Must Hear Tracks: “The Rolling Stones” “Love Takes Miles” “Nina + Field of Cops” “Drinking Age” “Cancer of the Skull” “Try as I May”
I almost wrote this album.
When I was 22 years old, I almost wrote this album.
I have friends who almost wrote this album. I followed people on Twitter, saw people on TV, watched people in interviews. I saw countless stand up comedians. Read timeless novels by brilliant authors. TED Talks. Podcasts. Vlogs. They all almost wrote this album, too.
The thing is, none of us wrote Heavy Metal. Cameron Winter did.
In fact, Cameron Winter is the only one who could’ve written Heavy Metal, because Heavy Metal is Cameron Winter. Just as much as his sandy brown hair, his nasally drawl that suggests anywhere but his native New York, and his enigmatic spaciness and wit, Heavy Metal is an extension of the man himself. These songs so completely map the inner-workings of their architect that you might start feeling vicariously through them. You might start thinking you really did scribble to words to “Love Takes Miles” on a napkin, that you really did spill your guts at the piano writing “Drinking Age,” that you really did exorcise “Nina + Field of Cops” from the darkest reaches of your psyche. You didn’t. Neither did I. But damn are we lucky that someone did.
We’re lucky because being 22 is a mess. It’s an age when we start to feel “all things spit toward and stutter at [us], closer and closer until the whole city falls over.” Awakening from the fever dream of adolescence into a very real world that we hoped would be kinder, less fucked. At 22, Cameron Winter navigates the psychological labyrinth of young adulthood like an acid-addled guru, fresh off a bad trip. Speaking like he’s seen some shit. Speaking like he knows some shit. You can hear it on “The Rolling Stones,” the opening track, where Winter introduces himself as a comically tragic figure. He’s destined to lead a “conga line” of chickens, using his “miracle drugs” to write a “miracle song,” even if he dies trying. From beginning to end, Heavy Metal slings paranoia, striking wisdom, and surreal humor in equal measure. The same way that our own traits aren’t pigeonholed into neat boxes, these three thematic threads are never confined to one song. Sometimes, they’re all squeezed into one line.
“The kitchen is lying” in “Nina + Field of Cops. “Everything is lying” in “Drinking Age.” Paranoia and anxiety lurk around any corner, and Cameron Winter breathes life into the borderline panic attacks/moments of clarity that pepper his early 20s. He gives these pivotal, but blurry, episodes a size and shape that the rest of us can touch. How many of us worry that nothing we see or hear is true? How many wrestle silently with the notion that we’re growing into a person we don’t admire? On “Drinking Age,” over icy piano chords, Winter sculpts that vague malaise into reality:
“today, I met who I’m gonna be
A glimpse of the future, snagged out of thin air and unfolded for all to see. When taken sarcastically, it’s a pragmatic and lighthearted take on growing up. When taken seriously, it’s a scathing self-criticism that reeks of despair. As a listener, it’s impossible to tell which tone Cameron Winter himself takes. It really doesn’t matter. Some days I chuckle at its blunt melodrama, some days it stops me in my tracks with its striking honesty. Every day it feels thoroughly and authentically human. Flawed but still here. Trudging forward despite overwhelming evidence that “technically there’s no point in making anything.”
Winter’s uncanny ability to convey the entire spectrum of his humanity with one line strikes again in “Try as I May,” a cursed tale of unfulfilled potential. It mourns a relationship between the jock with “rock throwing,” and “knuckle scraping ways,” and the high school sweetheart who’s “born to hold [his] cannonball brain like the lord holds the moon.” It mourns the relationship that opens the doors of intimacy between people who, in the hormonal throes of youth, feel suffocated by everything else. Like so many star-crossed teenage love stories, the doors are fated to slam closed as quickly as they opened. True to the song’s title, “Try as I May” is about being unable “to love what fits in my hand.” It all comes through in a single line, sung by an angelic choir of duplicated Cameron Winters:
like clean windows kill the birds”
This time it’s a glimpse of the past, presented in 4k, 20/20 hindsight. The sense of destiny, of instant destruction, the cacophony of imagery. It’s a capsule of coulda, woulda, shoulda. A bitter pill to swallow, for those of us who couldn’t size up the mysteries of young love when we were living through it. Cameron Winter is hardly the first person who couldn’t love the one right in front of him, but he’s one of the best at putting that hollow, sorrowful headspace into such vivid terms. Resigned to what happened, there’s nothing to do but look back on it and sigh.
The telescopic hindsight of “Try as I May” is raw. It lives and breathes and plods along its narrow path. But it isn’t the mythical “miracle song” that Winter prophesies in the opening track. The soulful, rollicking “Love Takes Miles” isn’t it, either. Nor is “Cancer of the Skull,” an “Astral Weeks” flavored tune that casts Cameron Winter as a blue collar craftsman, waking at dawn to toil away at his songs. He likens them to “a hundred ugly babies” that he “can’t feed.” Every song on Heavy Metal got fed, though. And as far as I’m concerned, “Nina + Field of Cops” really is Cameron Winter’s miracle song.
It is Ginsberg’s Howl sung over Ray Charles’s piano after 5 caffeine pills. The verses are perpetual, anxious, R&B breakdowns. The choruses snap the tension and replace it with immediate, gospel chorus catharsis:
and she’s seen into the mouth of what it is to be a mountain,
And she’s seen all the good pigeon-like people shot down,
And bones be kicked to powder,
but when you lie on the piano, I am reminded I am stupid,
and in every upstairs room, A tall and daughterless Russian,
is kicking robin’s eggs to powder,
While the music breaks a window”
What is ostensibly a song about how Winter’s adoration of Nina Simone keeps him sane ends up being a surrealist outpouring about the entirety of existence. The magnificent tragedy of humanity in 5 minutes and 52 seconds. Paranoia, wisdom, crooked smiles. All cranked up to 11, at the same time.
Apartment buildings full of “people who hate you and bite off fingers and eat from piles.” Names that are “doughnuts in the sea.” Unending, pointless death. The world’s meat-grinder, kicking bones into powder. A person, a family, a village. Poof. Gone. The crush of it all, squeezing you “until the whole city falls over.” In the midst of this “idiot festival,” Winter promises to “love whatever kicks [him] hardest in the mouth,” and “talk to every crowded room,” despite things being “sadder than the paper-flat puppy in your path, sadder than any featherless doer of math.” The chaos, the indescribable, helpless complicity, and the beauty nestled within it. “Nina + Field of Cops” strains to express how it feels to exist at 22: tossed in the deep end and expected to swim. Lyrically so broad in scope, yet so rich with fleshy, gritty, minute imagery, that I can summarize it by stringing lines together like a ransom note. This un-replicable magnum opus wraps its arms around everything. And, miraculous as it may seem, it manages to do everything justice.
Since its December 6th, 2024 release, Cameron Winter hasn’t played Heavy Metal with a full band once. Instead, he performs it alone on crowded New York streets. Or, more fittingly, on solo piano, in churches. The songs are well-suited for it. If you strip these compositions down to the studs, most of them are essentially gospel songs. Major chords, soulful vocals, declarations that “god is real.” Beyond structural similarities to gospel, the 10 songs that make up Heavy Metal have a cohesive spirituality that runs through them. They comprise “The Book of Cameron.” His two decades of accumulated experience, the fruits of his “pirate’s crazy eyed quest,” the depth of his point of view. In a sea of content-for-content’s-sake, Heavy Metal is not content. It is an album. A little trip into some fascinating stranger’s mind. A diary that we have the privilege of reading and relating to. It’s not something to consume mindlessly and on to the next one.
I’ve been an evangelist for Heavy Metal since my first listen. I shamelessly plug it to every music-lover that I know. It spreads the old fashioned way, through word of mouth. My friend recommended it to me, and I turned around and recommended it to my friends. One said he felt like crying 10 seconds into hearing “Love Takes Miles” for the first time. Another said he can’t listen to it anymore because it’s “too visceral.” YouTube comment sections for any Cameron Winter track are the same way. Talk of revelatory lyrics, talk of transcendent understanding of the world, talk of supernatural ability. Something in his words make them feel like our own. We all almost wrote Heavy Metal. But we didn’t. We’re just converts. Chickens in the conga line that’s growing ever longer. For Cameron Winter, someone so capable of stitching his own idiosyncrasies together without losing resonance, capable of transforming the blur of “20-something” into striking, impressionistic poetry, I’ll happily dance in the line.
Sources: album art, Genius Lyrics, Cameron Winter’s Youtube page, excellent Line of Best Fit interview / article,
The Healthy Alternative 
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