To be chosen by the muses is not always a blessing. Inspiration can arrive as an iridescent butterfly or a rushing torrent, or, as in the music of Cameron Winter, it can look and sound a lot like torture. “Songs are a hundred ugly babies/I can’t feed,” the frontman of Brooklyn’s Geese laments near the midpoint of his debut solo album, Heavy Metal. As Winter slips into a falsetto on the word “babies,” there’s a stab of pain—one of many on the record, in which he takes a drill bit to the twin struggles of music and love, boring down to their raw, nervy centers. Bolstered by timeless arrangements that are by turns folksy, soulful, and neo-classical, Winter establishes himself as a songwriter par excellence. But he is also a reluctant one, a warrior-poet Achilles broken down, “beat with ukuleles,” exhorted to take up his pen and aegis by forces far greater than himself. The result is a project of catharsis that never comes across like an exercise in vanity, an outpouring of material as necessary to its creator as it is compelling to experience.
One of the first things to notice about Heavy Metal, and perhaps its defining feature, is Winter’s voice. Put largely in service of Zeppelin-esque theatrics on Geese’s 2023 record 3D Country, it becomes a more versatile and tender instrument here, immediately remarkable for its sheer range and depth of tone. Over the even-keeled strut of “Nausicäa (Love Will Be Revealed),” Winter alternately croons and yelps the name of the titular Greek princess, infusing each syllable with want. And at the climax of “Drinking Age,” a wrenchingly gorgeous piano and woodwind ballad, it practically sounds like he’s melting: “From now on, this is who I’m gonna be/This way/A piece of meat.” That song has Winter breaking out his signature batty lip burble—think when a baby sticks out their lips like a fish and runs their finger over them—as though he’s regressing to a truer, more infantile state. Or it could just be the air leaving his lungs as he sinks to the bottom of the bottle. Pitched somewhere between Conor Oberst and Rufus Wainwright, Winter’s delivery is not “emo” but is especially emotive, charged with a need to communicate even in the moments where words and language fail.
As the words fall out of his mouth in an aphasic flood, it’s hard to picture Winter actually committing Heavy Metal’s lyrics to paper, though they look too precise on the page to have emerged any other way. With enough listens, the spray begins to cohere around certain motifs—horses, water, feet, enough “baby”s and “mama”s to make Robert Plant blush—and, especially, names. There’s the aforementioned Nausicäa, and on opening “The Rolling Stones,” two parallel martyr figures in John Hinckley Jr. (“with a candy gun towards the president’s ass”) and late Stones guitarist Brian Jones, a member of the infamous “27 club” (Winter himself is only 22). And then there is Nina. The only character without a corresponding encyclopedia entry, she’s the explicit addressee of two songs—the endlessly escalating ”Nina + Field of Cops” and “$0,” the record’s only single—and so uniquely, thoroughly rendered as to instantly join the pantheon of classic rock’s mononymic women, right alongside Peg, Layla, and Angie.
That he pulls off this mythmaking with ease can be credited both to Winter’s genuine skill and his youthful bravado. Heavy Metal’s instrumentation is, likewise, casually virtuosic while still managing to feel loose and improvisational, channeling Astral Weeks one moment (“The Rolling Stones”) and Music From Big Pink the next (“Love Takes Miles”). The recording process—which Winter claims included a five-year-old bassist, a Boston steelworker, and illicit sessions in several Guitar Center showrooms—was far from placid. “I had to just sit there and for every six-minute performance track the whole fucking shaker thing myself,” he said in an interview with The Line of Best Fit. “In between takes, I’d just lie down and put my head between couch cushions.” Still, the resulting sound is effortless, weaving in mandolin, vibraphone, jaw harp, blocky Wurlitzer organ, and a mini horn section, and coming off like a great lost Harry Nilsson or Tom Waits record. Each artist blended soul, country, and folk, rock, jazz, and showtunes with gleeful abandon, but always in the service of the song, something Winter seems to innately understand as well: See the clattering, atonal percussion that emerges and quickly resolves on “We’re Thinking the Same Thing,” a rare bright spot about the joy of melding minds with a lover.
And what if I told you that Winter is in possession of information that can definitively prove the existence of God? Well, not quite, but when he repeatedly proclaims that “God is real” on the outro of “$0,” sounding like a man possessed of all the conviction of Moses stumbling down from Mount Sinai, it’s hard not to believe. For another songwriter, this would be more than enough to hang one’s hat on, the kind of Joyceian epiphany that most albums don’t even get one of. But Winter goes for one last gut punch. Playing like his answer to Leonard Cohen’s “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” “Can’t Keep Anything” is the tender-hymn counterpart to the ecstatic revelation of “0$.” Heavy Metal’s simplest composition, it is moved by something stronger than religious faith, greater than the pursuit of art. A promise would be the best way to put it—Winter’s vow that “I see where you’re going babe/I’m going too.” Wherever that journey takes him, it’s a privilege just to follow.
