Teddy Geiger

Teddy Geiger is a media darling. Despite having just turned 17, he had already been one of this year’s ubiquitous faces. He was a finalist on music reality show In Search of the Partridge Family, has just signed up to be the face on Levi’s jeans in the fall, and then in a case of life imitating art imitating life, he played an up and coming singer-songwriter on Love Monkey. The only problem is that he didn’t make the final cut as one of the new Partridge Family and then Love Monkey was cancelled after just three episodes. So that means that his debut album, Underage Thinking, isn’t getting the extensive cross promotion that it might have received, but he still has a familiarity that can’t hurt. It speaks volumes that the CD booklet folds out to make a poster of Teddy — that kind of thing is probably really important to his target audience. Yet while the marketing machine has gone into overdrive to get Geiger’s face out there, he’s not simply another pretty boy. He writes or co-writes every song except one on Underage Thinking and he plays guitar, piano, bass and drums too. He’s a "real” musician. The problem is that while he might seem just fine in the context of a television show or commercial where snippets of his songs are presented, a whole album demonstrates his blandness. The good news is that blandness is not always an obstacle — just ask Dave Matthews or John Mayer, because they’ve done just fine. And thanks to his good bone structure, there’s a good chance Geiger will be around longer than Love Monkey was.