Brock Geiger’s Big, Bright Breakout
From self-doubt to self-assured, the Calgary polymath's long-awaited solo debut reveals an artist finally finding his own rhythm.
By Sebastian Buzzalino
Photos by Jen Schier
- Published on
Some Nights arrives on March 18 in widescreen format, an immersive pop landscape that seems to shift and scale with subsequent listens. Master of his own domain at his home Studio B, Geiger spent long hours during the pandemic tinkering and toiling on the foundations of his shape-shifting pop edifices. Textural elements give way to earworm hooks and not a single element feels superfluous or out of place: it’s a soundtrack to a Dr. Seuss technicolor world of wonder, if Prince and St. Vincent, rather than the Grinch or Horton who heard a Who, were the protagonists.
“It’s a liberating step forward,” says Geiger, with the air of someone who can sense that the release is finally on the horizon. “To know that the collective of songs feels cohesive and is something that is going to exist for people to hear just makes it feel real in a different kind of way, even though I knew the material was already there. It feels representative of my songs and my production.”
“I am the biggest self-doubter. I had to figure out how to get out of my own way…’”
We’re huddled inside I Love You Coffee Shop (Calgary’s 7th best underground coffee shop) in the Beltline, hiding from a blast of bright, wintry weather outside. Angular pink walls surround us and some unknown-to-us, cool-guy jazz spins on a slab of wax behind the espresso machine.
“I realized, truly, how much of my own enemy I am, honestly,” he says. “I am the biggest self-doubter. I had to figure out how to get out of my own way, find these flow moments. I went through so many stages of like, ‘What the hell is this?’”
Rome wasn’t built in a day and Some Nights wasn’t created in a vacuum either. Geiger drew on his decade-plus of expressing a deep-rooted collaborative spirit and brought on a whole cast of characters to help him build out his vision. Once he had a pile of demos, he went down to LA to reunite with an old friend, Will Maclellan, with whom he played in Raleigh and who now works as an engineer at Sound City. As those 15 or 16 tracks were shaped down to the final ten, a slew of musicians contributed elements of genius and spontaneity here and there, Geiger the architect at the helm making sure each piece fit in where and when required. In the leadup to the album’s release, as the big marketing machine fired up, he then turned to his partner and visual artist, Jen Schier, to create the visual elements that accompany the first singles.
“I’ve always enjoyed the visual components of getting to do artwork for singles. I like to think about the aesthetic that’s going to accompany things,” he says. “Even videos, whenever we have the ability to do it, I’ve always loved that aspect of things. But also, I realized how much of an expectation there was for [this album], to feed the social media beast. Knowing that, I didn’t want to get stressed out by that and was like, ‘Let’s make projects we believe in.’ They’ll get used in the apps however they get used, but let’s make projects, collaborate with friends, make visual stuff that’s honest and fun.”
Geiger the pop auteur has big plans for the kaleidoscopic Some Nights, but for now, he’s following his gut, feeling out a couple of steps at a time and seeing how things build out. For him, the important thing is to believe in the project, believe in the people around him and believe in the world he’s built.
“I just want to actively create,” he says. “I have a studio to do it in, I’m able to jump around and bang out ideas, and the artist in me is just about making things I’m curious about.”
Some Nights is out on March 18. The Calgary release show takes place on April 2 at the Ship & Anchor.
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