Geese's Cameron Winter has spoken to NME about his new eccentric debut solo album 'Heavy Metal', opening up about his fearless Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen-inspired approach. Check it out below along with new single '$0'.
The frontman of the former NME Cover artist has announced today (November 19) the release of his first solo LP – a 10-track record that sees Winter embrace a unique sound influenced by the likes of Tom Waits and Bob Dylan and unleash his creativity with songs that explore chaos and existential dreads.
Winter released his first offering of the LP in the form of the song '$0' – a spiraling six-minute piano ballad with whimsical strings and brooding melancholy. “You're making me feel like a dollar in your hand / You're making me feel like I'm a zero dollar man,” he sings, confessing his discernment.
The track's accompanying music video sees Winter sing the song live into a microphone while feeding pigeons in NYC. Check it out below.
'Heavy Metal' was produced by Loren Humphrey (Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del Rey) who previously worked with Winter on Geese's 2023 LP '3D Country'. “A year ago, I was inspired to make an album outside of my band Geese; unfortunately for Geese fans, I thought it would take four months and it took a year and a half,” said Winter.
“I got a lot of advice that it was too early to 'go solo', probably because most people feel that 'solo albums' as once a band is basically over the hill and that they're usually uninspired cash grabs, but rest assured , my solo album is unique, because barely anyone knows who my band is, I'm young and not afraid of living with my parents and I'm free to chase whatever ideas I want.”
Winter has already shared two singles to mark his solo era in the form of 'Vines' and 'Take It With You' – which saw him depart from Geese's rowdy indie sound to something reminiscent of the likes of Leonard Cohen and Harry Nilsson.
On why he launched with these two tracks, Winter told NME: “Well, nothing's perfect as far as indicators go. But I thought they were decent, sort of simple songs. I wanted the album to strive towards something else.
“I figured that they would actually be fine as singles rather than on the record. The record I kind of see as its own thing completely.”
Check out our full interview below, where the singer tells us about the stress of diving into a solo project while in the middle of Geese's jam-packed year, his fear of the Bob Dylan renaissance and his process of creating something that lets him be uniquely himself.
NME: Hello Cameron, why did now feel like the right time to branch out into a solo album?
Cameron Winter: “It's actually a really inconvenient time for me to release or create solo stuff. I did it because I really wanted to. I've been making music by myself for as long as I've been making music with Geese, and I felt I needed to do a solo album, and so I did.”
The title of your album is 'Heavy Metal' which feels like the complete opposite of what the tracks are. How did you land on that name?
“Once the album was done, I was sifting through the lyrics to try and find a name for the album. For a long time, I wanted to name it something kind of stupid, like some reference to a Bob Dylan album or something like that. I want to call it like …”
Tarantula.
“Tarantula. Have you read that book? It's a piece of shit.”
Yes, but I genuinely thought I was having a stroke 10 pages in because I was like 'I don't know what I'm reading'.
“I'm terrified for the Bob Dylan renaissance that's about to come out from this Timotheé Chalamet movie A Complete Unknown. I watched the trailer the other day with this mix of complete horror and the knowledge that I'm definitely going to watch this movie more than once. I'm excited and sort of dreading it.
“But anyway, I was looking through the lyrics, and I came across this line from the song 'Cancer Of The Skull', where I say heavy metal, and I didn't mean it in the genre sense, but I thought it would be a funny title.”
The album sounds like an eclectic blend of '70s folk, Tom Waits, Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic. Where did the musical inspiration come from?
“Well, I had a traumatic childhood, you know, all that sort of thing. I was concussed many times as a boy and I developed a love for Tom Waits and a fondness for all those people that you've mentioned. My love for Weird Al actually developed before my love for any of those other people, so maybe that's sort of a foundational thing that has become part of the gradient of my references.
“That's as well as anyone could describe it. I often am really terrible at describing the stuff I make to anybody.”
All of your work feels unapologetically yourself. How do you as a songwriter tackle the creative space freely without acknowledging the pressures that may come?
“I like doing what I want to do, and ideally, I don't care about what anyone expects or wants from me, but it's not a hostile thing or anything like that to me, and that's what I think is a big misunderstanding that often it is had between me and the people who I work with or who listen to the music.
“[The album] isn't meant to be this contrarian thing. I was just really trying to listen to myself and what I like, and sometimes that leads you to places that are oblique or something like that. That was the case for this record, and I'm proud of that. In retrospect, a lot of people seem to have this idea that I went in with the sole purpose of making something as far away from common sense and the current culture as possible, but I just tried to do whatever excited me.
“A big note I got on this was that it's 'too heavy and you're going to scare people away' and I don't want it to scare people away. I feel like when I listen to Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen or those sort of sad sacks, they're more depressed than I am by a long shot, but I never feel like their songs are devoid of hope or anything. I feel like they are very affirming to life.
“Life is depressing sometimes and instead of trying to avoid talking about or referencing depressing aspects of life, their version of uplifting is to look depressing things dead in the face and that to me is healthier and more appealing than just avoiding it.”
Is there a difference between how you go about creating for your solo work versus creating things with Geese?
“Well, some parts are easier and some parts are harder. With Geese, when you're working on full songs with multiple people, the songs themselves have to have certain beats that everyone understands and knows and can revolve around whereas, when I was doing it myself, I would sort of just throw all that out the window. For Geese songs, I'm really prepared and for this, I was not prepared, which made things more difficult.
“I was just like, 'I don't have to teach these things to anyone. I could just figure it out on my own and just all it could all exist in my head,' and led to something that was that's a little more impressionistic, than a lot of the Geese stuff, which ended up being fine, but was also really fucking stressful. A lot of these songs sucked for a long time due to me not writing them before I recorded them. There was a lot of reverse-engineering from just like me banging on a piano. I had to make the songs out of that and you can kind of hear it on the record. Everything's stitched together and kind of weird.”
Is there anything you learned about yourself and the process of creating your own work that you plan to bring while working on the next Geese project?
“Fuck ton. I explored a lot of stuff that I was going to explore on the next Geese album, and I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. It was really disruptive to make this album with Geese's schedule and the rest of the band were very supportive, but understandably anxious for me to get this shit done.
“But in reality, finishing it and completing it in a way that I thought works, it's going to make the third Geese album better than it would have been, I'm sure.”
'Heavy Metal' is being released on the second night of Geesefest. Will you be performing any of it live at that show?
“Yeah, a little. I may have some help from three or four friends of mine who I'm in a band with.”
'Heavy Metal' is set for release on December 6 via Partisan. You can pre-order the album here. This coincides with Geese's “Geesefest” shows – a three-night run at the Music Hall of Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY. He will also perform a solo set at Tomorrow Never Knows festival in Chicago on January 18 2025. Visit here to purchase tickets.
'Heavy Metal' tracklist is:
1. 'The Rolling Stones'
2. 'Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)'
3. 'Love Takes Miles'
4. 'Drinking Age'
5. 'Cancer of the Skull'
6. 'Try As I May'
7. 'We're Thinking The Same Thing'
8. 'Nina In A Field Of Cops'
9. '$0'
10. 'Can't Keep Anything'
