|
Jeff Geoffray - Biography |
|
YOU'RE INVITED TO... Some people struggle all their lives to become successful filmmakers. Others starve as unrequited musicians. Jeff Geoffray lives successfully in both worlds. As a high-profile filmmaker with business partner Walter Josten, who together own production company Blue Rider Pictures (www.blueriderpictures.com), Geoffray has been working steadily as a producer since before he graduated from the University of Southern California's renowned School of Cinema-Television, where he was the director of photography on War Games , which won a Student Emmy. Even before that, he couldn't lose. The New Orleans wunderkind of stage and screen wrote his first professional play, the nationally touring Ghosts , soon after he got his driver's license and then produced his first feature film, Witchboard , at 24. He and Josten, who began their long-time collaboration with the cult classics Witchboard and Night of the Demons , have been involved with every major studio from Paramount and Miramax to HBO and Showtime. But long before the Santa Monica, California resident was making videos for groundbreaking artists The Minutemen and Henry Rollins, Geoffray was making music. In a culmination of his lifelong passion, the filmmaker and singer-songwriter has fired up First Barbeque (www.firstbarbeque.com), his just-released Oyster Kiss Music debut. Not a case of a well-financed wanna-be out to indulge a fantasy (hey, people are cynical and they think things like that), this release, astutely produced by Nick Future (The Black Crowes, Ice Cube) is intriguing for its song titles alone. But beyond the alluring imagery of "The Spot Where Never Ends," the irony of "Poet Garbage Man," the unabashed honesty of "You Know My Secrets (For Marcy)," and the tributary "My Friend Is A Long Distance Runner," the lyrics are intelligent, Geoffray's voice is confident and vulnerable, and the melodies are perfect. No, this ain't no vanity project from a guy who knows how to put together financing (though Geoffray and his partner are renowned for pulling out the big guns at the eleventh hour to rescue a troubled film -- just his way of paying it forward from when friends and investors had helped save their butts in a professional context countless times). This is his First Barbeque and A/C radio has already lined up for the first single. "Bring Me Rain," which was the #1 most added track during its first week of release, is now cooking on the ACQB chart. "Having played different kinds of music throughout my life, ‘Bring Me Rain' echoes a personal voice," Geoffray reveals. "If there's a concept behind the album, it's imagining yourself at a barbeque, and this is the music that someone is playing from their collection. It's purposely not meant to be any one genre, but to be a range of things. I am writing music where the words mean something to me. "I'm trying to write things that sound good, but also have something to offer about love, about commitment, and what it's like to work a job and sometimes be successful, and sometimes not," he says of his imaginative blend of southern R&B, jazz and folk rock. "The more I become an artist, the more I want to make things as brutally honest and personal as they can be." As an artist who traverses two worlds, Geoffray knows the differences between them, explaining, "Film is a collaboration with many artists and many different kinds of people. It costs a lot of money to make a movie. What my partner and I do is create an environment in which other artists can work. Our ultimate goal is to create the great sandbox that other people can enter and play. "What was cool about the process of making this record, which I never would have predicted, is that it has made me a better producer. While recording vocal tracks alone in the booth, writing and re-writing the songs, I realized how vulnerable it is to be that person who is the artist. As a producer, I had become hard-edged at a very early age, and this process has made me more sensitive to the writers and actors who have come to me since I started this process." Although the casts and crews on Holes , Ghosts of the Abyss, Behind the Red Door and The Hollywood Sign might have noticed a change for the better in the production executive, who was working on all four plus developing Jackie Chan's Around the World in 80 Days , while simultaneously working on his album, no one would have known why Geoffray was transformed. Always the paragon of discretion with the projects in which he's involved and the actors attached, such as Kiefer Sutherland, Molly Shannon, Vincent Gallo, Robin Williams and Burt Reynolds, Geoffray kept the smoke and fire of First Barbeque on the down-low until three months after its completion "Most people didn't even know I played music," he reveals. "I would go home, take a nap, see Nick and make music until I had to go back to work." Imagine keeping a secret like this from people with whom you're spending 15 hours a day. But Geoffray did it. And you can bet they're invited to his First Barbeque , too. See ya there... |