GoldFord

If left to Jeffrey Goldford, music is in good hands.

Jeffrey Goldford, known professionally as GoldFord, is done making music. Well, making music for other people that is.

If you’re unfamiliar with the smooth honey like vocals of this ballad belting artists allow me to paint the picture.

Imagine summer time. Not shirt-sticking-to-your-back- kind of heat but the sweet, breezy summer where life is light and easy. Picture yourself driving down a windy road with the windows down, wind whipping your hair around as you relish in the simplicity of living.

If ever there were an artist that captured that sweet summertime ease, it’d be GoldFord.

His tunes are known to evoke a sort of no-BS, raw effortlessness.

That’s not to say his songs lack merit or meaning. Rather they come from someone who has seen dark days but is able to let the light shine through even still.

According to GolfFord, this wasn’t always the case. Once a cog in the corporate America machine, GoldFord always wanted to write songs that people could relate to. He released his earlier albums like ‘Shed a Little Light’ while still working as a salesmen but as his fanbase grew so did his desire to dive even deeper into his work.

“That’s the dream. Writing songs from a great place that someone else can see themself in. It’s the exchange of energy that makes this whole thing special,” he confessed to me in the back booth of a dimly lit music venue in Brooklyn. It was minutes before he was due to take the stage at Baby’s All Right. Here he was, drink in hand, unpacking the toughest part of his music career.

The weight of opinions started working against him and soon he found himself under the immense pressure of ‘What will they think?”

“I made music for a long time thinking ‘How do I do it for them?’ Then I stopped…that was paralyzing me,” he remarked.

It was the COVID pandemic that broke him out of his self-made box of uncertainty. GoldFord was sitting in a song writing session with an old friend, as was his custom at the time, when he said he realized if he could just sit with the heavy emotions of life long enough to write the words that are the hardest to say, only then could he produce music that was universally moving.

“The things that are the most challenging are also the things that offer the greatest opportunities. The hardest relationships that have fallen apart for me have forced the greatest growth or the deepest lessons of humility,” he testified.

He professes that the ‘hard’ is the most necessary. As in, the emotions and experiences we try to run from, are where the greatest victories lie. Experiences however painful, birth the resilience we need to carry on.

The St.Louis raised LA transplant said it was this ability to lean into the difficult that allowed him to write some of his greatest ballads including ‘Walk With Me’, the come-together-everyone song that helped communities through the isolation of the pandemic.

“Down these troubled roads / We’ve stumbled into / We’re all in this thing together / We’re gonna make it through.” - Walk With Me

“I needed someone to tell me it was going to be okay,” he says, noting what the writing experience for Walk With Me was like. “That song was us [he and his writing partner] talking about the despair we were going through. People were divided. It just felt like the world was on fire so we were just in our feels.”

This raw, storytelling element has continued to twinkle throughout GoldFord’s discography. Truth and vulnerability are his Bible. They’re the guiding lights that lead him through the ebbs and flows of life.

“I just need to be as vulnerable and honest with myself in what I’m going through. That’s the most important thing,” he swears. “Just to get in the essence of the thing whether that’s pain, or struggle or love, whatever that feeling is — just feel the thing.”

“What if everything I have is all I’ll ever need? Or what if yesterday’s already got the best of me?” - Something Better

If you hear a GoldFord song come on the radio when you’re out and about, it’s likely to stop you in your tracks. Similarly to how GoldFord was able to write the head-swaying joint, Orange Blossoms.

He was on a familiar commute to a writing session when an orange tree in full blossom stopped his stride. He recalls “it was like I walked into a perfume store.”

The moment —equal parts simple and magic — was a reminder to stop and smell the roses. Or orange blossoms, rather.

“I had this tendency of always running, running, running and not slowing down,” he says. “[The orange blossoms] stopped me in my tracks. Even though I was running late, I bent down to smell the flowers. It was a profound moment of ‘slow the f*** down and enjoy what you’ve got’. ”

“I got orange blossoms in the air right now. Smells so sweet till they hit the ground. I won’t save my breath for another day. Cause the wind might come blow them all away.”

So no. GoldFord isn’t leaving his fans behind. He isn’t giving up on writing music that heals.

But he is leaving the weight of a perfectionist behind. He’s trading imposter syndrome for captivating refrains that speak to his own musical odyssey.

“All of my music is about my own healing journey,” he says. "When I write music from that place I feel the most grounded and purposeful in what I make.”

It may seem like authenticity in art is on its way out but artist like GoldFord are holding the metaphoric doors of truth open.

“The things that have always been the most powerful have been being so deep in a feeling or emotion that I’m compelled to lean into it or process it through a song,” GoldFord said. “If I can be raw without getting clouded, everything else comes after that.”

GoldFord is currently on his Orange Blossoms tour. Tickets are available through his website.