Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall: bare emotion from the voice of a generation

It starts with a bit of minimalist boogie-woogie, then dances weightlessly up the range of the keyboard, Liberace-style, then comes to rest on a single repeated high note. But you can’t really call it rest, the way Cameron Winter stabs the note again and again with fingers on both hands, first impassioned and then playful and then like he is telling us to go fuck ourselves.

This is “The Rolling Stones”, the first song on Heavy Metal, the album that turned Winter within a year from a talented indie-rock bandleader in a city full of them to the kind of performer who sells out Carnegie Hall as a matter of course. It’s possible to forget that the song is still happening, he stabs for that long before bringing us back to the final verse, the one where he stands together with a lover, watching pianos fall from the sky, soon to be crushed under their weight. 

During the lighthearted provocation of the piano stabbing, like the half-assed mime performance he gives in lieu of stage banter before the song begins, Winter seems like a kid. He is a kid, pretty much: 23 years old and anointed rather quickly as a defining voice of his generation. After the show, a friend half-jokingly remarks on the aptness of a Gen Z lodestar whose only intimacy is with a camera that appears from a stage door a few songs later, during a frenzied rendition of “Nina + Field Of Cops”, a stream-of-consciousness paean to the power of art that’s also a puckishly anti-authoritarian protest song.

The camera comes swooping out and gets right up in Winter’s face while he sings and plays furious piano, a face that the audience hardly glimpses, pointed as it is squarely at the stage’s huge and gilded back wall. There are camera people everywhere: behind the seats, running up and down the aisles, even filming you as you pick up your tickets. There’s a rumour that Paul Thomas Anderson is in the house to film Winter’s valedictory hometown show. And sure enough, when the camera comes onstage during “Nina + Field Of Cops”, there is the most audacious American filmmaker of our era staring down the lens. 

If one were inclined to cynicism about the hasty coronation of this young songwriter, this show at Carnegie Hall – and the high-profile concert film that seems to be on the way – might provide vindication of one’s doubt. OK, the kids love him, but surely he doesn’t already deserve all this? But he really does. He performs alone at the piano, stripping away the layered vocals and magpie instrumental arrangements of Heavy Metal, communicating bare emotion through his singing even when his lyrics offer surreal feints and artful obfuscations. Who else could bring you nearly to tears with the phrase “piece of shit”?

His voice has a hefty presence in the room that doesn’t always translate on record, and he wields it with astonishing control, especially in his delicate high register. At times, he seems to be actively resisting the pure beauty latent in his own music, scuffing it up with a mumbled word here or a discomfiting line there, as if revealing it in full would be somehow dishonest, too sweet.

Winter peppers his set with new material, including “If You Turn Back Now” and “Take It With You”, two painfully direct songs of heartbreak that ditch the dream imagery in favour of keepsakes left on kitchen windows and entreaties to leave or to stay. It’s a rare feeling, knowing that you’re hearing a future classic for the first time. The next album may well be better than the first.

Winter leaves the stage after “Take It With You” and we cheer for so long awaiting his return that it begins to feel like a joke, like the high note in “The Rolling Stones”. A camera at the front of the stage points eerily out at us. The minutes drag on and the claps come together by that magic of rock’n’roll concerts into a single insistent pulse, then dissipate again.

The lights go down, then came back up, and still he does not return. The mood threatens to turn from euphoria to exasperation. Who does this kid think he is? Then, just as the first attendees began to leave their seats, there he is, with one more song to send us off into the cold New York City night. 

SET LIST
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*
ENCORE
Vines*

* = new/unreleased song, using the titles by which they are commonly referred to online