Live at Carnegie Hall, the album, and Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, the Anderson concert film it accompanies—which recently premiered at the New York Film Festival—are at once faithful renderings of Winter’s triumphal performance the evening of December 11, 2025, and works of real-time mythmaking. Lured in by such shiny baubles, the responsible critic should avoid making premature, weepingly sincere pronouncements. So allow me to just tell you what I hear when I listen to “It All Fell in the River,” the opening number and one of three unreleased songs Winter performed that night. I hear Carole King and “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” I hear Nyro, too, right at 2:27: “I didn’t ooh then/But I’m ooh-ing now.” I hear Winter’s childhood piano lessons, as he vamps up from an allegro to a galloping allegrissimo, takes a baserunning slide into a ritardando, then dusts himself off with a cheekily prim coda. I hear half a century of the Great American Songbook compressed into a brilliant point of light.
Geese did something similar with last year’s Getting Killed, their own neutron star of an album, gobbling up the tangled lineages of rock, punk, and drone music in New York City with the ravenous appetites of kids weaned on the infinite scroll. What Live at Carnegie Hall proves is that the more Winter jettisons, the closer he gets to some platonic ideal of music. It’s the perfectionist’s dream: no mixdowns, no producers or session players to misinterpret your ideas, restricted only by the speed of your hands. That’s how “Try As I May,” whose Heavy Metal incarnation plodded along to a rinky-dink, haunted-carousel click track—a joke at the song’s expense, maybe—now just glides. Winter lets the spaces between each downbeat expand and contract, as if his Steinway grand has lungs. Meanwhile he’s warbling, “I drowned in expensive clothes for the oysters all to see,” like the collar of his black button-down is suffocating him.
