The last person on Earth I would want to be right now is Cameron Winter.
He’s 23, he’s from Brooklyn, and the people who really love Cameron Winter and his band Geese — undoubtedly the most argued over musical act of the moment — really love Cameron Winter and Geese. And the people who hate Cameron Winter and Geese (the guys over at Sound Opinions on WBEZ, for starters) really hate Cameron Winter and Geese. I really like them. I really like Winter. So sue me. I’m in. They excite me, they seem new yet old, feral one moment and pleading a second later. Maybe I have a limited imagination, maybe this sounds defensive, but it’s nice to swoon once in a while, to open yourself to ridicule, to walk around feeling like a cult member.
It’s a fun feeling.
Haven’t felt that in a while — certainly not for a new record or a new performer.
On Tuesday night at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Hyde Park, beneath vaulting 80-foot ceilings and organ pipes reaching high over sculpted trumpeters and stone reliefs, Cameron Winter played one of just five shows on a small national tour, a lovely, riveting and very sold-out capper to a remarkable year (New Yorker rave, Atlantic rave, top of Pitchfork’s 2025 lists, “artist of a generation” bombast, et al). He sat on the altar at a piano, without supporting musicians, flanked by ornate carvings and with the audience in pews. He played with his back to the room, for the entire show. You’d play like that too if every other social media hosanna tagged you the next Dylan — cryptic, sardonic, genius. Self-care comes first, folks. He played Carnegie Hall last week in much the same way, while being followed by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson and a camera, further recalling the breathlessness that shaped Dylan 60-odd years ago. In fact, depending on where you stand on the Great Winter-Geese Debate, even the guy’s posture — so hunched he seems to be crawling into his Steinway — may be compelling or eye-rolling.
Winter is tall and handsome and looks exhausted. He wore a blue untucked buttoned shirt and black pants, as if he had just gotten off his shift waiting tables. He has sad eyes and a strange, deep and trembling voice that mumbles like a shy high school senior — which he was only five years ago, during the pandemic. It’s hard listening to him without hearing artists he reminds you of — Laura Nyro, Thom Yorke, Van Morrison, Jeff Buckley — but it’s equally hard to listen without thinking you’re hearing someone still developing, raw and unpredictable. The Rockefeller Chapel show was so intimate, if there were fewer people, I might have thought Winter was rehearsing, toying with the phrasing of lines, allowing a stray plink to lead him into digressions. He pounded and caressed keys. He plunked at one key repeatedly, as if in a trance, gradually finding the humor in pushing the audience’s patience — and so plunked that same key once more.
He’s accomplished enough at the piano to know how to whiplash a listener with grace, wrapping a mouthful of intensity around a gentle melody, the lyrics intriguingly confusing though certainly heartfelt, grinding sweetly against a plaintive piano. Whenever pretense looms, in walk some terrific one-liners. “The serious world is gone.” “Like Brian Jones, I was born to swim.” “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.” “I feel loneliest when I’m with you.” “Today I met who I am going to be from now on, and he’s a piece of (expletive).”
The effect — especially at Rockefeller Chapel, beneath soft yellow lights, the audience strikingly silent, the room overstuffed — was a kind of drama without earnestness. You get a sense Winter himself doesn’t always know what the hell he’s singing about and yet sometimes feeling transcends words and careens straight to ache, lonesomeness. You get a sense the audience feels it too. A guy one pew away was weeping openly. A woman beside me giggled to herself at Winter’s every line, as if hearing an inside joke.
I heard someone tell their friend the show was “legendary,” albeit before it even started.
Cameron Winter, so far, has a nice response to the hubbub around Cameron Winter. He burrows into his songs and his feelings, and when it all seems too much, he undercuts. At one point on Tuesday night, he fiddled for an absurdly long time with his microphone, saying nothing, letting every scrape and bump of the mic resound loudly through the chapel — like some slapstick John Cage.
He also reacts the way many an iconoclast before him has reacted — by biting the hand that feeds, by cringing at the gold rush. He ended the night sounding more vulnerable and alienated than any moment before, singing “(Expletive) these people / I’m not here / You’re making me feel like a dollar in your hand.” If you were to play tourist here and poke your head into his solo album, “Heavy Metal,” or maybe listen to the abrasive opening of “Getting Killed,” Geese’s third album, released in October, you might assume the music is too meandering and shapeless to generate more than a dollar in a hand. But then elegance shows up, and warmth, and something human and too real to ignore.
Winter is coming. Let it snow.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
