The Geese frontman excels away from his band, in a 2025 voice-and-piano concert that casts a soaring spell. You want a concert movie to sound great, and plenty of them do. But I don’t think I’ve encountered a concert film that casts the precise kind of sonorous spell that “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” does.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the movie, which had its premiere tonight at the New York Film Festival, is a record of the solo performance that Cameron Winter gave in front of a packed audience at Carnegie Hall on Dec. 11, 2025. The movie in only 75 minutes long, and the entire thing consists of Winter sitting at a Steinway grand piano, singing his gorgeous meditative trance tunes, but I swear you’ve never heard a sound quite like this. The slow rolling piano echoes through the hall like a rhapsody from the deep.
The sound is rich, lustrous, bottom-heavy, grand. Winter sings in a low baritone (and occasionally a high one) of astonishing power, the notes hanging there in a suspended quaver so bold it’s hypnotic. At different moments, he’ll remind you of a great many other singers.
At times he’s a low-octave Thom Yorke, his lost-in-the-haze midnight rapture is like Tom Waits minus the gravel, and there are strong echoes of early Springsteen — the plaintive bard of “Incident on 57th Street” — in his soaring vocal caress, and the wide vibrato of it. The concert may remind you, at times, of John Cale’s great 1992 live album “Fragments of a Rainy Season.” But the artist the Cameron Winter of “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” is most magically reminiscent of is Bob Dylan — the Dylan who let the words pour out of him in a blissful torrent and sang them as if possessed. Winter, like Dylan, isn’t just singing.
He’s crafting pop songs that add up to an incantation, a rhapsody, a prayer. At the start of the concert, Winter, very tall, in a black shirt and pants, with shaggy greasy unkempt indie hair (with his thick eyebrows and doleful countenance, he suggests a solemn version of Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas”), lopes onstage and stands in front of the piano, introducing himself with what looks like a slight bow, though it’s so reticent it might just be a hipster stoop. Winter, of course, is the frontman of Geese, the indie-band-of-the-moment who, on the tuneful/tuneless scale, reside somewhere between Wilco and Arcade Fire.
Geese are okay, but they’ve been overpraised. Winter’s 2024 solo record, “Heavy Metal,” is much more compelling; it gives voice to the meditative soul inside the noise rocker. The piano is poised at a slight angle on the bare Carnegie stage, but basically Winter has his back to the audience.
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