by Even Cillian Murphy knows who Cameron Winter is. Not only that, but the Oppenheimer actor is “obsessed” with the 22-year-old New Yorker who fronts the on-the-rise alt-rock band Geese.
Winter is not quite like the typical smirking, tanned, and tatted frontman with an affinity for gyrating on stage. Instead, he’s a bit of an oddball with acerbic wit and, seemingly, a wardrobe made out of the same three band T-shirts. Kitted out with a deep, ancient voice and an unparalleled ability to just about master any instrument he lays his hands on, Winter already has an array of bangers in his early discography.
Murphy’s just one example. Ask any celeb-actor or otherwise who their favourite musician is right now, and odds are, a fair few will name-drop Winter. He’s basically the industry’s worst-kept secret. Still, it took the wider music world a minute to clock that, beyond two cracking albums with Geese, Winter had a bit more up his sleeve by the end of last year.
Winter released his first solo full-length, Heavy Metal, to an eerie critical silence in December. This couldn’t have been encouraging for the young artist, whose label, Partisan, had already begged him not to release the project. According to them, Heavy Metal was “not the album to get you out of your parents’ house”.
Winter’s response? “I’m young and not afraid of living with my parents,” he said, adding, “People want the real shit.” He’s the real deal.
Now Winter has his own apartment in Brooklyn, and he’s quickly becoming one of the hottest singer-songwriters on the circuit. But before the delayed adoration of Heavy Metal, the ‘Taxes’ singer released two singles as if to test the waters. Finding them shockingly cold, he still plunged in. But, hear me out, his very best piece lies in that first foray onto the shore.
On ‘Take It With You’, Winter writes a doozy, romantic address to an old lover, imploring them to, well, piss off. It’s both delicate and remarkably harsh, soft and bitingly cutting, vulnerable and sneeringly closed-off. Toxic romance has a new chairman.
On the track, backed by simple, soft instrumentation, Winter’s lover is reminded that their home is now elsewhere. They must move on at once. Yet, his warbled, biblical vocals are almost spiritual, hinting at the connection he once shared despite the harshness of his rhetoric. Though nothing is said of the dead relationship, it becomes one of the greatest written within the varied terrains of modern heartbreak.
Plus, Winter has such a grandiose and nostalgic way of situating his verse in recent American history. On the second verse, he sings “Cowboy north till you reach the Dakotas / Ride the highways in a Cadillac / You could make a fortune panning gold in Sarasota / Just don’t come back.” At once, we see the open road split in half by the likes of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, and the whinnying horses sneezing through dust in the deserts of Indiana.
His use of space widens an expansiveness between the failed lovers, painting Winter as, once again, a brooding loner blinking at the dark rain on a sad New York evening. He begins the accompanying single, ‘Vines’, innocuously, and here he can finally write the words that snap the cord connecting him with the lovers he so painfully writes about.
“I feel loneliest when I’m with you,” he decries on ‘Vines’. Ouch.
Winter’s Heavy Metal is laden with oddball gold, from the crushing ballad ‘Drinking Age’ to the universally-loved ‘Love Takes Miles’. But it’s not where his most underappreciated song lies. On ‘Take It With You’, Winter writes the meanest heartbreak ballad in my recent memory. Call me toxic, but I’m all in.
