I hadn’t heard of Geese. I hadn’t heard of Cameron Winter. They have millions of views on all the places that count that sort of thing but I hadn’t heard of them.
Bandcamp, I learned last night, has this thing where you can see who else bought an album. It says “in 109 other collections” or something. I looked in to see who else owned Conor Oberst’s self-titled record on Bandcamp as that seemed like a reasonable indicator of good taste. A: They use Bandcamp. That’s a win. B: They bought Conor’s album there.
This person had so many other incredible albums and artists I already loved. Lucy Dacus, M Ward, Cat Power, Dinosaur Jr, etc. and also Cameron Winter with album art that looked like what the youths are doing these days. “Heavy Metal” , I clicked in and dear fucking GOD.
I heard a voice doing what I always thought I could do but never really could. I heard an all-in voice not giving a fuck. I don’t know his influences – I expected they are better than my influences and would probably provide some insight into how a person gets the wherewithal to let this sound out of our mouths on purpose over and over. But I heard it and thought something like: here we are, now we’ve found it.
I think about the tip of a wave. Not the crest but the break, and not just the break but the very furthest out droplets of water. That’s where I experience Cameron Winter (with the other members of Geese right there around him). It’s been some twenty years that I feel like I’ve seen this wave coming but never knew how to find it, never knew what it would sound like exactly, never knew who would do it and when. And then just like that, here it was, right in front of me. All the forces of nature and culture and pressures waiting for the one speck of sand to land just right into the mouth of a clam made of circumstance and dumb luck. That’s Geese. Just the stupid luck of having enough friends and enough parents and enough access and enough temperament and enough vocal range and appetite to try and try and try and poof. We get Cameron Winter and subsequently Geese (since we are all people first before we are groups-of-people).
Usually when I listen to music, up until today, I’d want to go make my own music. Good music has almost always made me want to make good music, maybe even better music. I’d hear someone say something and a pit of angst in me would remember all the things I have been meaning to say but hadn’t found a way to say yet – and so I’d want to go make music. Or, make something at least. At least a poem. Maybe it’d end up just piano instrumentation. But it’s been almost always I feel it: incredible music motivating me to take it in and try again.
But yesterday I didn’t feel that. The canary choked and I didn’t leave the coal. I was just there listening. I wasn’t feeling especially seen even or especially heard. I didn’t feel like I was particularly related to anything being said or expressed in the musicality of it. I was just, somehow, completely there.
Thank god I didn’t know yet how popular the band was becoming or I’d have probably moved right on. But for a little while there I couldn’t tell who all liked them, I didn’t care. It was just me and them and nothing in me wanted to leave to try again. To try saying what I had to say again. It was like I realized there it was okay to just enjoy the music and nothing else. Maybe normal people feel this way all of the time but I don’t. Music makes me want to speak and the best music makes me feel like I’ve already spoken. But somehow, here, I didn’t feel any of that.
It was 4 am now (this all started maybe 11 pm or so). I’d been absolutely buffeting on music and interviews and anything I could find of these people. Some interviewer asked Cameron about a bandmate coming out as nonbinary and like, what the fuck. Stop it. I’m thirty seven and gender and sexuality are fucking complicated for me. I’m autistic and am in treatment for diagnosed CPTSD(which I was only recently surprised diagnosed with) and grew up in this hyper conservative religious organization and it literally defined everything I am and everything I ever cared about. But, a few years ago I came out as trans-nonbinary (they/them) and it’s been just a sort of a clusterfuck of dealing with old friends/family. Like, I know what I was taught to think about trans people, and so I know what they are thinking, but that’s also fucking literally why I never realized I was, myself, trans.
But in this interview Cameron sort of stumbled through (and into) some really incredible language for the experience of transitioning. I don’t know why the interviewer asked about it, it felt really strange for a second there and Cameron had every right to move past it if he wanted because like trans people do not need to keep being the focal point of every culture war. But, he seemed to take a breath and realize he actually had an opportunity to say some shit that kinda mattered and so he did.
I expected he didn’t know this, but the bible has some heavily used verses about putting off the things of a child to become an adult (1 Corinthians 13). My dad has used those verses so many times when talking to me it could make a person sick. So it was really fitting to me that that just happened to be the exact metaphor Cameron used to describe Emily’s transition – like simply growing up and allowing unimportant things to be unimportant. He went on in additionally helpful ways. Often comparing it to something that is more operatively a negation rather than an affirmative (ie it is about not doing things one was otherwise forcing themselves to do, and not the other way around).
After this all. It all felt salvific. Like now I’m old and the pit of my own angst is either gone or numb but, I guess, I can feed on the young. They have a youth I remember and I am already grieving when it will be gone. They await the same fate of all of us. I hate that for them. I really do. But for now they are still getting enough out of them that it can still overpower and break into me. And I’m just
so fucking glad for that.
Retracing my steps I believe “$0” is the first track I heard. I have no idea what you should listen to first. But you better goddamn listen.
