I'm Not Here: Cameron Winter And The Art Of Songwriting

Introduction:

In late 2024, I was reeling from a lot of things that had happened in my personal life that had made my will to live shake in it’s shallow grave, the stink still prevalent since I forgot to bury it and left it decomposing in the morgue of my shattered hopes. The world was not horrible, for it never has been, but it certainly was a mess and I did not really know what was happening or where I was going. Come December, I had set in motion unwittingly a series of events that would make the next year of my life a waking nightmare of stress so all-encompassing I could not breathe, of hate towards everything and especially towards myself and the want to simply no longer exist prevalent as always.

At around this same time, December 6th, the frontman of the band Geese, a band I had heard of before but had avoided on account of the equivalence people had drawn towards old school rock outfits (I had already grown out of my classic rock phase by then but was still yet ignorant and unwilling to go out of my boundaries more often than not), and I did not realise it but the love of life had been put into song for me and in around a year I would be ready to take it in. That frontman was Cameron Winter, the songwriter of this generation and a musical voice who has an uncanny ability to articulate many of my deepest thoughts and emotions whilst barely trying.

Heavy Metal, the album, is a 40 minute folk/singer-songwriter affair, borrowing very heavily from a number of places, primarily the influence of soul, the Greenwich Village folk revival scene of the 60s and the orators thereof (Dylan and Cohen and the like) and a strange sort of avant-garde inclination in terms of vocalisation and certain aspects of the instrumentation analogous to the work of Tim Buckley, a personal favourite musician of mine himself.. But what Cameron does is he combines all these influences into this final product, Heavy Metal, an album that siphons the emotionality and the oddball expression and the depth of feeling inside every man and woman on this earth and expresses outwards through the medium of this young man, longing and love and not wanting to be here and art all meld as though one had just dumped a dozen paint buckets onto a blank canvas, but somehow the result was the most beautiful painting you’d ever seen. Little else really compares to the breadth of feeling that Cameron conjures on this record. Everything coalesces into a tapestry of gorgeous melodies that trip over one another, formless form, like the waves moving according to the order of chaos, like entropy had found it’s favourite composer.

I will be taking apart every song on this record and will attempt to illuminate the nature of the sacred essence that this man taps into. It will not be enough to really elaborate on how much I truly adore this album but an attempt is deserved and worthy of such a record.

The Songs:

The Rolling Stones:

I feel as though an analysis moving through the record’s tracklist works best, so we shall start with the album opener.

The Rolling Stones is of course named after the titular band, one of the most famous and influential rock bands in the history of the genre and an act who really represented their period in a myriad of their ways, from the flaunting decadence to the self-destruction emblematic in the death of Brian Jones. Like Brian Jones, Cameron Winter sees himself falling down, wants to make the same sort of impact that that band did, is willing to break cups until his left hand looks wrong but the melancholy of the situation is overwhelming and he keeps thinking of the past and a “you” he mentions again and again.

The song starts off and continues with a gorgeous simple acoustic guitar line that feels appropriately rusty and worthy of the lonesome theme underpinning the song. A journey without a clear end, guided onwards towards God only knows what. There is a cycle of destruction prevalent, the narrator wants to effectively reach the apotheosis of his own self but he can’t through these methods, because it’s all a distraction at the end of the day. Alas, like Hinckley Jr. who tried to shoot Reagan and like Brian Jones, he thinks that the end is nigh for him.

It highlights an incredibly consistent part of the Cameron Winter songwriting strategy as well: the absurdity. “Until the conga line behind me is a thousand chickens long” is one of those lines that means absolute nonsense and absolutely everything all at once, it reminds me a lot of what he says on the unreleased song LSD (one of his best, by the way): “we were born to be hairs on the ass of a very busy man.” He manages to somehow mix tauhat absurdity in the choice of words as well as in the strange ribbit voice he has that somehow makes the nonsense sound like the wise words of a preacher or the pontifications of a philosopher. Between the beautiful guitar and the horns and the lyrics, it really does feel like a song about tumbling down, perfectly emblematic of everything the record is about.

Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed):

Nausicaä is the famous woman from the Odyssey who Odysseus himself finds as an aid to allow him to return to his homeland. She is the only woman of her crop who found him naked and terrifying but was not scared, and instead took him on as a friend.

She is the representation of unconditional platonic love, a central theme of the entire album being the search for such a thing. She is a pure thing, though the narrator finds her ugly (immediately after stating his blindness, ironically) there is something inherently attractive to the prospect. He wants to know how it feels. It reveals something rather apparent, this album flips around between song moods very often and Nausicaä is the first real life-affirming song of the record to contrast the moodiness of The Rolling Stones. It’s also the one with the most influence from soul, a wonderful bass line and horns coming in and out, plus a guttural scream towards the end as he keeps shouting out her name over and over.

Nausicaä is truthfully a rather simple song in the context of the record despite being one of the best, because the focus lies in the pure joy of the instrumentation and how it is guaranteed to uplift a person’s day.

Love Takes Miles:

So.. this is the one.

I’ve listened to Love Takes Miles more than most artists I’ve ever listened to. It is well and truly the monumental pop song of the record, the one you’ll be singing to the grave, the one that will illuminate every dark night and fill every pit of the soul, the stench of corpses replaced with the flower perfume of the love that takes miles and miles and miles, that takes years..

Words fail the greatest of songs. And Love Takes Miles is really not a very difficult song to appreciate and understand, it’s a 3 minute pop song with a relatively conventional structure and it has some of Cameron’s most conventional, lyrical singing on the album, it is very much supposed to be the radio hit.. And it’s so, so good for it.

Love Takes Miles deserves to enter the public consciousness and I hope that in some decades’ time, people recognise it for being one of the most fantastic things ever made. Heavy Metal in general well and truly is a marvel to behold, it is a masterclass in folk instrumentation and in writing honest songs, but Love Takes Miles taps into something primordial, it is the synthesis of joy itself, the type of song you’ll keep dancing to and you’ll wish you could dance to when your body won’t let you, the type of song that makes you wonder how the hell the world existed before it did, the type of song that has the spirit of that creative intelligence that brought about all that there is and ever will be in it’s midst.

In Sun Kil Moon’s Duk Koo Kim off the similarly incredible album Ghosts Of The Great Highway (funnily enough an influence on Cameron) Mark Kozelek sings of the angel that comes about and saves him from dying in the blood-soaked battle field of his dream.. And with this song, Cameron Winter becomes an angel, all on his own, the angel that transforms dreams and hopes into concrete reality, lighting the soul of the cursed and bringing even further joy to the child within all of us. Hyperbole this is not; he enters a very specific canon of musicians for me with this song, Springsteen, Bowie, James Murphy, ones who could just as he could put song to hope, the song of the life that runs through us. Cameron knows the reason and he’s seen into the mouth of what it is to be a mountain.

This is what it is to be a mountain.

Drinking Age:

So it seems after the monumental earth-shaking love of Love Takes Miles, Cameron saw the need to immediately bring the listener down to earth and he accomplishes this and then some with Drinking Age, a song whose name implies what it’s about just as much as the melancholy tone of the downtrodden piano, just as his singing (which becomes exceptionally froggy and strange on this one, and all the better) and just as the words. “Today, I met who I’m gonna be from now on.. And he’s a piece of shit,” is a lyric for the ages, the self-loathing emanating from it one of a kind.

This song is about a recovering alcoholic, so it seems, and an alcoholic coming to terms with his own self-hatred, that he is just this way, that this is who he’s gonna be for the rest of his life, a failure. It is well and truly dark and captivating, probably the lowest point the entire album gets to when it comes to being depressive besides maybe the first half of $0. This is when the strange avant-folk textures come into play as well, the horns coating the piano playing and Winter’s singing with a sort of haze, one that feels positively noir and appropriate for a song so dour and sour as this. This was the song he performed on Jimmy Kimmel, and that version is about as good as the studio version and the depths of despair he somehow manages to get to are astounding, the sounds he makes towards the end not coming off goofy but instead the result of a tremendous amount of pain that cannot come out any other way than this garbled mess, perhaps the very sonification of alcoholism.

Cancer Of The Skull:

It picks up after that, and this is the first song of the album that introduces the theme of artistic insecurity that later on gets fleshed out just as much in Nina + Field Of Cops. He’s a heavy metal man, he’s an 80s man, and of course this song brings about a very interesting question: why is this album called Heavy Metal?

Of course, it’s supposed to be an ironic thing, on a meta scale, such that the listener ought to go in without expectations. I think the point is that heavy metal functions for the metalhead in such a way, as all music does, that it siphons his love of his love and his courage into the medium of riffs and breakdowns. Cameron internalises these things, the conflicts innate to his songs are not as massive sounding as the ones in that genre, but they are no less consequential or human. Heavy metal is the most natural distillation of a certain attribute of music, the ability to connect and allow the listener to cope with it’s use.

Heavy Metal, the album, certainly functions in that way, but through a subtle lens. Cancer Of The Skull illuminates one of the central conflicts as was said earlier, artistic insecurity, which probably also ties into the metal motif; it is a genre of great showcases, of virtuosity and who can shred the hardest and perhaps in a similar sense the heavy metal man inside views himself in opposition to the whims of the artistic inhibition inside, that it calls to him to make the music he needs to. That is what the cancer is, and the skull is a metaphor for the creative capacity of the artist.

Try As I May:

The forever conflict of hitting your head against the wall in life is elaborated upon in a phrase that can perhaps epitomise the human condition itself: “Try as I may to love what fits in my hand, I don’t.”

There is someone that the narrator is clinging to who he refers to as the wall, someone who was supposed to watch his private ceremonies, to be there for him always, but one he could never break through to himself. Try as he did, he could never seduce that wall, and in the wall lies a central metaphor for the sisyphean climb upwards, the inability to do as Meursault does, accept the benign indifference of the universe.

No, we are creatures of desire and clinging to those we care for, we fight for them and we feel more pathetic for it, and that is the very beauty of being human, that we continuously do that over and over again despite it not being beneficial and despite the fact that other people are every bit as fallible and dangerous and scary as we are. This song sounds like it’s cracked, like the rust set in but not so much that the entire structure is falling apart.

One could probably tie together a narrative through all these songs, but I really think that would be missing the point even if there is most definitely a lot of thematic cohesion and callbacks across the songs, rather, it’s snapshots into essential parts of being all of us feel and most people have gone through the experience of loving someone who does not love them back, or who takes and uses their generosity for themselves without any sort of remorse. It reminds me of a specific passage from Søren Kierkegaard:

“I have never wished to do anyone an injustice, but I have always made it appear as if anyone who came close to me would be wronged and injured. Then when I hear others praised for their faithfulness, their integrity, I laugh, for I despise people, and I take my revenge.”

Most of us have probably known someone like this.. I would argue that the heavy metal man at his core is sort of the antithesis, that, perhaps on some level, it is an overman ideal to trip around and hurt as much as he does, to feel like a dollar in everyone’s hand because the alternative is to feel nothing at all, and how sad would that be?

We're Thinking The Same Thing:

Probably the weakest song on the album but it serves a useful transitional purpose from that Try As I may dejection to the incoming power of the two 5 and 6 minute songs at the end of the record that are titanic and breaking apart at the very seams. It continues that narrative from the last song of not being able to make sense of your relationship with someone and stumbling onwards, but it is a bit more hopeful and a lot less pained, for they are on this one thinking the same thing.

Nina + Field Of Cops:

One of the two absolutely titanic tracks left for the end of the record, this one sounds like a post-rock crescendo that refuses to resolve itself, like the stuttering sounds of Try As I May caved in and what’s left in it’s wake is a monster of feeling, waves on waves of piano notes and horns that refuse to take any sort of peace as Cameron delivers perhaps his greatest lyrical performance in terms of sheer imagery. It is very akin to the Dylan epics of old in that he brings out incredible vague bizarre metaphors (like the daughterless Russian or the wild horses) and it’s a contradictory mess of anxiety and insecurity all centered around the admiration of the power of the artist, personified in Nina.

One of the two absolutely titanic tracks left for the end of the record, this one sounds like a post-rock crescendo that refuses to resolve itself, like the stuttering sounds of Try As I May caved in and what’s left in it’s wake is a monster of feeling, waves on waves of piano notes and horns that refuse to take any sort of peace as Cameron delivers perhaps his greatest lyrical performance in terms of sheer imagery. It is very akin to the Dylan epics of old in that he brings out incredible vague bizarre metaphors (like the daughterless Russian or the wild horses) and it’s a contradictory mess of anxiety and insecurity all centered around the admiration of the power of the artist, personified in Nina.

Nina is to my mind Nina Simone. If you’ve heard Nina Simone then you understand exactly why it’s her of all people that Cameron compares himself to, sees the weakness in himself in comparison to, feels stupid in the wake of her piano. The good people, us, those who listen to music and find themselves in it, are perpetually destroyed by their life again and again, the radiance snuffed from their corpus, the willingness to go on hanging on by a thread. But she is the mountain who saves them again and again.

A ways into the song he drops one of my favourite lines of the album, “sunburnt to shit in the rain.” There’s something incredibly striking about the inherent oxymoronic quality that such a line holds and it’s indicative of the contradictions present within the heart of this record. There is weakness in all of us but we find ourselves, and later on, God, inside the songs, illuminated we are by the power of song.

The truth of the matter is that Nina Simone is not singular in being a mountain, neither is Tim Buckley from whom the very expression of being a mountain for someone might’ve been derived. Cameron himself is a mountain to many, and within art lies the ability to become a mountain for any who requires one, for they find reflected in the abstract power of the feeling of others and the beauty of their souls the warmth required to keep waking up. There is a working class solidarity to the musical experience and to the best music, that we’re all in this together, that we’re all dollars in the hand of lady fate and she has a mean smirk on her face, but she has a good side to her too. It’s that thing you find in Love Takes Miles reflected back but not so purely, instead, you get a glimpse into the vat of despair, the boiling pot from which the Achillean soul may come out, and no one is really Achilles, but that doesn’t matter, and no one is really Nina Simone, but it’s good enough. In her version of Wild Is The Wind, Nina implores her lover to love her, to say that they do, and that can apply to every listener of the music that they love. Nina Simone becomes titanic, and so does Cameron Winter, and so does every other artists because art is a theology and melody is the greatest of all scripture.

$0:

I feel that this is one of the great musical accomplishments of this decade, up there with Geordie’s The Magician as far as the power of it is concerned. 6 minutes, starting with him gurgling oddly, and then it transforms into the most honest display of dissociative depression I’ve seen in music.

It starts off with just the somber piano, the feeling of being entirely alone in the world exemplified in the sound, miasmas of melancholy flooding out into the ears. He croons on about how Nina knows why, the reason for life in her music, and the thing about being in the water, like you’re drowning, holding hands with the one thing that keeps you floating, Nina herself, because you do love her.

And man.. Few things really describe the awe-inspiring power of music sometimes well, and it feels better to just diverge into speaking about how it makes you feel as opposed to the technical details.. And this is one of those times.

GOD IS REAL GOD IS REAL I’M NOT KIDDING GOD IS ACTUALLY REAL I’M NOT KIDDING THIS TIME I THINK GOD IS ACTUALLY FOR REAL GOD IS REAL GOD IS REAL GOD IS ACTUALLY REAL GOD IS REAL I WOULDN’T JOKE ABOUT THIS I’M NOT KIDDING THIS TIME

The spontaneity of how that comes out. I remember, when I watched The Good, The Bad And The Ugly for the first time, and I got to the end of the movie. The ecstasy of gold is overwhelming, and then the three main characters are in one place, and they have a three-sided stand-off, a triello, and Ennio’s music soars high above the very throne of God on the seventh heaven, and I remember thinking to myself that God has to be real. There is no other option in such a scenario besides God being real.

I’m not a conventionally religious person, quite the opposite in fact, but I do feel the weight of that which flows through all things passing through me, that Percy Shelley awful power, that intellectual beauty.

I was in the shade of a beautiful tree earlier today, the sun shining high above, the cold was irritating and I was sick and yet I could still see God in the soft movement of the leaves, and in that he lies with those who have little else. The spiritual is natural and we are all under the watchful eye of creation itself, the universe perpetually perceiving itself. What is there to do other than to make music, to live and love and laugh. It’s not just Nina that knows why, it’s Cameron and it’s anyone who really understands the core of what art is about.

God only comes to the narrator after he was in the water and that’s how it always goes. The transformation of that dissociation, the feeling of not being here, into an awareness so substantially greater than that of anyone around, an ecstasy so honest and thorough that it comes off clumsy, like he’d just found the cure to despair itself but the recipe is in a language he can’t speak. Truth of the matter is, that’s all God ever is to anyone, and that’s good enough to keep going, to forever repeat the cycle of $0, from zero dollar man to the servant of that which is greater, that aforementioned theology.

Can't Keep Anything:

The last song! Can’t Keep Anything is a well-needed break from the size of the lat two songs, something that allows for the listener to catch their breath at the end of the madness. Reckoning with the consequence of creating something as massive as this record, this song provides a somewhat grim look into the artistic death, that which is reflected in the David Bowie reference towards the end, of his last song.

We can’t keep anything in life because life itself won’t keep us, but keeping being important is a presumption we people make out of our inability to reconcile nonexistence or mortality, to never be able to reached that promised land Bruce Springsteen would always sing about. Alas, the very same thing happens with this song as does with the rest of the record, back at the listener is reflected the comfort of the universality of the terror of not knowing what this world is about and not knowing where you’re going, and yes, we will feel that we can’t give everything away, but that’s not true. In death, life begins, and in life death begins, and we die a thousand deaths, every infinitesimally short moment of an infinite amount of moments that a Zeno paradox shows, and such is the way of being. I am not inclined to believe in the impossibility of change, but there is most definitely a light in the chance we have to make of ourselves a heavy metal man, reminiscent of the overman as I stated earlier. Apotheosis is the very search for apotheosis, and to be a heavy metal man is to listen to heavy metal.

Conclusion:

Heavy Metal is in my opinion the album of the decade, nay, the millennium and Cameron Winter barring anything unforeseen will probably come to be seen as a voice of this generation as he should be, a man whose ability to express the depths of the despair of the modern experience is a sort of reactionary-modern-romanticism, not in any sort of rejection of what it is to be alive in these times but in that we still have it in ourselves to find an ideal that we perhaps see reflected in times prior. We are still every bit as much able to be stupid, it’s unavoidable, but to be stupid is to be a genius. Holy the hideous stupid human angels we are.

Give Heavy Metal a listen. If you’ve listened before, do it again! It’s as good as you remember, if not better. I really love this album and it has become such an intrinsic part of me that I struggle to believe I existed before it did, but now that it is, I will never forget to keep striving to be the heavy metal man, for that takes miles and it takes years.