Cameron Winter is Not Kidding This Time

WORDS: Adison Gamradt 
PICTURES: Luke Nelson

Geese’s Cameron Winter sings like a storm. “God of the sun I’m taking you down on the inside,” he wails in forceful acapella, opening the rock band’s latest record, 3D Country, with such conviction that you can't help but worry he might take you down too.

When I sat down for an interview in Queens with Geese’s lead singer-songwriter before his debut solo show, it was hard to imagine I was conversing with the same artist behind the band’s tempestuous vocals. Tall frame recoiled into an impressively severe slouch, tendrils of rain-soaked hair shielding his face from view, Winter’s soft-spoken drawl was nearly overpowered by coffee shop ambiance. Yet, as he spoke, the singer’s wily withdrawnness soon stopped striking me as a contradiction. Secure enough to slouch, self-assured enough to remain self-contained, Winter approached conversation with the same confidence present in his music. He had nothing to prove – his songs can sing for themself.

Signing with Partisan Records in 2021, Winter and his Brooklynite bandmates were thrust into the indie-rock limelight fresh out of high school, gaining critical acclaim and a cult following after the release of their first two records, Projector and 3D Country. Geese’s ever-evolving sound straddles post-punk and classic rock, their lyrics composed with Winter’s signature sarcastic edge. “The band is seriously one of those monkey typewriter situations where we just sucked and sucked and sucked and then through straight up statistical probability we eventually made good songs,” he noted.

Letting his voice run wild and untamed, Winter’s vocals assume a precarious quality throughout his music, ebbing and flowing between inventive extremes within the span of a single song. Geese’s “Jesse” epitomizes this stylistic range, in which Winter’s vocals contort to a deep drawl, a heady high pitch, a silky talk-sing, and a gravelly wail all before the playhead hits its halfway mark. Such vocal modulation is instinctive for Winter. “It's not really a conscious choice,” he explained. “During the 3D Country album, I was just really trying to be as expressive as possible and feel where the song wanted to go.”

Winter’s writing process is equally mystical. “I take a lot of adderall, first of all,” he remarked. “I ingest it through any orifice of my body that will accept it. I spin around three times, I say the magic words, and then I can usually get a whole album’s worth in one day.” It was only when Winter unthreaded his fingers from their fidgeting clasp and pushed his bangs aside that I could meet his eyes and discern the faint smile that punctuated his dry-humored words.

Winter sees the irony in trying to boil down the creative process into a tidy explanation–

nothing about his process is entirely concrete or decisive. A deeply intuitive musician, Winter described inspiration as something happened upon, not controlled. “Usually it's a pretty inopportune time that I actually feel like I really want to make something. Usually it's [when I’m] away from home, or just in the middle of something, or in court or whatever,” he said slyly. “Very rarely when I sit down [to make something] do I make anything good at all.”

As both a writer and conversationalist, Winter recognizes the power of language to misdirect, speaking and singing with an air of distrust. But he isn’t asking us to trust him– he concluded nearly every one of his answers to my questions with “I dunno… or something like that,” as if uprooting his words, coating them with the same air of suggestion and mystery that looms over his lyrics.

“Slowly as the glaciers / I crack my skull on the hard wooden corner / Even when I start to waver / You watch me dance, and catch my hands every time,” Winter drawls out in a sultry gravel in “Projector,” his lyrics lingering in the liminal space between surreal and sardonic.

“Lyrics don’t really matter as long as whoever’s singing ‘em really means it, and [gives] it all their energy and isn’t bullshitting or anything like that,” he remarked.

Is such a statement poetic sacrilege? Perhaps. But Winter brings on this sacrilege and sarcasm tenfold, wielding it like a weapon. “Voodoo Balarama Baba Yaga!” he wails during “2122.” Through the sheer impassioned authority of his voice, Winter baptizes this gibberish, bestowing life upon seemingly empty words. He sings so confidently, you begin to ask yourself: is there meaning to this meaninglessness?

Winter throws this quest for definition back in our faces with youthful snark. "I’ve got eyes for anything moving / fell in love with a tumbleweed,” he sings with gusto in the mock-apocalyptic world of “Cowboy Nudes.” Life is a joke and Winter has scribbled down the punchline on a spare sheet of notebook paper.

Yet, Winter isn’t entirely elusive, and searches for something deeper as Geese’s sound evolves. “I think we’re looking for ways to push Geese toward something more vulnerable,” Winter explained. “Cause right now it's draped in a lot of pageantry and sarcasm, which we like [because] that’s sort of how we are as people… I don’t think we necessarily have to give up the sarcasm or the sense of humor. We can be vulnerable and keep that… We’re trying to get a little closer to something a little more authentic, realer, something like that.”

When I returned to Queens hours later to attend Winter’s debut solo show at the Stone Circle Theatre, his posture didn’t change from interview to performance. Still withdrawn and aloofly self-contained, he sat slouched before his grand piano, veiled by his bangs. Yet from the moment he uttered his first wavering note, Winter broke down the wall between his audience and himself. Consisting of a cover of the folk classic “Oh Shenandoah,” a stripped down version of Geese’s “Domoto,” and a series of unreleased songs from his upcoming debut solo album, Winter’s set was electrically unpolished, unrefined, and uncontrolled. The singer flung his voice around the room, grabbing sound by the throat and contorting it to his whim. At some points, his words became indiscernible, evolving into an amorphous, abstract language of his own: half English, half outcry.

“If you’re not being totally vulnerable during any performance, people can usually tell,” he asserted. “Maybe they don’t know that’s what they dislike about it, but if someone’s faking it during a performance… it just has a quality to it that sucks.”

“God is real / God is real / He’s actually real, I’m not kidding this time!” Winter chanted under the light of a mosaic of Jesus, bashing his instrument with full-bodied force. Sitting on the floor beneath his piano in an awestruck cluster of Doc-Marten-wearing, Aphex-Twin-tattoo-bearing spectators, I couldn’t help but believe that the singer’s lamenting cry, in all its sarcasm and in all its truth, can lead Geese to that deeper place.

But what exactly does the future hold for Cameron Winter? “Poverty,” he declared when asked that very question. “Followed by millions of dollars, my big break, and then a crippling addiction that drains all my wealth away. And then an intervention, and then I’m back on the horse and I make my comeback album, and then I get in a freak wakeboarding accident. I record my last album from the hospital bed with a broken femur, and then I retire… something like that.”