(March 20, 2006) — This may very well be the first album review in history to open with a quote from the artist's mother.

"If he's writing this kind of stuff now," the always loquacious Lorilyn Geiger once said to me, "what's he gonna write when he's experienced the complexity of adulthood?"

Mom!!! But true, as far as we know, for a kid who had 24,000 teenage girls writing to Miss Seventeen magazine, hoping to "Win a Date With Teddy Geiger."

Underage Thinking, which hits the stores Tuesday after several delays (the album cover was even changed in the meantime, as the 17-year-old grew a little more mature-looking), will be immediately compared to John Mayer, both stylistically and because of their voices. That's the good news/bad news aspect of this review, depending on your view of Mayer.

It's good news the rest of the way. Underage Thinking is such an impressive debut; it hardly needs the qualifier "for a 17-year-old."

Geiger came into this deal with Columbia Records with a wide-ranging grasp of music history. Playing a show at Water Street Music Hall more than a year ago with his McQuaid Jesuit High School band, Faction, Geiger showed off some '70s funk in his young bones. Producer Billy Mann sharpened the songwriting and focused the sound on pure pop.

The first single, "For You I Will (Confidence)" is an ear worm of hooks. But it's completely free of clichés, a trap that veteran songwriters fall into, especially with love songs.

Yet these are ideas you can grasp: In "For You I Will," Geiger uses images of a woman "twisting your hair 'round your finger" and diving like a cannonball into the water as a metaphor for overcoming fear. The story of his pursuit of a woman takes place in familiar surroundings, yet with unfamiliar actions: "If I could dim the lights in the mall, and create a mood, I would."

Underage Thinking gets better. There isn't a wince-inducer among the 12 songs.

"Look Where We Are Now" features the most arresting lines on the album:

So the pencils change to pens

I just want to hang out with my friends

It is, at first glance, a wistful suggestion of how life moves on too fast. You're a kid in class, No. 2 pencil in hand. Then you're an adult, writing checks to the gas company. But there's a second level there, a deeper one: Pencils come with erasers. You can make mistakes. The movements of a pen, and the consequences of an adult's actions, are not so easily erased.

Most people don't take their advice on relationships from 17-year-olds, but I'm not sure Dr. Phil knows any better.

Geiger certainly has the attitude of a careful listener, and conveys his words with a marvelously textured voice that — and here we go again — is beyond his years.

His photogenic looks, with eyes the color of a wolf drinking at a winter creek, have created a buzz among the teenage girls. Good for them. As their moms might prefer to forget, David Cassidy is 55.

What matters more is Geiger is writing his own songs at an age when other young pop stars are staring from behind those chicken-wire breeders where they're created, mouthing the words of thirtysomething adults.

With Underage Thinking, you're getting a young talent whose skills haven't been filtered away by a corporation. Geiger is learning, but he seems to have been left alone. Underage Thinking is his words and his arrangements. He even plays many of the instruments. What's happening here is unique, worth encouraging, and something we need to watch — and listen to — very closely.

JSPEVAK@DemocratandChronicle.com