I’m surely not the first person to note this, but though Cameron Winter’s debut solo album is called Heavy Metal, it is not, indeed, a heavy metal album. Crazy, I know! Here is what the record is: It is ten tracks of idiosyncratic American music, vocal-led and gutsy, charming in the same way that David Berman or Leonard Cohen can be, existing on a spiritual bandwidth somewhere between WFMU and an AM pop transmission. 

This is all to say that the record differs considerably from Winter’s work in the New York band Geese, though both projects share in their DNA an interest in excavating older forms in a search for new ideas. It’s an inspired first crack, for sure, and I wanted to know more about it, so I sent some email questions over to Winter—mostly focused on Heavy Metal. Stream the record and give his answers a read below.

The record is called Heavy Metal. The first song is titled “The Rolling Stones.” It seems like you might have rock and roll on your mind. Could you talk about your relationship with rock history?

Cameron Winter: I’m not always conscious of it but yes, I have rock on my mind at all times in one way or another. Older rock music is way more enjoyable if you have some level of understanding/appreciation for music history. Nowadays 60s rockers have loose skin and wear fedoras, but when you listen to the Who in relation to Chuck Berry or Frank Sinatra, for example, you can suddenly connect with the precocious, badly-behaved children these old guys once were, doing their best to kick sand in the face of the establishment

What can you say with this project that you feel like you can’t say with Geese?

I can afford rent with this!

What is your relationship with humor in music?

Wary, if I’m gonna listen to “funny” music I’d prefer it to be Andy Kaufman funny rather than Carrot Top funny.

How did the arrangements come together on this record? “Cancer of the Skull” in particular has some really nice horns and reeds.

Thank you, honestly we just piled on track after track after track and then scraped away the muck in post. I spent two months in my room muting and unmuting and re-muting tracks on Pro-Tools, trying to be painstaking. Move a french horn there, replace one guitar take with another on the second verse, add the organ back in for the chorus, et cetera.

How much lyrical re-writing do you do? How close are the finished songs to their initial sketches? 

I do more re-writing than a lot of people assume. As stream of consciousness as some of the lyrics sound I actually do care a lot about phrasing and stuff. I find that the songs I’m proudest of are usually the ones that most closely resemble their earliest versions, ‘cause that means the idea was good to begin with.

Do you feel like this record is in conversation with contemporary music? Or are you more interested in speaking back to your major influences from decades past?

As much as I love and am inspired by certain old eras of music (maybe to the point of fetishizing old stuff a little) I have zero interest in making throwback music, cause I think anything which doesn’t plant its feet in the era in which it’s made (at least to some extent) is inherently kind of inadequate. You will never, never measure up to what you’re trying to recreate. I like the freedom that working digitally provides, I think it’s a hallmark of contemporary music, I do my best to make full use of both old and new tools without being fully dependent on either.

I’m curious about your approach to narrative. How much of these songs are pulled from your own life? How much is fiction? Is there ever really a line to begin with?

They’re all pulled from my own life, some more than others. I don’t really think of anything on the record as ‘fiction’ in the spiders-from-mars sense of the word. I guess I didn’t write narratively in that there aren’t story beats or anything, but I do think of all the lyrics as journeys from point A to point B in their own way, I tried to have them develop, etc.

Who is a deep-cut singer-songwriter that influenced this record and you think more people should be listening to?

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, RIP.  A genius. Listen to Out of the Blue from 1978.