The best album of this year—which was actually released, with relatively little fanfare, last December—is Heavy Metal, a surreal and wounded folk-rock record by a probable-genius musician named Cameron Winter. It’s fabulous and macabre, kind of sexy, and pretty alienating. The album’s disparate vibes are tied together by Winter’s foghorn voice and uncanny lyrics. Winter’s music can feel oblique on a literal level. A lyric like “You’d like to keep my salesman teeth, wouldn’t you, baby?” is admirably risky, at least in the sense that it offers an alternative to the fashionable Phoebe Bridgers-style texting-as-lyricism—but it’s spiritually clarified in a thrilling and galvanizing way. “The Rolling Stones” might be a braid of uncomfortable similes (“Like Brian Jones, I was born to swim”) and wry non sequiturs (“Send me the basslines of the future/My good sense doesn’t win me any wars”) but it also, somehow, perfectly conveys a feeling of doomed romance.
Capping off this immaculate aura is the fact that Winter is a brooding, broad-shouldered, six-foot-three 23-year-old from Park Slope who moves with an intensity that borders on camp. This itself is kind of surprising, because until Heavy Metal, Winter was best known as the frontman of Geese, a wild-child Brooklyn post-punk-turned-jam band he started with his childhood friends. Geese have a young, cult following because they are raucous and silly and music nerd-y—a far cry from the pretty, literary twistiness of Winter’s solo music.
When we meet in London on a Saturday morning in April—Winter is in town for three sold out shows, all of them at churches – he is quiet, and barely looks me in the eye; in his short career, he has already established himself as someone who hates press, and has been known to slip lies and fabulations into his responses. For a while, he claimed he recorded Heavy Metal at Guitar Centers across the US with a five-year-old bass player and a bunch of guys he found on Craigslist. (That bit, it seems, has gotten old: when we chat, he talks about making the record at Loren Humphrey’s studio in New York, which seems too normal to be fabrication.)
Although he seems kind of depressed in this particular moment, slumped, almost totally motionless, on a gigantic couch, Winter says he’s enjoying his time in London. “No one here is, like, too impressed by anything, but they’re also not totally mean—it’s kind of like New York in that way, but a little less stupid. Everyone seems more sensible to me, because of the British accents or something like that.” Winter is fresh off a few weeks in L.A., where Geese were recording their latest album. He’s not particularly fond of L.A. “If my identity deteriorated very quickly, or something like that, maybe I’d [move] to L.A., do you know what I mean? I’m frustrated sometimes with the get-ahead culture there, with movies and TV and stuff. It’s very actively fake.”
This is the thing about Winter: He comes off a little like a Holden Caulfield type but he also pulls it off, in part because he’s really good at quotables. When I suggest New York and London are also full of “get-ahead” types, for example, he responds: “It doesn’t feel as widespread in New York, you know? People are lyin’ bastards’ in every city in the world but in New York you have to go to Wall Street [to find them], rather than going to some music studio and finding people like that. At least to me.”
Winter grew up in Park Slope, the son of a composer and an author who wrote a memoir about discovering herself through opening her marriage. He went to the Quaker school Brooklyn Friends, and says his youth wasn’t the “romanticised version of growing up in New York”, although he did “get to hone some amount of street smarts.” He says, “If you can operate in New York City, you can operate pretty effectively in other cities too.” He slips into one of his deadpan riffs. “Maybe I’ve never been mugged because I’ve always packed heat on me.” Then he’s serious again, “I did my homework, I liked music, I doodled, I had a pretty normal childhood. I found time for whippets and stuff.”
After high school, he applied to Boston University with the hope of getting a communications degree he could use to “scrape by til I could figure out how to make a living through music.” Geese got signed before he even stepped foot on campus.
I ask if he’s ever had a complex about being such an easily defined “type”—the kid from a chichi part of New York with endless opportunities to pursue a career in the arts. “I don’t feel like I’ve ever really tried to hide the fact that I did not, in fact, come swinging from the slums of Yugoslavia or something like that. I just remember my dad working all the time when I was a kid and really sacrificing, and I figured that was why we were able to live pretty well,” he says. “I’d probably have more of a complex about it if I tried to hide it. It’s nice being lucky—it’s nice living in a place where you don’t walk around scared, it’s nice knowing there’s a safety net if you really fuck up. I don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t have that safety net—maybe I wouldn’t have taken some of the risks I have in my life.”
Heavy Metal could be seen as one of those risks. He says the process of putting it out was “full of disappointments”, in part because nobody really thought he should release it. “No one had it out for me or anything, but the people who I showed it to—and I wanted their honest opinion—gave me their honest opinion, which was, ‘You may regret doing this’” he says. “It just didn’t make sense to a lot of people. Hearing the last Geese album, I’m on this path that involves wacked out songs about bull-riding and nitrous oxide, so to release this is like… you can’t have everything, you know? People told me that. But I felt like I worked so hard on it that I’d regret it if I didn’t put it out, regret it in a real way, 20 years from now.”
Now, people come up to him on the street every other day to talk about Heavy Metal, a marked increase from people rockognizing him from Geese, which represents its own kind of stress. “I love all the people who listen to it and connect with it, and I feel responsible for them in some way,” he says. “Some people come up and they’re like ‘Hell yeah man, sweet’ and other people come up and they’re like, ‘I was gonna kill myself and then I saw the light of Jesus’ and I’m like ‘Oh my God.’ It feels difficult to give those two kinds of people the same thumbs up, high-five type of thing. If someone has that kind of reaction to an album and then they see me, they may never see me again… I’m thankful to those people, and I want to do right by them.”
The spirit isn’t always moving him in the way it is some of his fans. For his part, Winter says he hears stuff and, “I either like it or I don’t like it.” The other day at CVS, for example, he heard a Mumford and Sons track—he sings the chorus of “Little Lion Man” in an exaggerated British accent—and liked it. “It was very grand sounding. Very large and in charge, cathartic and stuff like that,” he says. And in January, in Chicago, he had one of those “saw the light of Jesus” music moments. “We were in this really shitty bar, where this guy got up on the stage—this very old, Moondog-looking guy, who was sort of bald and seemed like an alcoholic, for lack of a better word, and he just started singing ‘Without You’ the Harry Nilsson version,” he says, singing a couple of lines in a quiet croak. “I actually almost started crying. It was incredible. He was giving it everything, and he apparently did this all the time. He was sort of lost, he wasn’t there with anybody. But everybody knew him. That was good.”
