Cameron Winter doesn’t smile when he sees me.<\/p>\n
It’s 8:03 on a Sunday morning in Silver Lake, a mile below the hillside house that Winter and his band, Geese, have been living in for the past week. Winter told me last night to meet him here, in a cavernous coffee shop whose high ceilings threaten to swallow up all conversation, at 8:30 a.m. I arrived early so that I could sit silently for a spell, to think about anything other than interviewing the 23-year-old songwriter who has handled almost every journalist he\u2019s spoken with during the last year the same amused way a cat might treat a toy stuffed with catnip, batting it around for his own entertainment. Winter loves jokes, fables, and other forms of conversational defense that quickly become offense. I didn\u2019t want to fret about my strategy, at least for a second.<\/p>\n
But when I arrive, Winter is already settled at the two-top closest to the door, wearing enormous black headphones and glaring at his laptop like it holds some sacred secret. I shuffle to his table and stand there until he notices. He pushes back one can, but his lumberjack jaw remains fixed. \u201cFind me whenever you\u2019re ready,\u201d I say. He makes eye contact, nods once appreciatively, slides the headphones into place, and gets back to work. Half an hour later, he appears with his book bag packed, its straps awkwardly tugging against his faded pink Elvis T-shirt. \u201cGood morning,\u201d he finally says, his voice a breaking baritone. \u201cLet\u2019s go outside.\u201d<\/p>\n
When we sit down, I ask Winter if he was finishing the song I\u2019d watched Geese start recording yesterday evening at the same downtown Los Angeles<\/a> studio, Putnam Hill, where they made the year\u2019s most thrilling rock record, Getting Killed<\/a>, back in January. They\u2019d cut six songs in six days and, as I left the studio, were starting the seventh. The new one had a name, \u201cLyin,\u201d but no firm lyrics or arrangement yet. He shakes his head. I later learn he was studying Japanese.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t written until last night, but it\u2019s sounding pretty good, actually. All these songs so far have gone pretty well, which is unusual for us,\u201d he says, leaning back and crossing his legs beneath basketball shorts. \u201cI\u2019m optimistic. There\u2019s still room to maneuver these songs the way I want them, still time.\u201d<\/p>\n In the last 12 months alone, Winter has started or finished four albums, two of which already feel like new landmarks. In December, he issued his first solo album, Heavy Metal<\/a>. Intentionally buried amid year-end release-schedule doldrums by his label because of low commercial expectations, it became a true artistic and commercial breakthrough. It’s one of the most staggering singer-songwriter records released this century, an album that Nick Cave rightfully called<\/a> \u201ca racked and wondrous thing.\u201d<\/p>\n The response to Heavy Metal steeled Winter to make Getting Killed with Geese, a New York crew of four equally eccentric high-school chums who are evolving at the sort of rapid rate that makes me resent not their youth and energy but the fact that they grew up able to stream the world\u2019s sounds and internalize them. Getting Killed rips open the carcasses of Radiohead, Pavement, and Swans and feasts there, looking up with a big, bloody grin. It’s a 46-minute torrent of exhilarating ideas and existential collapses, all bound by precision hooks and buoyed by massive rhythms. And as Winter sits in this coffee shop on August 17, six weeks before Getting Killed’s release in late September, Geese are five days away from finishing what may be its follow-up. Meanwhile, back home in New York, the sessions for Heavy Metal\u2019s successor are also well underway. Winter has Dropbox folders, a few people tell me, stuffed with a thousand unused songs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cameron Winter doesn’t smile when he sees me. It’s 8:03 on a Sunday morning in Silver Lake, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[2766,77,269,60816,4714,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-446031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-onecolumn","12":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115254098986935015","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}