When an album bears Carnegie Hall in its title, you naturally think of giants such as Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Neil Young, Bill Withers. You can now add Cameron Winter to that revered company. In 2025, the 23-year-old Geese frontman became the youngest artist since Bob Dylan in 1963 to headline the legendary New York venue. Live At Carnegie Hall makes it immediately obvious why. Winter is a generational talent. He holds deep respect for the icons who walked the stage before him, but carries enough irreverence and wild spark to make him one of the most singular voices working in rock music today.
While Winter has released three acclaimed records with Geese (most recently last year’s superb Getting Killed), 2024’s sublime Heavy Metal is the only studio album to his name as a solo artist. As such, seven of Heavy Metal’s ten tracks appear in this 12-song set list. Despite the immediate familiarity with much of the set list, these spellbinding performances are wildly unpredictable, and at their very best are hallucinatory, magical songs that are nothing short of astonishing.
Where critics once drew comparisons to Rufus Wainwright, Thom Yorke, or Julian Casablancas, the truest likeness here is Bob Dylan’s revelatory mid-60s shows, specifically Live 1964 at Philharmonic Hall and the acoustic sets from his legendary 1966 world tour. Like the young Dylan, Winter strips everything down to the bare essentials, just the man and his piano. Stripped back, these songs take on a vivid, intense life of their own, propelled by stream-of-consciousness lyrics and off-kilter vocal inflections that push the tracks into thrilling new territory.
Heavy Metal standout "Love Takes Miles" is an immediate highlight, its nakedly pop-inflected melodies sound magnificent here, balancing romantic longing with sharp, humorous irreverence. Elsewhere, the back-to-back free-form epics "Nina + Field of Cops" and "$0" reach heights of pure, unfiltered emotion, as do brilliant renditions of "Cancer of the Skull" and "Drinking Age".
For dedicated fans, the biggest draws will be performances of the deep-cut early tracks "Vines" and "Take It With You" that close out the set, alongside two as-yet unreleased gems, "It All Fell in the River" and "If You Turn Back Now". The latter provides all the evidence you need of Winter’s preternatural talent, surely ratcheting up the hype for his next solo record.
Like Dylan, or his 60s contemporaries Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison in their early prime, Winter possesses that untrainable ability to transfix a room through minimal instrumentation and the romance of pure, psychedelic poetry. His lyrics may tend to lean toward the dark, painful, and brutal, but there is undeniable beauty in these raw, earthy declarations. Outstanding.
Live At Carnegie Hall is out now on vinyl & CD
Live At Carnegie Hall is out now on vinyl & CD
