CAMERON WINTER

🌊 Big Sur, 🇺🇸 Cotton Eye Joe, 🎺 Miles Davis outtakes, and more.

February 6, 2025

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Cameron Winter is a New York City-based musician whom you might recognize from our Best of 2024 music round-up or as the frontman of the indie rock band Geese. His fantastic solo debut, Heavy Metal, was released at the tail end of 2024 and it's a perfect reminder to not post your f*ckin best album list in early December...(looking at you Pitchfork etc). Lyrics like “God is actually real, God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this, I’m not kidding this time”, paired with gorgeous instrumentation and his signature vocals make for a one-of-a-kind listening experience that we highly recommend. He's about to kick off a solo tour for this record and you can find tickets here. Lucky for us, Cameron is here to tell us what he’s been into.

WHAT cameron winter IS INTO...

🌊

Big Sur

In 2022 during my band’s first tour ever I witnessed the honest-to-God USA™ for the first time, and after about 2799 miles of driving I was about to chalk the whole country up to a disappointment until, not unlike the murderous fur-trappers of the early 19th century, I was rewarded for my long slog through the Bleak American Nothingness® with something approximating paradise. Spending a sunny day in Big Sur can make your whole week.

🇺🇸

Cotton Eye Joe

Chorus is catchy as sin. They knew the verse parts sucked so they made them as short as possible. Where the hell did he come from / go?

🎺

Miles Davis outtakes

For a brief period in the late 60s and early 1970s Miles Davis’ spiralling drug use and creative genius hit simultaneous peaks (a period which ended abruptly in October of 1972 when he obliterated a sports car full of coke, and every bone in both his legs, against a traffic column. The drug use would go on to make a full recovery, his genius would not). In these years Miles would frequently walk into Columbia Studio B and, seemingly with ten ounces of the good stuff dissolving in his rectum, offhandedly churn out total brilliance, music full of darkness and rhythm, at the cutting edge of several genres. I know it’s often said that even geniuses need to write several bad songs for every good one, but I swear to God it’s like even the scraps of tape they left on the floor during these sessions are solid gold. It’s possible Miles arranged some kind of deal with the devil to get an advance payment of good songs and pay off the bad ones in the 80s.

🥖

Lyon

Paris can wait, you oughta see Lyon.

🪒

Shaving

The rest of my life starts after I shave.

👁

THE LA'S- THE LA'S

The La’s made their first and only album three times, and rejected all three for not being good enough. The label got fed up and released the third attempt without frontman Lee Mavers’ permission. Mavers has dismissed it ever since as being “all fucked up like a snake with a broken back.” I get that it’s his burden to strive for perfection, but his failure is my inspiration. I relistened to this album a while back and have been stuck on it for months. There is not a single wrong note, not a single moment of hesitation on the whole record. It is pop rock written and performed with a despotic level of focus. As far as songwriters go, Lee Mavers may well be the equivalent of a mad scientist deep underground trying to create a perfect vacuum night after night. The songs are concentrated, some of them so economically structured that they barely even exist. They may not be ambitious in scope or message, but they are crystal clear statements. I love Lee Mavers’ voice more than anything, he sings like he wishes his voice could be as perfect as a guitar. He’s straining so hard, he hits each note so squarely on its head, never a syllable out of time, he’s got no room for attitude, he’s trying to write songs…

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CAMERON WINTER

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