What I want is far away

Some thoughts on the Cameron Winter album

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth – William Blake

Back in January, a nice guy called Alex messaged me on Instagram to say I might enjoy an album which had been released the previous month called Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter. I played the first song and thought it was unlistenably bad. It felt loose and unstructured (not in a good way), and Winter’s voice seemed affected (not in a good way), like he was channelling Vic Reeves’s club singer (not in a good way). It just sounded wrong (not in a good way).

Every few weeks, someone else would recommend the album to me and each time I would give it another go, but I could never get past that first song. This is just silly music, I thought. It’s a man doing a silly voice and somehow people have convinced themselves that he’s the saviour of modern music.

Then I read this interview with Cameron Winter in the Guardian and a couple of things really intrigued me. First off, there was the comparison with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (my favourite album), and then there was the fact that Winter seemed to be so strange and enigmatic. Also, I wasn’t really sure if he was always telling the truth (but what is the truth? – we’ll come to that later); at one point in the interview he claimed that a five-year old played bass guitar on the album. I admired how unfettered he appeared to be: ‘I don’t even really go on stage with a setlist. I’m free as a bird.’ I decided to give Heavy Metal one more try.

This time the album clicked. (This is a horrifying realisation, but do I really need the Guardian’s approval before I can enjoy anything?) I got past the sticking point of that first song, and the record seemed to open up for me. In fact, I know the exact moment when something changed. It was in the second song, with its call and response chorus, where, at one point, the line ‘love will be revealed’ is answered with ‘walking really slow’. For some reason it made me laugh out loud. Walking really slow. How do you walk really slow? Why would you want to walk really slow? It reminded me of the absurd texts that my friend and I sometimes send each other – things like ‘Do you want a signed picture of me running about?’ or ‘Are you still mates with that skeleton?’ I can imagine texting him, ‘Are you walking really slow at the moment?’

So, my way into the album was through laughter. And yet that song, ‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’, is serious, I think. (‘It’s serious and it’s not serious’ – George Harrison on ‘I Am the Walrus’.) ‘Love will be revealed’ is, after all, a wonderful, mystical line. It reminded me of something Cass McCombs once said in an interview: ‘the divine is always in a constant state of revealing and concealing’. And what’s Nausicaä doing in the song? The princess who discovers a naked and shipwrecked Odysseus on the shore. Is she a figure of unrequited love? Is she Gerty MacDowell, the object of Leopold Bloom’s lust in Ulysses? Is it a sincere love song if it contains wisecracks like ‘I am blind and you are ugly’?

It was clear to me at this point that this was much more than a silly album by a man with a silly voice. Maybe what I was listening to was actually pure expression – which doesn’t always sound pretty. Maybe what I was listening to was something like truth. It made me think, what if you found a way to truly express who you are? A way to express the fundamental truth of who you are, completely unfiltered by inhibitions? What if you did all that but it came out in a silly voice?

When I got to Winter’s extraordinary vocalisations in the song ‘Drinking Age’, I was reminded of ‘The Big Sky’ by Kate Bush, a song I’ve always loved because of Bush’s completely fearless performance. In the coda she’s gibbering, talking in tongues. I find it powerful even though it’s ridiculous. I find it powerful because it’s ridiculous. I find it powerful because she doesn’t care that it sounds ridiculous. Joanna Newsom too. ‘Only Skin’ begins with a high-pitched crack in her voice that is almost painful to listen to; a sound that is, to quote one of her own lyrics, ‘like a table ceaselessly being set’. I also thought of the author John Burnside, who writes brilliantly about being enraptured by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s truly untamed delivery of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ in his book of the same name:

This crazed grace can lead to moments of extraordinary and recognisable beauty; it can also run into madness, perversity and holy terror – but it is essential to the life of the community. We need the glamourie these creatures offer in order to approximate wholeness; the stories they enact are more vital than logic or money. In the day-to-day world we allow ourselves to be taken in by cheats and thieves; we are beguiled by money and status; we consume products and celebrities whose only value is assigned to them by advertising and public relations. The beglamoured exist as the antithesis of that world: they give off an other-worldly light that cannot be faked and their visions, no matter how insane or comical, give the lie to the Authorised Version of existence.

I started to think of Cameron Winter as just such a beglamoured creature, someone whose songs give off an other-worldly light. Take ‘Drinking Age’ for example, a tune that made me understand the Astral Weeks comparison. I remember reading in No Surrender, Johnny Rogan’s book about Van Morrison, that, as a young man, Van would record himself singing at home. But he wouldn’t really be singing, he’d be making his voice do weird things: shrieking, gurgling, babbling, putting his fingers in his mouth. Being completely ridiculous, or finding a new way to express himself? Both probably. And you can hear that on Astral Weeks – it’s as if Van is ‘singing like no one is listening’, to quote a nugget of fridge magnet wisdom. Play ‘Beside You’, with its incantatory repetition of ‘you breath in, you breath out’, and you’ll understand why that song is such a stumbling block for new listeners.

There’s gurgling, babbling and what sounds like fingers in mouths (or madness, perversity and holy terror) on ‘Drinking Age’ too. I don’t really know the technical definition of what Cameron Winter is doing at around two minutes and fifty seconds into the song. Googling it led me to Reddit where someone posed this question for the ages: ‘What’s the word for when you take your pointer finger, place it between your lips and wiggle it, making a “Beeblbweeblbeeblbeebl” sound?’ Another search led me to the term ‘whuffling’. Walden Green did a good job of describing it in his Pitchfork review:

That song has Winter breaking out his signature batty lip burble – think when a baby sticks out their lips like a fish and runs their finger over them – as though he’s regressing to a truer, more infantile state.

Note the word ‘truer’. Something that ‘cannot be faked’. Pure expression. A moment of extraordinary and recognisable beauty that also sounds insane and comical. And what’s beautiful and what’s comical cannot be untangled.

An aside: What would happen if Pinocchio, whose nose grows when he lies, said, ‘My nose grows when I tell the truth’? His nose would grow because he would be lying, but, as soon as it would start to grow, it wouldn’t be a lie any more. What would happen to his nose? And what would happen to Pinocchio’s universe? Would some immutable physical law that prevents two contradictory things from happening at the same time kick in? Would Pinocchio’s nose be stuck simultaneously growing and shrinking (or revealing and concealing) forever? That’s the end of the aside, but it’s quite a funny image, isn’t it?

In ‘Truth Serum’ by Smog, the song’s narrator describes staying up all night with his buddies taking the titular drug. There are some wonderful lines in the song, not least: ‘Big Bruiser Ken walks in, says, “I like men”’. At one point an unanswerable question is asked: ‘What is love?’ The narrator’s ‘truth’ is brilliantly Zen: ‘Love is an object kept in an empty box’. (Which reminds me of Salinger’s ‘blank sheet of paper […] by way of explanation’ from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.) ‘Truth Serum’ ends with these lines:

People people, there’s a lesson here plain to see
There’s no truth in you
There’s no truth in me
The truth is between
The truth is between

It feels like Cameron Winter’s lyrics have the ring of ‘truth’ because they exist somewhere ‘in between’. As with Van Morrison on Astral Weeks, Winter seems to be singing in a dream language, channelled directly from an unconscious place, unconditioned by meaning and expectations, and decorousness too: ‘like Brian Jones I was born to swim’. His words often have the uncensored quality of a somniloquist; in one song he sings about ‘cancer of the fingers’ and ‘cancer of the 80s’, grotesque, nightmarish images.

I read an interview with Van Morrison years ago where he was asked about the inspiration for the song ‘Astral Weeks’. His answer was that the song didn’t mean anything in the traditional sense; all he was trying to do was evoke the sense, the memory, the feeling of a specific place, a specific room. (It seems likely that I am half-remembering Van talking about visiting the studio of the artist Cecil McCartney and seeing a painting that was some kind of representation of astral projection.) The song captures a feeling of fleetingness and mystery, and Van sings it as if he is trying to articulate something preverbal.

Showin’ pictures on the wall
Whisperin’ in the hall
And pointin’ a finger at me
There you go, there you go
Standin’ in the sun, darlin’
With your arms behind you
And your eyes before

I’ve always loved how undefined this all is as an inspiration for a song: a feeling, a memory, an atmosphere. Hard things to translate into words, let alone write a song about. So how do you begin? Well, you could stop using language altogether – you could scream and babble (‘beeblbweeblbeeblbeebl’), or repeat a word over and over and over again until it loses its meaning, as Van does on ‘Madame George’ (‘the love that loves to love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves’). Or you could follow the great advice of Talking Heads and stop making sense.

The collision of words in nonsensical phrases can create new avenues of association and sensation. When language loosens its grip on sense, on meaning, it can feel like we’re getting closer to what Alan Moore described as the ‘probably psychedelic preverbal reality that we enjoyed as infants’; like we’re regressing – to paraphrase Walden Green’s review – to a more primal state.

After all, is nonsense ever just nonsense? Is it possible to stop making sense? Somehow, when I hear Aldous Harding sing, ‘Looks like a date is set / Show the ferret to the egg’, there’s a hinterland somewhere in those insane and comical words. Equally, when Cameron Winter sings about ‘great carnivals of pain’, or ‘backpacking upon the fingers of the real’, or trying to ‘seduce the wall’, it creates a kind of shadow meaning, an echo of a memory or a dream I might have had that is somewhere just below the surface. It’s like a string on a guitar has been plucked and an adjacent string has started to vibrate with sympathetic resonance.

The line that really knocked me out when I first heard it is from ‘Love Takes Miles’: ‘Open the moon, flatten her down and sit her on the stairs all day’. I could get lost in the dream logic of those words. As if the moon could be opened like a book, as if the moon could sit on the stairs (the same stairs that lead down to the hall in ‘Astral Weeks’?). It’s a line that makes me think of a lost classic of children’s literature. It somehow opens up a whole fantasy world of nostalgia and longing. There’s something naked and unashamed about this kind of image making, as if the author is not quite in control of his own imagination – like Saul Bellow during the creation of The Adventures of Augie March: ‘The great pleasure of the book was that it came so easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.’

Creation came easily to André Breton too – all he had to do was listen to Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt. In his iconic surrealist novel Nadja the titular character is based on Delacourt, a woman with whom Breton was infatuated. Delacourt gave off an ‘other-worldly light’ to Breton, and her strange vision of the world, caused in no small part by a mental breakdown, captivated him. To paraphrase Burnside again, Delacourt, as she appears in Nadja, is someone who gives the lie to the Authorised Version of existence. The following passage was translated by Richard Howard:

Toward midnight we reach the Tuileries, where she wants to sit down for a moment. We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. ‘Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there’s that broken spurt again, that fall… and so on indefinitely.’

‘The fountain is our thoughts’ could be a lyric on Heavy Metal, maybe nestled somewhere in the same verse as, ‘You were born to hold my cannonball brain like the Lord holds the moon’. I love the collision of associations in the language of Delacourt/Nadja; that connection between disparate things which is so clearly the product of intense subjectivity. It’s a glimpse into the intimate workings of her mind. We can’t see the connection between water and thoughts ourselves – indeed, it might seem like nonsense to us – but her words are an artefact of the way in which she recognises patterns and experiences the world, and it’s this that makes them beautiful – a form of pure, automatic poetry.

When I read Nadja I was reminded of another other-worldly figure: Limmy’s perpetually baked character Dee Dee. In a much-loved sketch Dee Dee spontaneously decides to hop on a bus to Yoker. For Dee Dee, Yoker is uncharted territory and much of the comedy of the sketch derives from him finding the utterly unremarkable neighbourhood of Glasgow strange and alien. As the bus gets closer to its destination, Dee Dee notices the Yoker Newsagents, Yoker Post Office, and a barber with the sign ‘Hair by Les Porter’, a surname which (to Dee Dee at least) rhymes with Yoker. Dee Dee nudges a fellow passenger and asks her if she thinks Les Porter’s name was originally Smith and ‘he changed it to fit in’. Her baffled response (‘whit?’) is hilarious because she obviously hasn’t been party to Dee Dee’s train of thought, his question just seemed like the solipsistic ramblings of a fractured mind.

But I love that moment because isn’t that what all artists are trying to do in a way – to make people see and understand what they’re experiencing? We may not always be able to follow or understand them, but the work they create can be beautiful and thrilling, especially when it palpably has come from a truly authentic place. Maybe Cameron Winter is like Dee Dee, sitting on the bus, asking whoever will listen to open the moon, flatten her down and sit her on the stairs all day. Maybe my initial reaction (‘whit?’) was totally valid. But now I’d gladly sit with him all the way to Yoker and beyond.

If all this sounds like I’m over-egging the pudding for an album that contains the lyric ‘I’m gonna eat my keys’, then so be it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s all just a grand illusion, and Cameron Winter has found a way of imitating the electric language of Delacourt/Nadja and the untrammelled vocalising of Kate Bush. Maybe he’s found a way to make it seem like his imagination is pouring like rain and all he’s doing is standing outside with a bucket. Perhaps it’s all just a pose. Well, does it matter? I like the pose.

The first thing you hear on Heavy Metal is a descending guitar figure that doesn’t seem to quite fit into a bar properly. This sets the tone for an album in which the songs feel fluid and unmoored. Instruments come and go, played in unusual rhythms, accenting offbeats where we wouldn’t normally expect them. In ‘Love Takes Miles’ the bass and drums only really kick in halfway through the first chorus (it’s unclear if this is because the bass player is five years old). Chord progressions and melodies push against the grid of their underlying bars.

There’s a chord change that’s used almost obsessively throughout the album. A plagal cadence, the satisfying movement of a IV chord resolving to the I, the tonic or home chord. In the key of E major (where the tonic chord is, you guessed it, E major) this would be an A major chord easing comfortably down like the perfect Tetris shape to the home chord. To me, it’s a change that makes me think of folk or country songs which take an unashamed delight in taking the obvious, most satisfying route home. It’s also used in religious music and is sometimes called ‘the Amen cadence’ – it’s what gives ‘Let it Be’ its hymn-like sound. This cadence is used on virtually every song on Heavy Metal, with Winter’s melodies snaking around each resolution. It feels like a kind of emotional shorthand, comparable to the way John Lennon so often used a romantic, yearning minor iv chord in his songs (an A minor in the key of E major, for example); it’s in ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘Across the Universe’, ‘In My Life’ and many more.

In the Heavy Metal highlight ‘Try as I May’ the whole song seems to be ‘about’ that cadence. It’s built around an endlessly deferred resolution, as if that plagal cadence is being unpacked, deconstructed, repeated and rephrased in different settings, looked at from different angles – about to happen, happening, never happening, concealing and revealing.

‘Try as I May’ is a sort of uneven waltz. With each repetition of the verse there are subtle differences – a bar with five beats in the first verse has four beats in the second, and three in the third. There doesn’t seem to be an overall pattern to this. (Is there to anything? A question to answer after imbibing some truth serum perhaps.) The chord progression frequently incorporates the plagal cadence, moving from C major (IV) to the home chord of G major (I), but then it keeps going back to D major (the dominant V chord), adding more tension just when you think it has been released. This, along with the unsettled pulse of the song, creates a sense of something never quite resolving, or more accurately, of being perpetually sustained in a Zen-like state of resolving and unresolving.

The arrangement of ‘Drinking Age’ too is vivid and hypnotic. At one point the song comes to a rest; there’s a silence, Winter mumbles, ‘Table by the door’, and there’s a high-pitched chime as if an announcement is about to be made at an airport. A lush sustained chord is played by a previously unheard brass and woodwind section. Winter mutters the line again, almost inaudibly, beneath the chord. And we realise, as more notes emerge, that that high-pitched chime was a vibraphone. The lyrics continue: ‘Wallet on the ground / Bag of rubber bands’. The atmosphere is gorgeous, gauzy and utterly mysterious – all the more so because of those absurdist snapshot lyrics. Has a bag of rubber bands ever been elevated to such mythic, mystic status? (I’m running out of space to go into the key line of ‘Drinking Age’, and maybe the whole album: ‘everything is lying’.)

The song ‘$0’ starts with what sounds like Winter turning the vibrato up to 11 on his voice; it wavers almost uncontrollably, like he’s challenging you to point out how ridiculous it sounds. The song feels like another lopsided waltz. You can count along to the luminous piano line as a bar of three, a bar of five and then a bar of six – the metre expands as if the phrase can’t be contained. The song builds to the album’s most extraordinary revelation:

God is real
God is real
I’m not kidding
God is actually real
I’m not kidding this time
I think God is actually for real
God is real
God is actually real
God is real
I wouldn’t joke about this
I’m not kidding this time

It’s maybe the most radical declaration of faith in indie rock since Jeff Mangum sang ‘I love you, Jesus Christ’. Winter did a Reddit AMA when Heavy Metal was released, and, as well as taking the time to praise Astral Weeks (naturally), he gave a brilliant response to someone who asked him to ‘clarify his stance’ on religion. With a wisdom beyond his 22 years (which, incidentally, is the age Van Morrison was when he recorded Astral Weeks) he replied:

You ask a good question, I will say however that I think clarifying one’s stance on religion is where religion’s problems begin. I’d add that I’ve come to mistrust anything that seems completely atheistic

God is real <3

His answer reminds me of the episode of In Our Time about Zen in which Melvyn Bragg kept trying to get his guests to be more specific but they kept being more vague (very Zen). But it’s a beautiful answer in many ways. It’s a kind of faith in something because it can’t be defined. God is an object kept in an empty box. It’s perhaps a belief in mystery itself; to define it is to lose its essence.

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In a recent piece on the second series of Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending TV show The Rehearsal, Rhik Samadder invoked Schopenhauer’s definition of a genius as, ‘someone who aims at a target the rest of us can’t see’. Perhaps there’s something similar going on with Cameron Winter. The reason that Heavy Metal is so enchanting, and (for me) so deserving of its place alongside Astral Weeks or Ys, is because it appears to be an authentic representation of a true artist’s vision, even if we don’t fully understand what that vision is (as Kate Bush sang, ‘I’m looking at the big sky / You never understood me’). Perhaps it’s a vision that will continue to reveal and conceal itself until the universe implodes along with Pinocchio’s nose, and all we can really do is marvel at its mystery, walking really slow in the process.

Love will be revealed

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