The miseducation of Cameron Lew

Lew is back home in Huntington Beach, California after traveling to and from Japan to film the videos for Shinbangumi, his first full-length album since his 2021 EP City Slicker and breakout single “Loretta.” The video, which looks a bit like an ever-so-slightly anachronistic take on a 1980s episode of Kōhaku Uta Gassen with Lew playing as every single member of his band, was blessed by the algorithm and quirky enough to build momentum for the Ginger Root project, suddenly multiplying Lew’s listener base several times over. But as niche internet fame is a double-edged sword, Lew has found himself pigeonholed in the role of a face for Americanized city pop revivalism, with new fans hungry for the next “Loretta.” With Shinbangumi, Lew’s hoping to walk that perception elsewhere, if not entirely back.

So I tap the bowling pin and ask him about Yorktown Lads. “Wow. Jesus Christ,” he chuckles. “Okay. Yeah. Sure. We could talk about that.”

“Yorktown Lads,” he continues, “was a project with my teacher from high school, Michael Simmons. I was in a program called Music, Media, and Entertainment Technologies where, if you know the movie School of Rock, it was kind of like that, but like in real life. So instead of ‘we’re going to teach you how to play C and D chords,’ it was ‘Learn the White Album. You’re playing bass on this song. You’re playing drums on this song. We’ve got a 7 PM gig at Schooners on Sunset.’”

Lew credits the pressures of the program for helping him develop as a multi-instrumentalist. “I learned how to perform on stage, how to play with other people, learn other instruments when people flake out on rehearsals. Like, I’ll pick up keys, I’ll pick up drums, I’ll sing backups this time, stuff like that.” After a little while, he built up enough of a rapport with Simmons to start a recording project together.

“I was writing a few songs and [Simmons] was like, ‘Hey, let’s put these out for real, I’ll show you how to record.’ It was me, one of my other high school friends [Addison Love] and Michael Simmons, who was very big in the ‘90s LA power pop scene. Which is why that music sounds the way it sounds.”

Simmons (best known for sparkle*jets u.k.), Love, and Lew split writing and lead vocal duties evenly, as was customary for bands such as Teenage Fanclub and Sloan. Lew wrote “Before You Leave,” “Dear Ethan,” “Rewind,” “Pronouns,” and “Stairway to Heather” on their lone hidden gem of an LP, Songs About Girls and Other Disasters. The band has 18 monthly listeners on Spotify and the upload for “Pronouns” redirects to Simmons’ opener “Something to Write About” as of this writing. Which may seem concerning until you check the song on Bandcamp and realize it really is just an error. Song’s totally fine.

To this day, it’s his friends from high school, namely Matt Carney and Dylan Hovis, who support Lew on his international tours. But even with this level of investment and promise, music came second to film for Lew in his school years.

“The same program also had a film and TV division, and I was one of the kids who wanted to do both,” says Lew. “So I was learning the ropes of popular music and doing the rock band thing alongside TV journalism, like the school news. In middle school, 2009-2010, I wanted to be a YouTuber. That’s just really where it all started. I wanted to make skits, I wanted to make vlogs. And so I started figuring out how to edit and I bought a digital camera and stuff like that. I did stop-motion Legos and all that fun stuff.”

After graduating high school, Lew attended film school, but quickly found himself stuck in a rut. “I went to Chapman University, specifically as an editor,” he tells me. “Because at that time, I was even more of an introvert than I am now, and so when I had to be on film sets and communicate with people and be around people for 12 hours a day, I was like, ‘Nope, I’m gonna be an editor and I’m gonna just stay in an air conditioned office and work alone.’ It was just really stressful. I didn’t feel creatively fulfilled.”

While Lew had moved on from Yorktown Lads, film was a source of frustration, so it was music that became his primary creative outlet. He recorded one album out of his bedroom under his own name, titled welp. welp. was no more than a half-step removed from what he was doing with Simmons: pure, classic pop rock. No frills, all songcraft. While a song like “Antique Mall” might not wow with its originality, the extra-jangly McCartneyisms do sink their way into your brain. But it was with his band Van Stock where he slowly found himself pulled towards the style that would later define Ginger Root. While Van Stock was still kind of a guitar band, Lew passed those duties off to Nick Torres and Kyle Shutts, while he began to embrace the synthesizer and atypical engineering techniques.

“When Van Stock came into play, I felt it was okay to experiment more with sounds instead of just the song,” Lew notes. “Recording your amp in a bathroom, or feedbacking your microphone through a vintage PA. That was when I felt it was okay to get a little weirder in the studio.”

With Van Stock, Lew had an outlet for his creative passion: an oasis of inspiration and expression amidst the dried-up desert of technical editing coursework.

“I started playing house shows and people’s backyards and college parties just because it was a way to relieve stress. I can’t drink: I have an alcohol allergy. And I don’t smoke or do any drugs or whatever.” Lew smirks and says, “One of my things that got me through college was the high of performing in front of people that are high.”

Still, Lew’s interests were continually shifting further away from the beachy psych of songs like “Can Do Attitude” towards what Lew describes as ‘aggressive elevator soul.’

“[Van Stock] was a band where my friend would have an idea, and then I would flesh it out, and then he would make changes, and then I would sing over it, and he would give me notes. So it was more of a band collaborative effort,” Lew explains.

“I wanted to write things that I wasn’t comfortable with, stuff I’ve never written before,” he continues. “I also grew up on synth-pop, groove, disco, soul, and Motown music. So I decided to create Ginger Root as a solo project because I feel weird about the spotlight and having my actual name on things. So I decided to, like Toro y Moi or Tame Impala, use a moniker to grow into.”

Spotlight People dropped on New Year's Day, 2017, with contributions from Carney and Torres. It’s a much smoother record than all that came before. While Lew had yet to tap into city pop in a major way, this is where he begins to align with city pop’s American contemporaries during the ‘70s and ‘80s. The best songs, such as “Belleza,” recall the likes of Prefab Sprout and Steely Dan, while “Lil Window” could pass for a lowkey Hall & Oates cut. Lew takes a real crack at Donald Fagen’s professional studio neurosis, as far as the home studio he set up at his aunt and uncle’s house could take him. But before he’d put out more originals, there was Toaster Music.

Titled as such based on the loving nickname of Lew’s old college car, a 2004 Honda Element called ‘The Toaster,’ Toaster Music was a covers series Lew started in order to kill time between classes.

“Toaster Music will always have a soft place in my heart. I started that series solely because I wanted to ditch class,” Lew recalls fondly. “I was a commuter in college, and if I went home, by the time I got home, I’d have 15 minutes and then drive back for my night class. And I didn’t want to do my projects or my homework. You know, a classic sophomore-in-college type of action.”

While the first edition was an original untitled instrumental, Lew quickly abandoned the idea after realizing what a giant pain in the ass it would be to consistently maintain.

“Originally, Toaster Music was going to be a new one-minute idea song per week, or whatever,” he says with nonchalance. “And after the first one, I was like, ‘Yeah, I got none. I can’t do this every week.’ So I decided to do covers.”

Some of these covers are off-the-wall. There’s an especially goofy rendition of Isaac Hayes’ Shaft theme which sees Lew swap standard vocals for text-to-speech samples, intentionally siphoning all sex out of the iconically horny track. Another has him cover Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” but it’s mad chill and super sparkly. Lew uses a Hydro Flask like a cowbell.

“I learned after doing 32 of them that what I liked about doing covers was that there was the blueprint of a song, but I can experiment and make it my own. There are two forms of covers,” Lew explains. “There are the cover purists, where it has to sound just like how they did it, or you can totally extrude and warp this beyond recognition. I wanted to try to find my take on those two extremes. And it was a way to experiment without expectations. I was thinking inside the box because I had a time limit. I only had my Element to record in because I can’t record in the school library. It was very private. I’d go to the park and make a challenge to film and mix it before class.”

When thinking back on his favorites over the years, he mentions Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and Kaoru Akimoto’s “Dress Down.” But the first kiss is always the sweetest.

“‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ by the Jackson 5. For some reason, I felt like there was just this thing that happened in the car that was, to be cheesy, magical — such a pure sense of creativity and enjoyment. Also, the police stopped me because, with all the wires I had, they thought I had an explosive on-site. Very stressful after that.”

Lew’s final project prior to City Slicker — Rikki — did alright given the circumstances. “Le Chateau” stands as his ‘biggest’ single pre-”Loretta.” But as he speaks about it, it seems pretty clear that Lew has less affinity for it than most of his work, for reasons both professional and artistic.

“I started to get into the freelance world as an editor. I edited Snapchat exclusive TV shows, I edited stuff for HGTV. I did a Jack in the Box Instagram commercial starring Vine stars, I edited bats mitzvahs,” says Lew. “It was all very terrible. I just remember one day driving home from downtown Los Angeles, and I was stuck in traffic. I was like, ‘I really, I really want to make this music thing work. Because I don’t think I can do this anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore. I thought I did and I didn’t.’

“When Rikki was about to come out, COVID hit. In my eyes, [it’s] the one that kind of just vanished from the ether. I don’t think a lot of people knew about Rikki. As an artist, I thought that was going to be my breakout album,” says Lew. “I really felt confident about the record and the sound, and I thought that’s what Ginger Root was. And when people didn’t listen to it, it was a wake-up call. And actually really liberating. When I started City Slicker, I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make whatever I feel like making.’”

If there are criticisms to be levied against Rikki, most have to do with how eerily ‘in tune’ with the dominant ‘indie’ sounds of its time and the few years prior it is. It’s playlistable stuff, so it’s not at all surprising that Lew would’ve been relatively confident in its success, but his “le chateau” vocal phrasing on its namesake track is a dead ringer for Mac DeMarco’s inflection at its sleaziest. Too often it feels like Rikki is what Lew thinks Ginger Root needs to be in order to succeed, rather than what he wishes it could be.

“With Rikki, there was a little bit of pressure to follow the trends of bedroom pop,” he admits. “Everyone’s doing the hazy guitar, everyone’s doing the Tame Impala vocals. Like, ‘you gotta do it too, kid.’ And I wanted to too, I’m going to be completely honest.”

But in Rikki’s wake, Lew took the opportunity to stretch himself in a new direction.

“During the entirety of COVID — I'm going on four years now — I self-studied Japanese,” says Lew. “I always wanted to learn the language. I was listening to city pop and Pizzicato Five and Shibuya-kei, all that stuff. In high school, ‘Plastic Love’ got really popular. And then for some reason, during COVID, city pop had a second wave.”

Stuck in lockdown with essentially nothing to do, Lew threw himself into Japanese media near constantly.

“I was self-studying Japanese through immersion, which is a method where you don’t use a textbook. You just watch and listen to a bunch of stuff as close to 24/7. Some people think that kids learn languages really easily because their brains are like sponges, which is absolutely true. But what adults don’t have that kids do is time,” Lew points out. “The time to just sit and the time to make mistakes and the time to be sponges. With your obligations, your work or schooling or family, you have less time to be a sponge. You still are a sponge, though. With COVID, the film industry was dead and I couldn’t go on tour. I was just stuck at home. I decided to be a sponge with the Japanese language.

“I was watching tons of stuff on YouTube: ‘80s music shows and game shows and interviews of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Taeko Onuki. Within a year, I was like, ‘why can I understand every other word?’ All of a sudden it was like all these sounds that meant nothing to me now mean something. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t use it, but I could get the gist of what was going on, and that was a huge high. My drug at that time was studying a language. But yeah, I was just really on this ‘80s Showa era, bubble era music kick. And thus City Slicker came into fruition.”

City Slicker represented far more than just a turn in aesthetic or primary stylistic influence. The Ginger Root project starts to become far more conceptual from this point forward. While the narrative elements are minimal when compared to its follow-ups Nisemono and Shinbangumi, it’s here where Lew establishes the setting of the Juban District, a Sailor Moon reference and the axis of all major narrative events in following records. And while there’s less here than what comes after, City Slicker still has a clearly established premise: “The year is 1981, Ginger Root is asked to make the soundtrack for the American adaptation of a fictitious Japanese film entitled, ‘街のやつ’” There’s an odd duality that arises from this premise. How does one go about crafting an ‘authentic approximation?’ It almost demands twice the attention to detail because now you have to be a little ‘off,’ but only in the ‘right’ way.

“With City Slicker, Nisemono, and Shinbangumi, I think what was at the core of being hyper-specific came from a want to make a love letter to ‘80s Japan for helping me get through COVID,” says Lew. “As an Asian American — even though I’m Chinese American — what I know is that in the entertainment industry, there tends to be a very superficial and shallow homage. If there is an homage to Asian culture, it tends to be not very deep. I didn’t want to be that band that just puts Chinese characters or Japanese characters on a tee shirt and be like, ‘Look how sick that looks.’

“I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being rude. And I think for me, my way of doing that was making sure to be hyper-specific, but also being able to tell the audience like, it’s okay to make this stuff your own too and remix it. Through the ‘American adaptation to the Japanese 1981 world’ aesthetic, I’m not trying to prove anything that I’m not. I’m not trying to be someone I’m not. I’m an Asian American dude from Huntington Beach, California. Just wanting to say that out front, without any preconceived expectations of what this may or may not be, or what themes this may or may not touch upon.”

City Slicker, and especially “Loretta,” struck a chord with many new fans for its sense of humor and earnest admiration for Japanese pop music and film. After about six years of floating through different projects and writing modes, Lew had finally locked into something that spoke to people and was met with the appropriate amount of luck.

“My expectations with music as a career were always very low,” Lew claims. “I remember seeing Japanese Breakfast open for Alex G at the Constellation Room in Orange County. And I thought, if I could just stand where she’s standing and be where she’s at, I would deem this whole thing I’m trying to do a huge success. And early on in the Rikki days, we were able to do that. And so for me, I was just like, ‘What do I do now?’ When ‘Loretta’ hit, I don’t think I was ever expecting or necessarily wanting that sense of virality. If my number one goal is to pop off on YouTube, or pop off with a song, and then I get that, I don’t know what would have happened after that. Maybe that would have been it.”

While City Slicker has, in almost every way, been a major boon for Ginger Root, its success has also inadvertently exacerbated Lew’s impostor syndrome.

“I just feel weird talking about the fact that [Ginger Root] is like, popular now. When I come back home, I just feel like I’m gloating,” says Lew. “I got recognized at my local Target in Orange County. You know how weird that is? I am looking for Gold Bond lotion for my eczema, my dry ass hands, and this kid comes up like, ‘I love Loretta.’ And I’m like, ‘oh my god, this is so weird.’ I’m still very uncomfortable with it, but I appreciate it.”

He continues. “I think because my expectations were so low, when that happened, I was like, ‘okay, well, I guess I’ll make another EP.’ But as an artist, something that came subconsciously — which is what Nisemono was all about — was ‘Is it okay that I had this moment? How do I live up to this? Do I need to?’ Once you have any type of viral success like ‘Loretta,’ or in any other capacity, what do you do next? Do you cash in on that? Or do you forget about it and don’t play it anymore and make people angry on purpose? Or do you play the game? With Nisemono, I was poking fun at being like, ‘Yeah, I’ll play the game a little bit. I’m going to try to lean into this a little bit more, see how much I can get out of it.’”

For Lew, leaning into it a little more meant a more cohesive theme for Nisemono, which tied directly into the aspects of interchangeability in the music industry and a very literal representation of Lew’s overwhelming sense of “I’m not supposed to be here, am I?!” Pair this with songs that arguably skew even harder towards traditional city pop such as “Loneliness” and it feels like Lew’s best answer to dealing with the feelings of ‘undeserving’ or ‘unbelonging’ is throw yourself deeper into them until you stop caring. At least a little.

In the video for “Loneliness,” Lew isn’t supposed to be a performer. He’s the writer: Kimiko Takeguchi (a fictional Japanese idol played by Amaiwana) is supposed to be singing this song. But when she quits at the last minute, Lew has to pick up the slack, just like when people bailed on him in his high school music program. It’s uncomfortable enough to watch eyes manically dart around as he slowly starts to ease into performing idol hand gestures in front of a glowing ‘Kimiko’ backdrop. But it’s the studio crew gaslighting themselves into believing not that Lew is a suitable stand-in for Kimiko, but that he is Kimiko, that really puts me on edge. Now he has to pretend that he’s someone he never said he was, or he’ll be ‘letting down’ all these people who made assumptions.

He pushes the bit further in more light-hearted ways (we actually do get a version of “Loneliness” from the real fake Kimiko), but at its core, Nisemono is about some serious existential dread.

Shinbangumi, at least at first glance, seems like a far more optimistic record. Sure, Lew is unceremoniously fired from Juban TV just seconds into the video for “No Problems” because he doesn’t want to make “Loretta 2.” But better to be disposed of for who you are than be accepted for who you aren’t? Maybe? Both are their own form of rejection, but in the former case, you can at least strike out and reclaim some of your agency. The narrative continues from there to see Lew start his own rival company after failing pathetically to try to do everything by himself, but he does get it off the ground with some friends before his old employer offers to rehire him.

“With City Slicker, one of my aspirations for that project was that I wanted to make a movie and an album at the same time,” says Lew. “And I think just because of resources and time or ability or experience, I was never able to pull that off. Nisemono was my second attempt at trying to do some form of that. There’s no real scenes going on, but there’s like a world and characters and an aesthetic. When I had the amazing opportunity to work with Ghostly and they were like, ‘whatever you want to do, we will try to help you do it.’ I have the support, I have the drive, and I have yet to really be satisfied with the whole idea of making a narrative album in a way that I haven’t seen before.”

Shinbangumi is easily the closest Lew has come on that front. Each individual plotline may not be as soul-crushing as the impostor syndrome narrative, but Shinbangumi weaves themes of reclaiming all of your identity with the message that it’s okay to rely on others to help you.

“We wrote the story of Shinbangumi in real time as I was going through the idea of ‘what is it going to be like when I work with a larger label?’ What is it going to be like when I can actually delegate tasks to other people? You start thinking about the business side of being a musician,” Lew admits. “And I weirdly put that into the story of Shinbangumi: creating a team and trusting them, and everyone has their own thing. Teamwork versus doing it all yourself, and being tempted to go back to other ways.”

Lew wants to clarify something before we move forward: "Juban’s not Ghostly. Some people are like, ‘Oh, it’s because he doesn’t want to work with the label.’ No, I think Juban represented City Slicker and Nisemono in a way of like, ‘man, you look just like Tatsuro Yamashita. You must be a big fan.’ No, I’m just an Asian guy with long hair. I get that a lot. I got pigeonholed as a city pop act. I especially felt that whenever we would go to Japan, a lot of people were like, ‘You are bringing back city pop.’ And while I’m very honored because I’m a huge fan of that music, I feel like I have more to say than just that. Shinbangumi was showing that I can do that, but I can also do it to different degrees and also do other things.”

I ask if Juban more broadly represents expectations. Lew nods. “Yeah, expectation of people. Our very first promo before ‘No Problems’ came out was like, ‘Oh, your project is ‘Loretta 2.’ I’m like, I don’t want to make ‘Loretta 2!’ You know how many people DM me being like, ‘Dude, you’re making Loretta 2.’ You’re not getting the point of this video. And they’re like, ‘Man, dude, just drop it. I don’t want to listen to ‘No Problems,’ you said you’re gonna make ‘Loretta 2.’’ That was the point of the video, people!”

This is why I ask Lew about Yorktown Lads before anything else. To understand Shinbangumi is to understand that Ginger Root has never just been “Loretta” or City Slicker onwards. Ginger Root is Yorktown Lads, and Cameron Lew, and Van Stock, and all of the covers recorded in that smashed up Element. And it’s reflected in the songwriting.

“I think I would have been sick if I made a 10 song city pop record,” says Lew. “There is city pop in there, but there’s also Paul McCartney solo influences there. There’s also Tower of Power stuff, Toro y Moi, Vulfpeck influence comes back, power pop kind of comes back, Devo comes back. All the stuff that I love and I grew up listening to. Shinbangumi in Japanese roughly translates to ‘a new show.’ Every song has a little bit of something for everyone, but it’s still made by the same production company. It’s not like I’m making The Simpsons 10 times over again. I want to make this type of show, this type of show, but it all comes from the same root.”

We loop back around to the videos because there’s a very unique challenge to what Lew does with video on Shinbangumi. Most musicals have dialogue: even rock operas such as The Wall and Quadrophenia have more dialogue and/or non-musical spots. The closest analogue I can draw is this 1989 anime OVA called Cipher, which is essentially 40 minutes of AMVs stitched together that tries to adapt a 12 volume manga. It fails unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

“One of the biggest things that [my co-director David Gutel and I] kept running into was the limitations of storytelling through music videos,” says Lew. “You can’t have dialog, you can’t have sound effects, you can’t cut the music right in the middle and then say what’s going on. You have to do it just visually. It was a very interesting way to push this medium. I know nowadays music videos are kind of an afterthought, because everything is just a piece of content now. But I think there is a place for music videos. I think if you put your heart into and soul into anything and give it 125%, it’ll be bound to resonate with someone.

“There was a whole B-story where I was gonna win an award if I sold my show. But then when I was talking to David, he was like, ‘Do you do Ginger [Root] for accolades? Like, is that why you feel really weird about putting that in the story?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I think it’s because I never thought about winning awards for music.’ So he was like, ‘Okay, well, let’s think about what you’re going through right now, and maybe use that as a springboard to figure out where the character Cameron goes in the story.’ It was almost like breaking news. Like the episodes were written as I would go through like, personal trauma.” Lew laughs a bit awkwardly.

So, how does all of this actually work? I ask Lew to give me the short version breakdown of how just one of his recent music videos was made. Here’s the short version of the short version:

“I’ll use ‘There Was a Time’ as an example. First and foremost, ‘There Was a Time’ is based off of a really big trend in the late-’70s and the ‘80s in Japan called sukeban. LIke Sukeban Deka and Sailor Fuku Hangyaku Doumei. Basically there’s these delinquent high school girls that work for some type of secret organization that fight crime. So I was huge into that. One of the best things I’ve ever seen, so I wanted to make my own version of that. And so I’ve seen a lot of those shows, and there’s a lot of tropes that come with that show. So how do we include those tropes and be accurate, but not like a rip-off and still feel fresh?

“All these students have their weapons, whether it’s a yo-yo or a dart or a chain. I thought, ‘why not make it Scott Pilgrim?’ Where they fight with guitars and keyboards and stuff like that. It’s kind of Kill la Kill-esque, like a school fighting type of thing. [But] first, we think about how all these videos intersect. And then how do we make it vacuum-sealed? Like, if this is the only Ginger [Root] video you watch, [you’re] going to have a good time and not be like, ‘Who's that?’

“We’ll write something on paper, and then David and I will go and make a version with our phone, because we’re gonna work and film like 75% of that in Japan. While my Japanese is good, it's better if I just show rather than tell. I wrote annotations in Japanese on the border of the thing, like, ‘This is who’s who, these are the props, and these are the locations. This is the duration, the cut, the section, whatever.’ I sent that over to the crew, and then they digested it.

“We fly there. It’s just a crazy opportunity and you can’t replicate that [in America]. Those shows, you cannot replicate a Japanese school courtyard here. You have to do it over there. I acted as the translator for David, who was filming it, and then I was directing it with the crew. We shoot it, everyone goes home. I sit with it for like a week, and I cut everything together. All these videos will be then shipped and processed to actual celluloid, filmed, and re-scanned as 4k. I recolor it, and so it’s actually real TV equipment from the ‘80s upgraded to a 4k scan of a film so it looks like nothing. I don’t think anyone has done that before, put a TV grade camera to film.”

My god, you get an introvert talking…

“I know that I will have to play ‘Loretta’ until the day I die, or until I cannot play keyboards anymore,” Lew concedes. “I’m very thankful that I had this moment, because if I can provide the same opportunity or the same feeling and drive that Japanese Breakfast opening for Alex G gave to me, if I can provide that same feeling for another aspiring artist, then I think that’s another thing that makes it okay that I have to play ‘Loretta’ two million more times.” To be fair, it’s probably worth hearing “Loretta” two million more times. That said, I cannot possibly fathom anyone who thinks there’s nothing more to Ginger Root.