You were born to break my big hairy football arms
Like clean windows kill the birds
I wasn’t expecting to go and see Cameron Winter in New York. I’d had a ticket for his London show two weeks ago but couldn’t make it. Leana and I had spent an indulgent happy hour at a dive bar creatively named ‘Dive Bar’ when we realised I’d left my phone somewhere. It seemed beyond saving (it has since made its way back to me) and the chance of seeing this show at the last minute was calling, so we descended on 57th street. As if by magic, an hour later we’re sitting in Carnegie Hall across the auditorium from each other, as Cameron Winter boyishly walks onstage.
He sits down and opens with a new song called It All Fell in the River during which, like everything else he did, nobody as much as blinks. We watch this young man hunched and cooing over the piano, turned away, with his back to us. Between songs, every now and then he stands up and performs some physical comedy that equalises the emotional pressure of his performance.
The performance feels anachronistic, building on, and constantly referring back to, those he is so often compared to. It is simplistic – a person and a piano and yet it is also right now, given by one of the most talked about people in music.
The way he plays is so different to the work he’s recorded. He’s covering his own songs. The way he phrases things, shifting and changing registers from one moment to the next is, frankly, hypnotic. On a recorded rip of the concert’s audio posted to YouTube, I’ve found myself replaying over and over how he sings “I didn’t ooh then / But I’m oohing now” in It All Fell in the River. The way he climbs to falsetto and drops into a drawling, spoken “now” scratches some itch in my brain. There are just so many moments like this here.
To strip your work back to almost nothing, a voice and a piano, and have it hold up the way these do is quite some feat. This sparseness was – very obviously – felt by those around me, in what can only be described as a kind of collective experience. Everyone in that room felt struck, as if we were bearing witness to something important.
That everyone included various celebrities. Most notable was Paul Thomas Anderson who wheeled a Panavision camera onstage at one point to film Nina + Field of Cops, supposedly for a concert film. Benny Safdie was also somewhere in a corner with camera operators. Collaboration with such talked about directors, while perhaps coming at whiplash speed for the 23-year-old, makes sense. Geese, and Cameron Winter in particular, have received a lot of attention, they’re sort of prodigal. They have been compared to everyone and labelled as everything. It has been a Cameron Winter, winter and he has been touted (like my ticket, unfortunately) as Leonard Cohen, Springsteen, Dylan, and Nina Simone. When you watch him play, you can see where this comes from.
His voice is ridiculous. Some people have called it grating, and his ability to go from falsetto to a deep full voice is striking, particularly at the end of this version of The Rolling Stones. But it’s ridiculously good.
If You Turn Back Now has something of the best of Dylan’s bitterness, it reminds me of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright. But comparison here, while kind, is the thief of joy; what he makes is his own. “If you turn back now, I might just watch you go / I might love you again, if you leave me alone”, he sings, before telling you how “the sun will stare down on the street where I buy / beautiful, beautiful, beautiful milk that is sold the day after you die”.
When he repeatedly declares that he thinks “God is actually for real” and that he’s not kidding, on $0, you think that he could be right, or at least you want to believe him. It seemed like people did. There was a 7-minute standing ovation at the end, where one unfortunate person left, before he eventually came on to play one more song, Vines.
When I eventually found Leana outside by the sight of the dumb hat I’d given her as a thank you for letting me stay, we hugged and the first thing she said was, “why did that have to end? It was over so quickly.”
Setlist
It All Fell In The River
Try As I May
Emperor XIII in Shades
The Rolling Stones
Love Takes Miles
Drinking Age
Cancer of the Skull
If You Turn Back Now
Nina + Field of Cops
$0
Take It With You
Vines (Encore)
maxim knowles 
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