Bangers Only: Cameron Winter

Beg, borrow or steal. But find a way to see this show.

Forcing an audience to consume your teenage obsessions is usually the quickest path to disappointment. Nearly every director who gets the chance to make the script they’ve been sitting on since before they could drive ends up with a bust. It’s a trap. You romanticize and idealize and lock in on ideas past their prime, appealing to a narrow, constricted version of yourself and no one else. There’s raw art and then there’s the undercooked.

Nothing about Cameron Winter is undercooked. On Monday night, at the 299-seat Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in LA, the 22-year-old lumbered across the stage like a more introverted Julian Casablancas ready to perform Warped Tour riffs of “I’ll Try Anything Once.” Winter carried a tiny cup of tea to soothe his voice through a short but aching set. (Someone in the crowd asked him what kind of tea it was and Winter said, “Good tea.”) He spent 90% of the show with body angled away from the audience.

The crowd sat mostly silent and camera-phone free during the performance. They erupted into a standing ovation following a closing rendition of “Take It With You,” a haunting ballad Winter wrote when he was 16 that ended up getting him signed. At one part he sings:

I’ve had Winter’s music on consistent repeat since finding it in December. Plenty of people have attempted to capture Winter’s cult-like appeal, but Katie Crutchfield has my favorite description for what works about his music:

I spent a little time in Durham last week and while there Brad showed me the Cameron Winter album Heavy Metal. It has quickly consumed my mind and emotions and all of the empty time and space in all this travel I’ve been doing. I don’t even really think I know how to talk about it. It feels hyperbolic to call it brilliant. It’s something else. There’s a casualness and stupidity to its complete and total airtight perfection. Brad said it sounds like freedom.

She’s right, the record hits because it’s casual and stupid. The show is another story.

Many small, solo artists have to strip back the live versions of their recorded work for budgetary reasons. It’s costly to get a bunch of people and their instruments on the road. But Winter uses the constraint to elevate his mission. It’s just him, his piano and his words for a solid hour. At times the keys slam and at others his fingers appear to be rendered in slow motion. All great voices are instruments, yet Winter uses his as a blunt object, howling and moaning and sucking you into his made up world.

With wet bangs covering his face, Winter has a bit of a “I’ve never talked to a human being before” energy on stage that belies how he’s fronted another band for years. But the man loves his own myth making, as Chris Black explained well in GQ:

Winter is the singer of a band called Geese, a country-tinged psych-rock band that has toured with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, but his solo album sounds nothing like that. In press releases and interviews, Winter has spun a story around Heavy Metal. He’s said that he made the album with musicians found on Craigslist, that his bass player is a five-year-old named Jayden, and the cellist is a steelworker from Boston. He’s claimed that he recorded the album, or parts of it, in various Guitar Center locations in New York City, moving on to a different store each time management wised up and kicked him out, which feels like something a shitty emo band would have done in the late 1990s. Is any of it true? I don’t know, and I don’t care. All of this has contributed to the lore around Winter and his music, which contrasts nicely with how likable and accessible the album is.

What’s true is the power of the songwriting and performance. Winter started off the show with a brutal one-two of “Try As I May” and “The Rolling Stones.” I teared up halfway through the latter, as Winter crooned:

The lyrics can be impenetrable literally but undeniable emotionally, by design. Around the record release, Winter told The Line Of Best Fit:

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.

Winter added an early show on Monday due to demand. He looked exhausted by the end of the late performance I caught. That could be acting, irony, myth making, whatever. Sleepless mania is baked into his narrative, right down to the trading cards he gave out at the entrance:

But it all worked on me, and I bought it. It’s funny and moving and, yes, stupid in the best ways. It’s rare you get to watch a young artist like this in this kind of moment — like you’re catching Jeff Mangum in a cafe in Athens in the 90s. But it’s happening.

Winter has seven shows coming up in the U.S., including three in New York. They’re almost entirely sold out. But do whatever you can to be there. The live recordings don’t do it justice. This is special.