The Confessions of Cameron Winter

It’s been four months since Winter released his debut solo album, Heavy Metal. The album is gorgeous and uncompromising, a peculiar and passionate collection of torch songs that highlight Winter’s quivering squawk of a voice, largely accompanied by piano. Heavy Metal has immediately connected with listeners in the way that only freaky stuff beamed straight from the heart can. From time to time a piano person takes hold of our collective imaginations, commanding devotion as though they were a diviner. Think of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple. Idiosyncratic, era-less weirdos hammering out songs, crooning their hearts out with no sense of gravity other than their own. It’s Winter’s turn now.

Since the record’s release, Winter has performed on Jimmy Kimmel, been celebrated by Nick Cave, and appeared on BBC. As the frontman for the Brooklyn rock band Geese, Winter is not unfamiliar with acclaim—the band, which formed in 2018 when all the members were teens, found its audience, opening for jam-adjacent bands like Vampire Weekend and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. But Heavy Metal has very little to do with the guitar fireworks of Geese. It’s very much a solo record. His offbeat lyricism is charming, if unusual. As a love ode, he sings to someone, “I need your feet more than you do.” Other times, his wordplay is impressionist, impressively bizarre. “Cancer of the ’80s/I was beat with ukuleles/Songs are a hundred ugly babies I can’t feed,” he sings on “Cancer of the Skull.” Your guess is as good as mine. It’s an indulgent record, but in the way writing in your diary is indulgent. It’s singular and raw, but occasionally oblique. In person, Winter is the same. He is straightforward about everything, which, for someone who alternates between earnestness and jest, makes it difficult to get a bead on what is real.

For example, someone named Nina shows up on two of Winter’s songs. First, on “Nina + Field of Cops,” where Winter sings, somewhat obtusely, that, “Nina knows the reason, and she’s seen into the mouth of what it is to be a mountain.” There she is again, on “$0” where he bellows that “Nina knows why, Nina knows why.” So who is this oracle? What does she know?

“She’s around,” Winter says when I ask him who she is. You can see the wheels turning as he tries to come up with a response. “She goes to Coney Island sometimes.” Is this a literal answer? A joke? Is Nina a real person, I ask. Winter half nods, his shaggy hair, still wet from the shower, flapping like a curtain in front of his face.

During our conversation, Winter attempts to both answer questions honestly and to kid around but seems to enjoy neither. Before we talk, he instructs me, deadpan, “Let’s not talk about Santiago.” I presume this to be a reference to some imaginary spy background. When I tell him that I just read about Santiago in a book, he responds flatly, “That’s my autobiography.” When I ask him how he’s feeling, he says he’s “hydrated.” Does he see similarities between the characteristics of Cameron the person and Heavy Metal the album? “We’ve got the same face.”

Winter has said that he recorded parts of the album in a taxi, though the album credits show he did it in two studios. He said he hired musicians off of Craigslist to back him on the recording. The credits show he played most everything himself, with the help of a producer, Loren Humphrey, and the multi-instrumentalist James Richardson. Why make such easy-to-dispel claims? Perhaps because they are so easy to dispel. It’s not a lie if everyone knows it’s not true. It’s something fuzzier, a kind of playful alternate reality where Winter appears to be most comfortable.

Winter was relatively late to this interview, and after a brief back and forth, his publicist signals that he needs to head to sound check. We walk together and continue our conversation on the street, my recorder held up to his face like I’m chasing a politician through the halls of Congress. As we approach St. John’s, there is a line of people waiting to get in. There is no assigned seating and they’re several hours early, hoping to get a good spot. Seeing his fans, Winter tenses up. I jokingly ask if he wants to stop and chat with them. “No,” he says with deep anxiety, in what appears to be the first moment of true feeling I witness that evening. His publicist urges him to keep going.

Winter released Heavy Metal with low expectations. “Ever since the band got any sort of foot in the door I’ve been showing people the songs that I just would make on my own. There was usually not so much interest in those,” he says. “For the longest time, I just made it passively on the side.” Seeing him see the audience waiting for him, a line of people staring as he walks by, you can feel the real world crashing into his private one.

Winter is a multitalented musician. But he is 23. He didn’t go to college, choosing, along with his bandmates, to focus on Geese. His young life, at least the public part of it, has been lived onstage with his friends playing loud music to boisterous audiences. Receiving this new type of hushed adulation is something very different. It’s like a champion monster truck driver suddenly becoming beloved for his sonnets. It’s natural he’d feel whiplash.

A phalanx of busy people, many handling packed key rings, meets Winter at the church door: his manager, his tour manager, a lighting guy, a sound guy, a guy from the show promoter, several photographers. They encircle him briefly before he’s whisked away by the church’s pastor, Pastor Foster, a spry, excitable woman who sprints upstairs to the church’s balcony to teach Winter how the pump organ works. The middle C is broken and there’s a problem with the air circulation, and he should be delicate. “We have to get that repaired,” she says. “We just don’t have the money to do it right now. But it plays fine.” Winter lumbers over to the bench. “Make yourself comfortable,” the pastor says. “Play around.” As he warms to the instrument, Winter’s manager banters with the pastor about people falling over the balcony. “No one is getting drunk at a Cameron Winter show,” he says. “Yesterday was 4/20,” the pastor says.

When Winter’s performance begins an hour later, the lights are low and deeply blue, with candles burning on the mantle behind Winter. He’s wearing black jeans and a black button down shirt and, improbably, baby blue and white Air Jordans, a comically surreal choice of footwear for such a heavenly performance. When, on “Drinking Age,” he sings about a “bag of rubber bands,” his voice’s deep resonance summons the image, where it floats into the church’s eaves and hovers like a cloud. No rubber bands have ever been so beautiful. When, during, “Try as I May,” the PA goes out, Winter keeps singing, not missing a beat. His unamplified voice is so tender it’s a shame when things start working again. Winter ends the set in the balcony, playing “$0” on the organ. People stand on the pews and crowd around him, lots of men in Carhartt, several Brits, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucas Hedges. “Fuck these people,” he sings, while playing an instrument usually reserved for worship.

The afternoon after the show, I spoke with Winter again, this time over the phone. He was on the street, walking around Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn. In the background, a siren’s wail eclipsed his soft-spoken response. It was a few hours until he’d return to the church to play his second sold-out show. How did he feel about the performance last night? “I feel good about the show, which was pretty standard,” he said. “I’m glad the pastor let me play the organ. That was cool.”

One personal detail I’d read that I wanted to ask Winter about was that he was frequently concussed as a child, though I had no context for why. I brought it up toward the end of our conversation. I thought something very specific might prompt a response. Winter seemed surprised that I asked. “How did you know that?” he said. It was in an interview with NME late last year. Had he forgotten he’d opened up? Or was he trolling me? The concussions, he says, were from youth football. “I was almost scouted for middle school. Ended up really doing some wear and tear on my body. My parents got scared, and they made me pull out of it. I was really in love with football from fourth grade to eighth grade. The last real big concussion I got kind of coincided with me discovering music.” It occurs to me that on “Try as I Might,” Winter sings about his “big hairy football arms.” Winter is an avowed fan of the Beats and I thought this was some of their brand of imagistic, beautiful gibberish. But maybe these songs are a way of telling his version of the truth.

“I want to give all of myself,” he says about his music and, responding to that onstage outpouring of emotion, the audience at the church had been totally rapt. Getting to know him is a secondary concern, if one at all. Still, watching these hundreds of people watch Winter, I wondered what he wanted them to know about him. Nothing? “I guess I never thought about it,” Winter says over the phone. “I get that it’s human nature to want more context for things. But I don’t think it really matters so much,” he says. “I’m doing my best to make that not part of the equation.” About that, there was no question he was being honest.

Matthew Schnipper is based in New York. He writes the Deep Voices newsletter and his memoir Rise Above will be released by Random House next year.