Cameron Winter's Sense of Humor

One day last summer I was sitting on an alleyway loading dock downtown eating a Jack Links beef stick with a 7/11 Slurpee when I was suddenly leveled by a wave of emotion that rose up out of nothing. It had been a normal, happy day until that moment. I’d just been to the Art Institute and I was hungry and a ways from home, so I got a snack and sat down to eat it, and I kept my headphones on so I’d feel less self-conscious. And then, out of nowhere, it was like everything I’d ever felt just hit me and I thought for some reason of my Grandma on my mom’s side asking how my other grandmother was doing years after my parents had split, and how they had been friends on opposite sides of the family but were themselves separated by the separation of my parents, and I thought about my whole family and my childhood and remembered things I’d forgotten since the moment they happened. Within ten seconds I was starting to cry and a truck was pulling up to the loading dock, so I finished the beef stick as fast as I could and choked, and when I leaned down to cough there were wet tears falling off my face. It wasn’t until hours later, at home, when I realized I’d left the Slurpee sitting there on the railing. 

This blog is about Geese, and their frontman Cameron Winter. So many UIC Radio bloggers have already written great things about these guys, and I don’t have a whole lot to add. But I just wanted to write something in appreciation for the humor in their music. 

Photo credit: Adam Powell

Last year, when Getting Killed catapulted the band into the mainstream, many listeners were introduced to Geese through the album’s opening track, “Trinidad”. This song is sort of vague, and the lyrics have something to do with frustration. But it’s probably best known by its chorus, wherein Winter screams, There’s a bomb in my car! It’s ridiculous, but it’s also kind of a good introduction to the absurdly heightened statements of emotion to be found throughout the album.

Whether it’s the bizarre warble of the vocals, or the extreme passion with lyrics like, “I’m taking off my pants/ I’m getting out of this gum ball machine” are delivered, there is something very goofy about Getting Killed. It’s clear that this band isn’t taking itself too seriously. But what’s astonishing is the deep emotional resonance that the music carries alongside the humor. 

Cameron Winter’s solo album, Heavy Metal, uses humor in the same way. Sometimes the comedy has a tragic edge. On “The Rolling Stones” Winter sings, “Like Brian Jones, I was born to swim”. Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, was famously found dead aged twenty-seven at the bottom of a swimming pool. The parallel to these lines is even more ridiculous– “I was born to dance with a candy gun towards the president’s ass”. On the climactic moment of “Nausicaӓ (Love Will Be Revealed)", Winter blind, “I am blind, and you are ugly/ It’s so easy to want you”. Rarely does a song make me laugh (honestly, I don’t usually want a song to make me laugh), but Winter’s lyrics always get me in the most expected moments.

The album’s strangest and most stunning song (my personal favorite), “Nina + Field of Cops” shares this absurd sense of humor. The lyrics to this track are equal parts gorgeous and incomprehensible, and altogether it feels like the song communicates something that couldn’t be expressed any other way. But, in the middle of all these sheets of beautifully hallucinatory poetry, Winter spits out abrupt lines like, “I’ll love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth, I’m gonna eat my keys”, which always catches me off guard. 

These are jokes, but they’re never just jokes. All of these lines point to a sort of hopeless, doomed feeling, which also gives this music its emotional power. There’s pain in being human, and as much as it might hurt, it might also be pretty funny if you just stepped away from it a little.

A lot of times, when you’re feeling something very strong, very passionate, it can feel like you’re living with a very somber, serious aura. I think that some artists get caught up in this too and imagine themselves having felt something the way people feel in movies, poetically framed and beautiful in perfect lighting. But, in reality, it’s usually just a little sillier than that. Ask anybody who wrote poetry in middle school. You write because it feels like the world is ending, and, more often than not, you just end up laughing at it just a few years later. 

While some people might be put off by the goofiness of Cameron Winter’s stuff, it’s exactly what draws me in the most. In his lyrics, humor is not there to dull the pain of the darker sentiments– it’s there because humor is part of it all, part of the whole thing that is being a person. Part of what makes Geese and Mr. Winter’s music so powerful is that it does not stoicise or over-aestheticize emotion. The feelings that drive these tracks are presented without any more dignity than a struggling, earnest, and tired person really has. In the words of the man himself, these songs are meant for bad singers.