Paul Thomas Anderson, winner of the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture for ‘One Battle After Another’, has already announced what will be his next film: Cameron Winter, live at Carnegie Hall. The Geese vocalist established himself last December as one of the youngest artists in history to sell out the prestigious New York venue, joining a list of names such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. What does Paul Thomas Anderson see in Cameron Winter? The future.
Anderson is not the only great filmmaker conquered by Winter’s compositions, since Benny Safdie has also been in charge of co-producing the film. ‘Live at Carnegie Hall’ will be available on platforms starting October 9, while tickets for the film will go on sale on September 17. It remains to be seen if any Spanish distributor dares to bring it to our country.
What better opportunity than this to recommend 5 essential songs with which to start getting to know Cameron Winter’s discography, which for the moment is reduced to his debut, ‘Heavy Metal’, and two extra singles. If you don’t like Geese, don’t worry. This has nothing to do with it.
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The Rolling Stones
Cameron Winter was clear that he had to stay as far away as possible from anything that could sonically remind Geese. Thus, the song that opens his debut immediately sounds like something out of the Van Morrison or Leonard Cohen songbook, as the 24-year-old artist makes it clear with his first two phrases that ‘Heavy Metal’ is about the pain that comes with creating: “I’ll keep breaking cups until my left hand looks bad / Until my miracle drugs write the miracle song.”
On the one hand, Winter is excited to have “the bass lines of the future” in his possession, but on the other, he knows that all his ambition can turn into self-destruction. This is fatefully compared to Brian Jones, who died in his pool weeks after being kicked out of his group: “Like Brian Jones, I was born to swim / Towards last month / Towards the Rolling Stones / Towards us / Swimming alone.”
Love Takes Miles / Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)
Beyond the suffering and despair latent in most of his songs, Cameron Winter also has great love songs in his repertoire. They are also the catchiest. ‘Love Takes Miles’ was named the best song of 2025 by Pitchfork, despite having come out in 2024, and ‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’ sounds even more immediate than the first.
Accompanied by the poppier melodies and keyboard lines of ‘Heavy Metal’, this is inspired by the passage from ‘The Odyssey’ in which Nausicaä finds the protagonist at his worst and takes care of him, basically in exchange for nothing, to tell a story about unconditional love, pure and tough, and with Winter’s best falsetto: “I’m blind and you’re ugly / It’s so easy to love you,” she sings. Nolan forgot to adapt this part.
Cancer of the Skull
Cameron Winter can’t stop creating and that really bothers him. His routine during the process was to get out of bed, go out to the garden of producer Loren Humphrey’s house, listen to Belle and Sebastian and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Teachers’ and “want to die knowing that I was never going to write something that good.” For this reason, his songs are “100 ugly babies that I can’t feed”, a product of the “insane religion” to which he prays.
Demonstrating his value as an arranger, the young New Yorker follows the path of Sufjan Stevens gradually building an entire ensemble of clarinets, horns and saxophones in what may be the most impressive song on his debut. Although Winter says otherwise, it is far from the work of “a beginner’s hands.”
Drinking Age
Winter wrote ‘Heavy Metal’ between the ages of 21 and 22, describing that time of his life as “a little blurry”: “I couldn’t say what I was addicted to and what I wasn’t, but I will say that Wellbutrin has been a fucking gift from God,” he declared at the time. ‘Drinking Age’ is a direct product of those turbulent times.
With just piano and voice, Winter delivers a devastating ‘coming of age’ story: “Today I met who I’m going to be from now on / And he’s a piece of shit.” It’s easily the most heartbreaking thing Cameron has done solo, but also a crowd favorite. In part, because she is the one who most freely shows her eccentricities on the microphone, with those final babblings.
$0
The longest song on ‘Heavy Metal’, clocking in at almost 7 minutes, it begins and ends with the most disconcerting moments of the entire project. In between, a peaceful and bucolic sea of keys. Distilled to the max, ‘$0’ puts all the attention on its simple and moving chorus, another example of Winter’s great lyrical originality: “You’re making me feel like a dollar in your hand / You’re making me feel like a zero-dollar man.”
‘$0’ ends, totally unexpectedly, with an epiphany: “God is real, God is real / I’m not kidding, God really exists.” When asked directly by The Guardian about the meaning of this part, Cameron took a “long pause” and after “almost a full minute” of silence, replied: “Just… The one above deserves a mention from time to time, doesn’t he?”
