if she speaks, waving a lit Camel Blue in and out of frame every few seconds.


“It’s not like I was doing anything bad,” she continues. “It was just a little bit of, like, following my own system of desire [even any time others informed me not to]. If there really is a true desire, just because somebody doesn’t quite understand it doesn’t mean it’s the incorrect thing for you to do. @They could mention, ‘Oh! No! You don’t aspire to do that!’ Yet, yes! Yes, I do!”


“It’s, like, good luck telling a trans woman not to do something she wants to,” I joke, knowingly.


“Exactly,” she says with a laugh. “Like, I’m sorry.”


What Geiger, 32, wanted to do in March of last year was get back out into the world. She had spent the previous fall in Madrid, crafting what would eventually become her forthcoming album, Teresa — a reference to her Instagram display name, as noted by Rolling Stone staff writer Brittany Spanos. Across the Atlantic, Geiger’s approach to her process changed. She got better with drawing a line between work and everything else, recording lo-fi tunes in her bedroom, then going out and having fun in a place where she may would be anonymous. It was an experience she rarely enjoyed back in her industry bubble where she felt like “Teddy, the trans songwriter and producer,” everywhere she went.


Though she started her career in the spotlight playing the teenage heartthrob in the video for her 2006 Top 40 hit, “For You I will (Confidence),” opposite reality star Kristin Cavallari, Geiger has long since settled into a more collaborative role in back of the scenes. Her credits are impressive, speaking to her reputation as a “musician’s musician” among industry peers, as fellow songwriter Justin Tranter once described her to The New York Times. She captures the seemingly life-or-death stakes of experiences as technically survivable as a crush or a breakup with a tunnel-visioned intensity, which she has applied to songs as varied as Caroline Polachek’s cult fave “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” and Shawn Mendes’s “In My Blood.” The latter earned Geiger a Grammy nomination in 2019.


“The process is usually mayhem in the perfect way,” Mendes says of working with Geiger. “Teddy is tapped into something purely magic. I’ve only ever felt it from her… If I hadn’t met Teddy, my world could be so different. She taught [me] not only to create music and love music nevertheless to trust and love myself. We’ve been through so much with each other. I can’t picture it any other way.”


whenever she returned house from Spain in November of 2019, Geiger hoped to carry over and apply some of what she’d learned about striking a work-life balance abroad. She also recommended to create a task to “get out of work mode and just exist” in 2020. That, obviously, did not happen, at least not how she hoped it would. Within weeks of her sessions with Arlie, much of the nation went into lockdown group in attempt to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, which was just then beginning to wreak havoc In the
U.S.. Geiger was stuck at house, out of work mode although not much else.


Unable to get back to the studio — physically, as she was legally prevented from doing so under state and municipal COVID-19 restrictions — Geiger had no choice yet concentrate on herself. She thought what she wanted going forward.


“Going through my transition, If I was working… It was a lot,” says Geiger, who disclosed her identity as a trans woman to the public in 2017. “So several things were changing for me, emotionally physically, and it also was just so much work with all of the doctor’s appointments and processing. Between that and music, it was overwhelming.”


Unbound from her strenuous, rather regimented schedule, she slipped into new creative rhythms at residence. She has also assumed a new creative moniker. Really, it’s an old one. She plans to release all upcoming assignments under her full name, Teddy Geiger, as an alternative opposed to teddy<3, the pen name she has often used professionally.


“There was so much more time to just explore things,” she says. “Being a songwriter in L.A. Who’s signed to a publisher, there’s so much possibility coming through. Like, ‘Do you hope to work with this person? This person?’ Like, yes! Just being in L.A. And being so close to everybody, it would get to the point that I’d have five different people coming in a week. It gets hard to remember what I’m doing. So, it’s been nice to spend time with the ideas and just have time to resemble on my own stuff, pop it open in the middle of the day, stay up late and ride this wave up until four in the morning if I want to.”


Two of these ideas will soon visualize the light of day. There’s Teresa, which Geiger says is mostly finished. The album, her first since 2018’s LillyAnna, toys with moody, ambient instrumentals, which fit the lyrical themes of navigating detailed, interdependent relationships. Unlike in most of her songwriting work, especially the tracks she has helped craft for bigger-name pop acts like Mendes’s “Stitches” or One Direction’s “Where Do Damaged Hearts Go,” the lead vocals on Teresa are airy and gently layered to the point of being indecipherable, positioning her more as a human musical instrument than as a discrete frontwoman. The shift was intentional. She saw the LP as a physical training in rediscovering her voice four years out from transition, what that sounds like, and what she wants to say.


The other idea is Teresa’s total opposite: a currently untitled dance-music EP packed with hooks, features, easily comprehensible lyrics, plus a hi-fi vibe. “I wanted to let myself be a little bit poppier and not be afraid,” Geiger says. “If it’s good or bad, who cares. It’s turning out nice. Any time If I listen to it, I get happy. A lot of my music before, I’d be sitting there thinking ‘Yeah, this is beneficial, yeah, that’s great,’ however right now I’d rather just be sitting there enjoying myself [while I listen].”


Geiger is back to networking with with other artists, as well, like Moriondo and bassist Blu DeTiger. She tells me that she is behind thrilled to be back in the studio — there’s nothing like “jamming in the room and feeding off each other’s energy,” she says. Still, she hopes to retain her newfound workflow and all of the slower, more natural routines she fell into that let her more time to simply live her life — if not for herself, then for the person she’s been dating on and off since last year.


“It’s awesome,” Geiger says of her open relationship. “She’s awesome. We’re both pretty bi.”


I ask if she’d like to name this mystery partner.


“Not yet,” she says, laughing. She leans back from the screen to take another drag of her Camel Blue as she comes into sharper focus.