Cameron Winter is not kidding this time

The complicated birth of the his first solo record Heavy Metal was both a self-described “inconvenience” and “pain in the ass” – and, by that same token, entirely necessary. “…Rest assured, my solo album is unique,” he declared in its announcement, “because barely anybody knows who my band is, I’m young and not afraid of living with my parents and I’m free to chase whatever ideas I want.”

Heavy Metal captures a 22-year-old who is barely old enough to legally drink in his home in Brooklyn, burdened with a voice that's heavy with dissatisfaction – an unnameable loss of purpose – which better befits a crooner slumped over a bar with only experience for company. It’s that voice – proof of God if there ever was one – which went some distance in making Geese the fascination of New York City.

This band, who “barely anybody knows,” are preternaturally gifted musicians who are both the resurrection and evolution of batshit-crazy rock. Their sound is driven by a timely curdle of joy and horror that feels almost hallucinated by Mr Winter, our cowboy lost in the city. Their albums Projector (2021) and 3D Country (2023) earned Geese cult-like devotion, a cross-continental tour and, most recently, a support gig with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard across the US.

It's somewhere between here and there that this particular story begins. When I ask how his day has been by way of pleasantries, volumes are spoken through a wordless, thousand-yard stare and a shake of the head. It could all be a joke, or it could be the worst day of his life; such is the knife’s edge Heavy Metal rides.

It’s a look you’ll recognise in the purple pools under his eyes on the album’s artwork; the total dereliction of hope in the opening frames of the music video for “$0.” He is a fixed point in the cacophony of a New York City morning, obscured at intervals by the relentless forward-motion of traffic. “Fuck these people,” he spits, “I’m not here.”

The camera expands on the scene as the piano ballad staggers onward. People become part of the frame: a child frolics in a pink dress on the way to school before holding her mother’s hand; a cyclist waits at the crossing and a man pulls his unruly dog across the road. Strings swell, and Winter is flocked by pigeons, equal parts scarecrow and sidewalk holy man. The shot widens and he grows ever smaller as he proclaims in the song’s crescendo: “God is real, God is real / I’m not kidding, God is actually real / I’m not kidding, God is actually real / I’m not kidding this time / I think God is actually for real / God is real, God is actually real / God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this / I’m not kidding this time…”

The overwhelming response shared by those who have seen it is a reaction to its beauty.

“That song started out a total bust,” remarks Winter, his spoken voice perpetually on a low simmer, unimpressed. “The 'God is real part,' frankly, I don’t know exactly where that came from. It’s hard to describe how I feel about that part…”

He is prone to long silences, present in body but gone entirely elsewhere, before coughing up a pearl. “I don’t know. I’ve gotten more questions about that than anything else. Everybody asks, ‘Are you serious?’ Like, read the lyrics. Does it seem like I’m kidding? I literally say I’m not kidding.”

But, you know, he might be. When the presiding instinct in music is to confess, Winter’s is to obscure. Those who were privy to the press release for Heavy Metal will read a section titled ‘About Cameron Winter,' which proceeds to another section, ‘More about Cameron Winter,' then, ‘Even more about Cameron Winter,' and so on. The story of Heavy Metal is woven from contradictions and the inextricability of truth and lies, reality and fiction.

The facts may, or may not, be that it was an album brought to life by a rogue’s gallery of Craigslist-sourced amateur musicians including a disinherited cousin of John Lennon (“he was a real good sport”), a five-year-old bassist (“these kids, you know, they get raised on their iPads but they’re far more precocious than any generation”), and a Boston steel worker-cum-cellist (“Honestly, it’s crazy, the talent that can be found on Craigslist. We got a couch, too”).

It was made amidst Winter’s battles with blood-thinner addiction, or perhaps amphetamines, or even “a crazy amount of extra-strength antihistamines and crushed up Wellbutrin.” It was recorded primarily in a series of Guitar Centers across the New York tri-state area (“After a day or two I’d inevitably get kicked out and I’d move on to the nearest franchise and keep working”), or maybe in a succession of hotel room closets.

I tell him that I don’t know whether to humour the ‘facts’ or not, that the act of asking would violate the point. “I’ll answer anything you want. I mean, the album process was truly a doozy, as you could tell from all that stuff,” he shrugs. “Like, those Guitar Centers, I have a lifetime ban. It’s really horrible. I can’t go in to get guitar picks or anything... That time in my life is a bit of a blur. I couldn’t tell you what I was addicted to or not addicted to, but I will say Wellbutrin has been a fucking gift from God in my life. You’re probably only getting another Geese album because of Wellbutrin, so thank your lucky stars.”

When I ask about the creative challenge of embarking on a solo project such as this, the question reawakens a kind of exhaustion that can’t be slept off. “Having to do all the fuckin’ work myself is a big one,” Winter sighs. “Having to play all the goddamn instruments myself. I mean, I was also going through what I now recognise as a major depressive episode during the main tracking of it, and that sucked. It all sort of coalesced with me having to do a lot of the stuff myself, and I would have this song where I had to just sit there and for every six-minute performance track the whole fucking shaker thing myself, or the xylophone I insisted on adding. In between takes, I’d just lie down and put my head between couch cushions.

"That was rough, looking back on it. I mean, there were pros and cons to doing it yourself – you don’t have to confer with anyone or explain what you’re trying to do. You can just make everyone do it … and by everyone, that’s just me, I guess.”

This led to a natural expansion into impressionistic work, the kind of thing that defies easy articulation to those around you. “I think that’s why a lot of it sounds like chaos,” Winter reflects. “I was just bashing on instruments, not really following an outline for the sake of other people.” The Spanish guitarist and violinist (perhaps sourced from Craigslist, perhaps not) reflected those interpretations back to him and synthesised the chaos, in a way that quietly amazed him.

Did the depressive episode Winter experienced cause him to retreat within himself? Was Heavy Metal the result of that? “No, it wasn’t poetic or anything,” he replies flatly. “It’s not even worth dwelling on too much. I just found it very hard to make anything, I just didn’t even see the point. Well, that’s what happens when you get into that kind of headspace. It’s not romantic, you know. It’s not, ‘Oh, you’re so tortured!’ or something like that. It was me being like, ‘There really is no point to any of this’. And in a way, I’m right, because technically there’s no point in making anything. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe it... The suspension of disbelief required to be happy in the world – you just can’t do it. I bet it comes through in the recording.”

Every day, Winter caught the early morning bus and travelled upstate to Tuxedo Park, a gated community where a Wall Street tycoon developed radar technology which helped win WWII. The producer of the album, Loren Humphrey, had bought the smallest, cheapest available house in the neighbourhood – a former servants' quarters – in the hopes of renovating it. “We ran into a bear once when we were hiking outside,” Winter recalls. “There are a lot of trees, a lot of hills, a lot of black bears. I would usually start every morning going out on the front lawn and listen to fuckin’ Belle and Sebastian or the Leonard Cohen song ‘Teachers’ like a thousand times and kick myself that I would never write anything that good. And then I’d go inside, brew coffee, and try to get the thing done.” The songs, as he wrote on “Cancer of The Skull,” are “a hundred ugly babies / I can’t feed."

It should come as no surprise that Winter is a graduate of the songwriting school of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. “Those were the two lyrical inspirations I was just obsessed with – unhealthily obsessed with – for the whole record,” he shares. “I’d been listening to today’s singer-songwriters, and they just grossed me out when I would compare them to Leonard Cohen especially because I would listen to his stuff and barely had any idea what he was talking about, but I felt it in my bones. In terms of expression, neither one of them, to my knowledge, had ever sat down and been like, ‘I’m going to express how I feel happy, or sad, or horny, or sleepy’ – it was always a slice of their whole lives. Almost like a painting. I think what a lot of people think of as being vulnerable lyrically is confessional – straightforward and unadorned lyrics, like, ‘I got a text message that you had broken up with me and I cried in the shower,’ stuff like that. And that’s fine, I like that thing too at points, but I just wanted to avoid it at any cost. I wanted to try and get myself to a place where I could just start painting.”

“Nina + Field of Cops” is less a song and more a hallucination in the vein of Hieronymus Bosch. The lyrics are the almost-nonsense of a burning fever – “I am reminded I am stupid, and in every upstairs room / A tall and daughterless Russian is kicking robins eggs to powder / While the music breaks a window” – and the strings are constantly on the cusp of a nervous breakdown. Occasionally, something with cut through with striking clarity: “One of the most important people standing on your chest / I’ll love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth.” The style can be attributed to Winter’s recent interest in the Beats. “I was really clueless, I’m not a literary scholar at all,” he says. “But I remember we were going on tour to Big Sur, and so I picked up the Jack Kerouac book about two years ago and read it while we were driving down the highway. It was nothing like I expected.

“You have this view of the 50s and it’s very conservative: housewives baking casserole and men with briefcases, you know. And then here’s this guy who was fucking pouring his heart out, being really obscene. I feel like literary movements were far ahead of musical movements, or films – it got crazy vulnerable long before all that other stuff. Even Walt Whitman, you read stuff from the Civil War where he’s talking about being sprawled out naked in his front yard, stuff like that. And just hating politics. People have been people forever, and I guess [literature] feels like a real window into the past and why I started to read. In terms of lyrics, I liked the Beats, James Joyce, Rimbaud… I went to the pretentious stuff really fast.”

Two songs preceded Heavy Metal: “Vines” and “Take It With You.” The former track, a devastating, hymnal ballad, was written when Winter was sixteen. “I had that song kicking around for a long time,” he says. “It’s actually what got me the record deal. I hadn’t really changed it since I was sixteen, and I was really sort of self-conscious because of that.”

And yet, those lyrics carry the weight of knowing far heavier than a teenager’s shoulders will built to bear. “They would have probably killed me if I didn’t record it, considering they liked it,” he shrugged, speaking of the tastemaking record label Partisan, where Winter and Geese share a home with the likes of PJ Harvey, Blondshell, and Lip Critic. “I wrote a string arrangement for it, and I didn’t hate the song, but they really wanted it on the album. They wanted to replace ‘Try As I May’ – they pushed really hard for that – and I had to disagree because it’s the song I’m actually proudest of on the whole thing. I didn’t want a song I felt didn’t represent me so much to replace it.” In the end, compromise was reached, and “Vines” exists in its own lonely orbit as a single with its B-Side for company – which feels just about right.

Though Winter speaks about the album as if it were an albatross around his neck, when I ask if the difficulty of making it has changed his relationship to it, he replies with confidence: “That sort of stuff just rolls off your shoulder. It’s hard in the moment, but then what you’re left with is all that matters. Just because you work hard on something doesn’t guarantee it’s good – but it does help. I think I’m most comfortable putting something out when I’ve exhausted all other options – when I like it after a month after I’ve fixed what’s wrong with it, then I’m just like, ‘Fuck it’. I just work on it until it doesn’t suck anymore. That doesn’t mean all the problems are gone, but it just means that they don’t matter as much in the face of what I like about it.”

Sincerity and irony seem to be sparring partners in Winter, both in his work and his demeanour, always locked in a rough-and-tumble with no declared winner. I ask what he has learned about himself throughout the process of bringing Heavy Metal to life. He tells me, sardonically, “Bring bug spray if you’re going upstate.” But then, after a long-drawn pause, he shares, “I think I’m confident that I can make stuff that I’m proud of, even under difficult circumstances. I have no idea how this album is going to sell, and luckily, I don’t really care. I’m in the wonderful position of being able to make what I want to make, and I live frugally enough not to care whether it sells well or not. I had a lot of moments of doubt if I could even finish this, and I did. I’m so proud of that, at least.”

He smiles wryly, “I think that the knowledge that I came in underprepared and eventually got this thing done is going to be fill me with hubris for the next thing, you know. I’m just going to be untouchable.”