Paul Thomas Anderson, the Oscar-winning director for Best Director and Best Picture for There Will Be Blood, has already announced his next film: Cameron Winter, performing live at Carnegie Hall. The Geese vocalist solidified last December as one of the youngest artists in history to sell out the famed New York venue, joining a roll call that includes Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie. What does Paul Thomas Anderson see in Cameron Winter? The future.
Anderson isn’t the only renowned filmmaker drawn to Winter’s compositions, as Benny Safdie has also helped coproduce the movie. Live at Carnegie Hall will be available on platforms starting October 9, while tickets for the feature go on sale September 17. It remains to be seen whether a Spanish distributor will pick it up for release in our country.
What better moment than this to recommend five essential tracks to begin exploring Cameron Winter’s discography, which so far includes his debut Heavy Metal and two additional singles. If you don’t like Geese, don’t worry. This has nothing to do with them.
The Rolling Stones
Cameron Winter was clear that he had to distance himself as much as possible from anything that could sonicly echo Geese. So, the opening track of his debut immediately feels like something out of Van Morrison’s or Leonard Cohen’s songbook, while the 24-year-old artist makes his aim obvious in the first two lines: Heavy Metal is about the pain of creation: “I’ll keep breaking cups until my left hand looks bad / Until my miraculous drugs write the miraculous song.”
On one hand, Winter is thrilled to hold “the bass lines of the future,” but on the other, he understands that all his ambition might drift toward self-destruction. He is fatally compared to Brian Jones, who died in his pool weeks after being expelled from his band: “Like Brian Jones, I was born to swim / Toward last month / Toward the Rolling Stones / Toward us / Swimming alone.”
Love Takes Miles / Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)
Beyond the latent pain and despair found in most of his tracks, Cameron Winter also has powerful love songs in his repertoire. They’re also the catchiest. “Love Takes Miles” was named Pitchfork’s best song of 2025, despite having been released in 2024, and “Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)” lands even more immediately than the former.
Aided by the pop-forward melodies and keyboard textures of Heavy Metal, this track draws inspiration from the Odyssean moment when Nausicaä encounters the hero at his lowest and tends to him, essentially in exchange for nothing, to tell a story about unconditional, pure love, delivered with Winter’s finest falsetto: “I am blind and you are ugly / It’s so easy to love you.” Nolan forgot to adapt this part.
Cancer of the Skull
Cameron Winter cannot stop creating, and it sometimes drives him to the brink. His process involved waking up, stepping into the producer Loren Humphrey’s garden, listening to Belle and Sebastian and Leonard Cohen’s “Teachers,” and feeling as if he might die for knowing he would never write something this good. Hence, his songs are “100 ugly babies I can’t feed,” the product of the “demented religion” he worships.
Proving his prowess as an arranger, the young New Yorker follows in the footsteps of Sufjan Stevens, gradually assembling a full orchestra of clarinets, horns, and saxophones into what could be the most formidable track on his debut. Even if Winter says otherwise, it’s far from the work of “beginner’s hands.”
Drinking Age
Winter wrote Heavy Metal between the ages of 21 and 22, describing that period as “a little hazy”: “I wouldn’t know what I was addicted to and what I wasn’t, but I will say that Wellbutrin was a damn gift from God,” he recalled at the time. “Drinking Age” is a direct offspring of those turbulent years.
With only piano and voice, Winter delivers a devastating coming-of-age narrative: “Today I’ve met who I will be from here on out / And he’s a piece of shit.” It’s easily the bleakest thing he’s done solo, yet also one of the audience’s favorites. Partly because it’s the track that most freely showcases his eccentricities on the mic, with those final stumbles.
$0
The longest track on Heavy Metal, clocking in at nearly seven minutes, opens and closes with the most disorienting moments of the project. In between lies a serene and bucolic sea of keys. Scrupulously distilled, “$0” foregrounds a simple, moving chorus, another testament to Winter’s distinctive lyrical imagination: “You’re making me feel like a dollar in your hand / You’re making me feel like a man of zero dollars.”
$0 ends, completely unexpectedly, with an epiphany: “God is real, God is real / I’m not kidding, God truly exists.” When The Guardian directly asked him about the meaning of this line, Cameron paused for a long moment and, after “almost a full minute” of silence, replied: “Simply… The man upstairs deserves a mention from time to time, doesn’t he?”
