The urge to respond
Clothes are pretentious until you realize you look like s--t, creativity is a conversation, questioning atheism, is NYC cooked? & more with Cameron Winter and Max Bassin of Geese
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Geese are about to put out one of the year’s best albums. They’re a great band from Brooklyn, where they all grew up. I (Jonah) am a Brooklyn native, too, and I think the chances are good that when Geese’s swagged-out singer and main songwriter, Cameron Winter, was rolling around Park Slope in a stroller in the early 2000s, and I was in my early 20s, we crossed paths on the sidewalk a few times. I have to imagine that, each time, he looked up at me and took life-altering inspiration from seeing me looking cool and (probably) performing neighborly acts of kindness.
It’s possible that never happened. But this much is clear: Winter is one of the most fascinating young songwriters out, with one of the most distinctive voices in music. His odd, excellent solo album, Heavy Metal — which came out last December and caught on among Heads with Taste this year — is beautiful, and it led me, along with a ton of other people, to dive deeper into Geese.
The band’s new album, Getting Killed, is their third LP and my favorite thing they’ve made. It’s what happens when lifelong friends lock in and make a bunch of transfixingly strange choices, honing a sound that feels like it’s been beamed in from an alternate dimension — or at least from their parents’ basements, where they started playing together as teenagers.
If “Turnstile Summer” just ended, it follows logically that Geese are about to usher in 🪿🪿 “Honkin’ on ‘Em Autumn” 🪿🪿. Getting Killed comes out next Friday — you can check out the singles “Trinidad,” “100 Horses” and “Taxes.”
All of which means I was stoked to get on a call the other day with Cameron and drummer Max Bassin to talk about how the urge to make something is an urge to respond; copying and then unplagiarizing other people’s art; questioning atheism; Daft Punk x Peter Griffin rarities; and other Unbeatable Topics.
Blackbird Spyplane: The new Geese album is sick, my favorite thing the band’s done. Your melodies and rhythms and arrangements all behave in unpredictable ways. What does the songwriting look like? What’s the first step, and how does the music get from there to what we hear on the record?
Cameron Winter: “Well, it kind of starts with someone else’s pre-existing song most of the time, honestly. We’re pretty referential in what we do. Even if we try not to be, we can’t help it. So we find something we want to filter through ourselves, and then we sort of have to work backwards to try and un-plagiarize it. And that’s the part that requires the creativity. So we postpone the creativity for as long as possible, until it’s necessary.”
Max Bassin: “We all got into the same music at the same time, and we wanted to somehow bring the spirit of that through, even if it didn’t sound like us.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Cameron, you’ve said that when you’re not feeling particularly creative, you listen to a song, or watch a movie, or read a book, and before long you get “the urge to respond.” We typically hear the creative act described as, you know, there’s a void, and a flash of lighting cracks through it. But I really like that idea of response as intrinsic to making s--t.
Cameron Winter: “Yeah, it’s pretty true. Like, if it wasn’t a conversation thing, everyone would be making cave paintings, or they’d be making Gregorian chants and stuff like that. You respond to stuff all the time. And some people don’t feel the need to respond, and they don’t make anything, and that’s not a crime. But sometimes you get the urge.”
Blackbird Spyplane: What things were you responding to with the new music?
Max Bassin: “We made the album in L.A. when the city was pretty much completely on fire. So that was something. There’s a lot of uncertainty that I think comes through in the music, if that makes sense.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I didn’t realize you made it during the fires. That deepens something I felt listening to the album: The title is Getting Killed, the first song has a refrain about a car bomb, later on there’s these lyrics about smiling and dancing “in times of war” — there’s this theme of imminent and ongoing violence that weaves through the record.
Cameron Winter: “There’s a lot to draw from, but I think we’re trying to draw more on the feeling of it than on exact points. Everyone is sort of living in the same world, they see the same things: I think we’re just trying to match the world we live in, in terms of the feeling. Or, you know, not be completely insulated from it. I don’t think we’re really so interested in making music that’s an escape. Maybe we were a few years ago, but not anymore.”
Max Bassin: “In America, everyone’s telling us to get f--ked, and there’s so much anxiety and uncertainty about everything, so it feels irresponsible to not have that seep in. Or not even irresponsible, but it just doesn’t make sense to not have those themes slip into how the music gets made.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Speaking of uncertainty, I saw a quote where Cameron said, “I’ve come to mistrust anything that feels completely atheistic.” I feel similarly, but it was the exact opposite when I was in my 20s. There was this default, widespread mistrust of religiousness among people in the circles I ran in, anyway. But over the past few years that seems to have flipped perfectly. I have an emotional sense of why, but I’m curious why you both think that flip happened.
Max Bassin: “I’ve had this conversation a lot. I think it’s a time of lost morality among a lot of young people, people our age, and it’s leading some people to the opposite end. I’ve realized that faith in anything is a good way to give yourself a moral compass, even if it’s not a belief in a higher power, but something that makes you feel like a moral person, with a moral compass.”
Cameron Winter: “I just meant it in the sense that I don’t trust these sort of people who are so presumptuous to think they understand everything, know what’s going on, know why they’re here. People who respond to impossible questions with just science, you know? It’s a mindset I don’t like. And it’s a mindset I used to be in, but I found it doesn’t really represent how I feel.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I wanna talk about “New York is cooked” discourse — this idea that the city’s creative heyday is behind it, rent’s too expensive for artists to stick around, the internet killed subcultures, the soil’s torched. It’s funny because the other day I came across this Donald Judd quote from 1968 where he talks about moving to Marfa to escape “the harsh and glib situation within art in New York.” So people have been saying versions of “New York is cooked” for years. What’s your take?
Max Bassin: “Everybody fantasizes about a world where the thing they want never really existed — at least not in their lifetime. The people who say, ‘New York is cooked’ moved here thinking it would be seeing the Strokes and Interpol every night. So now they say, ‘There’s not good bands.’ And that’s a stupid take. There have always been good bands from here, throughout history. As time goes on and this place gets more unaffordable, I will see this thing of, ‘Oh Geese is a bunch of private-school rich kids,’ which isn’t unfair, but who can afford to live here? The Strokes were rich kids. People want the starving-artist thing, but that’s never existed. So I’d say, New York is not cooked, it’s the same as it’s always been. But I’m sorry we’re not the Strokes.”
Cameron Winter: “We were lucky to be able to live with our parents for basically the entirety of the time we were a band. Most people here can’t be in a band because they can’t afford the rent, and as a band you don’t make a lot of money for a very long time, if you ever do. But I also feel like scenes don’t exist around locations like they used to, because everything’s too on the internet.”
Max Bassin: “Yeah, it’s hard for there to be music that sounds like a place. There are people in New York who have never been to the south who make music that sounds like MJ Lenderman.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Cameron, what’s the Daft Punk Peter Griffin sweatshirt you wear in the ‘$0’ video?
Cameron Winter: “My friend Jorge Vargas Camacho made that. It’s a one-of-one he painted. I don’t take it out much — there’s only so many times you can wear something like that before it wears out it’s welcome. But I’ve still got it under lock and key, as an exceptional piece of modern art.”
Blackbird Spyplane: What’s your relationship to clothes? It seems like everyone in the band has a cool sense of style.
Cameron Winter: “It’s been a process of me learning to dress myself. I thought clothes were pretentious for a very long time, until I realized I looked like s--t. And then suddenly they weren’t so pretentious anymore. I’ll wander around thrifting on tour. I don’t love spending a ton of money on stuff unless I really like it. I replace my shoes once every four years. Today I’m gonna look around for some new shoes.”
Max Bassin: “I thrift a lot on tour, too, and in New York there’s this spot called Other People’s Clothes I love. I wore a lot of stuff when I was younger where I was trying to pop out, and it didn’t work. I was an Odd Future kid for a while, wearing Vans and skinny jeans. Then I got really into the ‘70s, so I got all these f--king bellbottoms and boots. It was a lot of trial-and-error. Which was cool, to go through a lot and find stuff that fits me.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right, I asked you both to talk about some cherished unique possessions. Max, what’s the deal with the chain you chose?
Max Bassin: “It came completely fused, so I had to, like, grease up my forehead and my nose to slip it on. It’s a gift from my girlfriend, we went to an antiques extravaganza and a place was selling sterling silver by the pound. This link is called a Gucci link, we bought it by the pound and she very thoughtfully gifted it to me, and I can never take it off, literally.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’ll need the jaws of life.
Max Bassin: “Yeah, the bolt cutters of life, dude. Two months after I got it, I was riding a Citi Bike and I got hit by a car, and I had to have X-rays done. They wanted me to take my chain off and I couldn’t, so I had to stick it in my mouth during the X-rays. That prompted me to get a bike that was a little safer, so I got one called an Onyx — it’s an electric motorbike, I’ve been doing a bunch of 40-mile adventures on it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Cam, you chose a pair of lucky socks?
Cameron Winter: “I’ve had them since I was a kid. One day, maybe when I was 8, I just decided they were lucky: I put them on my desk and focused on them, and tried to keep them in my thoughts as lucky, trying to project psychic power onto them. I was very into the idea of creating a good luck charm. I carry them around in my pocket during important moments.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Are they a favorite color of yours? Do they have a pattern?
Cameron Winter: “They’re generic white Gap socks. No pattern. Came out of a 10-pack. I just saw people in books and movies with lucky so-and-sos, and I said, ‘I need a lucky something.’ I wanted to be f--king Harry Potter or something like that. I was into those clichés. So I decided on socks.”
Geese’s new album, Getting Killed, is great, and it comes out next Friday, September 26th — find it here. The band’s on IG here, Cameron is here and Max is here.
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The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to socks — is here.
Re: morality vs atheism: just want to point out that the Unitarian Universalist Church exists. Are you a spiritual more than religious person? Perfect community for you