Geese frontman who has been called Gen Z’s Bob Dylan and praised by Nick Cave tells tall tales

I’ve heard the stories. Cameron Winter releases solo album in 2024 Heavy Metal by entering various Guitar Center music stores in New York and using their equipment. Or maybe he recorded it in the back of a few different taxis. Or maybe he went on Craigslist and placed ads to hire musicians he’d never met or played with before.

I’d also heard that he was a Tom Waits fan, and thought maybe he’d learned as much from Waits’ penchant for making up his past and telling fun piggies as he did from his music.

But Winter seems genuinely surprised when asked if there’s any truth to any of these stories. “It’s all true,” he says. “People think I made them up, but I made them all. I needed musicians badly and they’re really cheap on Craigslist. Thanks to Guitar Center, I was going in to record and at the end of the day I had everything on the hard drive.”

So, did anyone working at any of these stores ever question what you were doing? “Eventually someone will come and ask what you’re doing, but I just turn on the spell and say: ‘How are you? Am I doing this right? Can you help me with this?’ People like to get involved.”

We’re on Zoom, and I tilt my head and squint at him like Larry David does. Curb Your Enthusiasm while trying to figure out if someone had outdone him. There isn’t even the slightest smile on Winter’s face. He looks as innocent as a lamb. The guy is either a consummate liar or used some truly unorthodox methods when recording. Heavy Metal.

The reason we’re talking is to be released to be killed, is the third album from his band Geese, ahead of their Australian tour in February. This album is another bold musical breakthrough from a band that crosses the boundaries between post-punk, indie-rock, math-rock and even funk and soul, combining brutality with exemplary diligence.

Winter is in her apartment in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, surrounded by bare white walls, a single lamp hanging above her head.

“As you can see, I’m going for the padded room chic look,” she says. He then lets out a huge yawn and grabs a tissue to blow his nose, and will do this regularly for the next 45 minutes. Somewhere between Adam Driver and Julian Casablancas, he has a low, flat speaking voice and a more relaxed demeanor.

He is 23 years old and just moved out of home at the beginning of this year. He has said in the past that he comes from a creative family. When pressed, she says her father works in children’s programs. Sesame Street, He later started his own business creating production music for television and commercials. He says of his mother: “She’s a very talented writer. You know her series of children’s books.” 39 Tips? “He wrote them all under various pseudonyms.”

This last claim is pretty easy to refute. The popular adventure series has been written by many different authors, most of whom are well known.

He took piano lessons from the age of six, stopped when he was 13, but continued to play on his own because he loved the instrument so much. He was only eight years old when he wrote his first song.

“It was about a lonely trucker,” he says. “Of course I had no truck driving experience, but ‘lonely roads’ and ‘where do I go?’ I wrote about it. and things like that. I guess I was just absorbing the sad songs and spitting out my own songs based on them like an algorithm. It was a piano ballad. “I wrote piano ballads privately as a child, and most of them were sad songs.”

He attended Brooklyn Friends School, an independent school based in the Quaker faith whose famous alumni include Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. It was there that he met drummer Max Bassin and guitarist Emily Green, and the three became the core of Geese in 2016, while still in their teens. The band also includes bassist Dominic DiGesu and touring keyboardist Sam Revaz.

He estimates they performed live only six times during their first five years of existence, “because New York is a tough place to get shows, plus we were basically kids, so no one wanted to let us play. So we’d record a lot.”

He wasn’t even born when The Strokes ushered in New York rock’s revival in 2001, but he’s keenly aware of the cyclical nature of the city’s music scene. “Hopefully these things will cycle in line with our release schedule and our five-year plan so we can make a tremendous profit. That would be very convenient.” Even he couldn’t help but give a slight smile as he said this.

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Nick Cave is one of the many people singing Winter’s praises. On its website Red Hand Files, He raved about Heavy Metal, called it “surprising and crazy” and said Winter had “a gorgeous, soulful voice with bright, bubbly lyrics.”

“What can I say?” says Winter, shrugging. “I thought it was great that he said that. Am I a Nick Cave fan? Yes, of course.”

For Acquisition killedThe band traveled to Los Angeles to work with Kenny Beats, known for producing IDLES and Vince Staples. “There were huge fires going on around L.A. at the time, so we were outside wearing masks and it was a crazy atmosphere, a little bit like hell in the sky,” he recalls. “The studio is around UCLA and it’s flat and empty, so we liked it there. There’s no distractions.”

On the new songs, Winter’s chameleon voice continues to take shape with the band’s sound, while the lyrics are untamed beat poetry laced with striking phrases that float one moment, sting the next. He has already been compared to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen.

Inside Half Real, “I’m thinking of paying for the lobotomy and telling them to get through the bad times and get rid of the good times too, there’s nothing I can do anymore,” he sings. He insists that this line is not specifically about the current moment in which the United States is waking up every morning to a news cycle that reads like Orwell’s nightmare.

“But when I’m writing, I have to interact with the world. I lock in on something and try to be a good witness so I can see the meaning of ordinary things. When you do that, suddenly there are a million things to write about, and then you can go, go, go.”

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When asked which authors he admires, he looks at the bookshelf on the right and lists the names. “William Gaddis, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, James Joyce. I love Joyce because he’s truly human in his stream of consciousness sense. It’s not just aesthetic garbage. He’s trying to grasp something really deep, and you can tell he’s really excited about it. There’s so much pathos in his heart.”

As he says this, he becomes more enthusiastic than at other moments in our conversation. Maybe it’s because he seems to strive for that in his own work.

Other journalists wrote that they struggled to get Winter to reveal much about herself. In the new song husbands “I’ll never explain, so you don’t have to waste your time,” he sings.

At the end of our time together, I told him this sentence and told him that I was worried that the interview would fail. “Oh, that line?” he said with a careless wave of his hand. “I was exaggerating things for effect.”

geese be killed and Cameron Winter Heavy Metal They are both out now. Geese will perform at Laneway Festival throughout February and at Sydney Metro Theater on 11 February, Melbourne’s Croxton Bandroom on 12 February and Perth Freo.Social on 14 February. Cameron Winter will perform solo at the Melbourne Forum on 9 February and the Sydney Opera House on 16 February.

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