On the Verge of Rock Stardom

New York Times

05-04-2025

On a sooty, dank spring afternoon in March, the musician Cameron Winter sat hunched over a portable keyboard inside a rehearsal studio in a nondescript neighborhood of central Los Angeles. Mr. Winter, 23, was rehearsing for an appearance on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' the next evening, and was teaching four middle-aged horn players his song 'Drinking Age,' a melancholic ballad off his debut solo album, 'Heavy Metal.'
At first, they struggled to find their chemistry — partly because the five musicians deciphering a structurally amorphous piece of music did not know one another, and partly because the horn players, all women, stood in a clump off to one side.
Mr. Winter was not sure he wanted them there at all. The Kimmel team had suggested he choose something more entertaining and TV friendly than Mr. Winter sitting with his 6-foot-3 frame hunched at a piano. Also, maybe he could play something other than a whiny dirge?
'My suggestion was I get a bloody nose onstage,' Mr. Winter said.
As a compromise, they agreed: No bloody nose and Mr. Winter could choose the song, with the addition of a brass quartet to fill it out.
As the rehearsal progressed, the singer's well-mannered-Brooklyn-boy temperament triumphed, and a big-sister energy emerged from the four women toward this shaggy burgeoning star in his corduroy bomber jacket and fan-made T-shirt.
'I'm an idiot when it comes to this stuff,' Mr. Winter said sweetly, as Laura Brenes, the mellophone player with the bleach-blonde mullet, wrote out the song by hand so that she and the rest of the players could follow more easily.
An hour later, they exchanged high-fives. 'And that's how we'll do it,' Mr. Winter said, smiling.
First Time Alone
This was not Mr. Winter's debut appearance on a network spot, just his first as a solo artist. He performed on television in 2022 on 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' with Geese, the rock band he and four childhood friends formed in 2018. Mr. Winter loves the built-in community and original sound that comes from making music with close friends. 'A band needs real friendship to work,' he said. 'Nothing can exist without that, and that keeps it in this really great, real place.'
But that closeness is also what drove Mr. Winter on a detour from the band, threatening to derail its considerable momentum. He needed to make something that could happen only when he was alone.
The independence cost him. The initial response to 'Heavy Metal' from important people in his life and from his label did not bode well. 'I'd never faced that much pushback and I didn't know how to handle it,' he recalled. 'I was really scared.' Friends and confidants told Mr. Winter the album would flop. 'I'd sunk so much time into this, I just felt like an idiot,' he said.
It was suggested that he release the songs as an EP, or shelve everything but the poppiest song on the album: the exquisite and sunny 'Love Takes Miles.' In the end, he recorded a new final track — the heartfelt, mournful 'Can't Take Anything,' because he agreed that the record should end with 'more of a jump shot' than the '7-minute-er' he had originally planned. After that, Mr. Winter dug his heels in and put out the record he wanted to make.
To everyone's surprise, 'Heavy Metal' has been received as a tour de force, the kind of offering that has people making comparisons to Bob Dylan and Tom Waits (see also: Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Mangum, Bill Callahan and the droller side of Lou Reed's solo work). But it has also turned Mr. Winter into the kind of artist that has fans analyzing every detail of his impressionistic lyrics and telling him his work has kept them from suicide. In other words, 'Heavy Metal' has received the kind of response that a record earns when the artist who made it is on their way to a certain kind of highly personal stardom. His debut solo tour is now sold out.
Getting Out of His Own Way
Mr. Winter started writing songs when he was about 10 years old. The first, 'I-95,' was about a lonely trucker. 'It was just sort of like an A.I., like spitting out sad stories,' he said. A decade or so after he began, his songwriting had advanced, but Mr. Winter still had a sense that he was following established conventions. When he told his Geese bandmates he was going to make a solo album, it was partly because he wanted to see if he could get out from under those strictures.
'I just listened to stuff that made it clear to me that I had been following rules that did not have to be followed,' Mr. Winter said over lunch at Tam O'Shanter, one of the great, old, dark and gnarled Los Angeles steakhouses. He listed Leonard Cohen, Federico García Lorca and William Carlos Williams as influences in opening up his own process. 'They all have this feeling of, like, innocent nudity,' he said. 'It's so plain and so terrible — so aching.' He stared at his Caesar salad, pushing it around with his fork, adding, 'I don't know how they do that.'
He decided to try to write less from 'imagining a story or imagining a point to be made,' and more from instinct, following breadcrumbs as they appeared. 'It's hard to get to that place, there's a lot of overthinking that has to be exhausted,' he said. But when it happened, Mr. Winter almost felt like it had not come from him at all.
'I'm young and not afraid of living with my parents,' Mr. Winter had said as part of the 'Heavy Metal' release announcement. He now explains he was essentially subtweeting a higher-up at his label who had negged the record, telling him 'Heavy Metal' was not 'the album to get you out of your parents' house.' As the child of two creative people — his mother is a writer and his father is a composer — Mr. Winter grew up attending the progressive Brooklyn Friends school and was free to explore unconventional paths.
Recently, Mr. Winter moved out of the family home and got his own spot in Bed-Stuy. 'Baby's first apartment,' he said. He has roommates, because he does not want to be lonely, but he marvels at the fact that he can pull off this kind of independence at all. 'At least, for the way I live right now, money's kind of not an issue and that's insane, making music full time, it's ridiculous,' he said. 'Before the album came out, I successfully divorced myself from any pleasure or pain at its success or failure. And so when it didn't fail, I also felt nothing. It could have flopped just as easy as it didn't.'
But Still, the Band
Geese released their last album, '3D Country,' in the summer of 2023. In addition to the Colbert appearance, 'Rolling Stone' once called them 'legit indie-rock prodigies.' The band appeared on the cover of the British music magazine NME, with the promotional line: 'meet NYC's most promising young rockers.' Geese also hosts an annual show, Geesefest, which has grown to a three-night event at Music Hall of Williamsburg, furthering their reputation as leaders of a rising New York-based rock scene. The idea that the band's lead singer and songwriter would disappear for even a few months to commune with dead poets and write an album of almost aggressively anticommercial piano tracks was met with 'a certain amount of discouragement,' Mr. Winter said.
Given the stakes, it would make sense if Mr. Winter's approach to his solo album was to become super rigorous, set a tight recording schedule and stick to it grimly. Instead, he felt relaxed. 'I didn't feel nervous at all, for better or for worse,' he said.
In a move that has now become a bit of Cameron Winter lore, he began recording 'Heavy Metal' by strolling into a Guitar Center in Brooklyn and messing around with the store's recording equipment. Over the next several months, Mr. Winter recorded his album in three different New York City Guitar Centers. Something about the anodyne spaces helped him get inside the songs. 'There's just very little pressure in that environment to do anything,' he said. Eventually, Mr. Winter worked with a co-producer (Loren Humphrey) and some professional players, but in general, the record was stitched together in this ad hoc, meandering way, with vocals recorded at home in Brooklyn or in hotel bathrooms while on tour with Geese.
Looking Ahead
It's tempting to think of Mr. Winter as the latest in a line of freakishly charismatic New York rock kids destined for a certain kind of fame. And maybe he is. But he already seems burned out on that perceived glamour. 'It feels like an obligation sometimes,' he said. 'Like, why aren't I euphoric all the time, if I'm ostensibly successful in rock music? That's supposed to come with its own giant pile of Xanax and willing concubines and all that stuff, but it's kind of exhausting.'
He's already been on a version of that ride. 'I lasted like two seconds,' he said.
What still feels vital is his connection to the record he made, which he will tour in April, and to Geese. The band just spent a month over the winter living together in a house in Los Angeles and recording its third LP, expected out later this year. 'A lot of weed, a lot of taco detritus,' Mr. Winter summarizes. 'We were messy, but we got five stars on Airbnb.'
He seems surprised by the easy pleasure of returning to the warmth of the band. 'It's weird, when I'm with them I kind of revert into this more adolescent place that I guess I repressed over the years,' he said. 'I'm trying to be all serious and stuff in my life and then I'm with them and suddenly it's just a gigantic poop joke. It's fun.'
One too many questions about what life was like in the rock 'n' roll house provokes a classic Cameron Winter good-natured sarcasm jag. 'Well, you know, Dom swept the chimneys, and I cleaned the drain pipes and Max paid the mortgage,' he says, smirking. Who made the beds in the morning? 'Oh, that's our little elfin helper, Ezekiel.'
While Mr. Winter may already feel weary of the trappings of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle before he's truly lived it, there is one aspect of the rock star pose that he seems to truly enjoy: messing with journalists. Has he ever been asked a question that he preferred not to answer and then made up a response that seemed outlandish for the purpose both of avoiding the question and because it was fun? Mr. Winter smiles and makes direct eye contact for the first time all day. 'I would never do that,' he said. 'That's disrespectful.'