Cameron Winter and The Art of Trying

My mom has requested that I write an article that is ‘positive’. Here it is.

I first heard about Heavy Metal, the debut solo album by Geese frontman Cameron Winter, in December 2024. Unfortunately, my introduction came through the form of one of those TikTok music guys who review music as if a song is a food. “Suddenly delightful” and “Sparsingly sweet” come to mind as some of the nauseating descriptors used by these ‘music experts’. This caused me to discard the album.

In April, I was driving my dog, Juice, to the beach, thinking it’d be nice to let him splash in the water and roll in the sand. In the crawl of Saturday traffic to Folly, I stumbled across “Love Takes Miles”, a song about how love weighs on you without asking. I glanced over at Juice and, without much thought, turned off the route to the beach and took a left, heading nowhere in particular.

We wound through the tree-lined roads of Wadmalaw with the windows down. Sunlight flickered through the canopy above. Juice had his head out the window, tongue flapping like a flag. And I listened to Heavy Metal for the first time.

The album, paired with that beautiful drive, quickly became an obsession. For weeks, I shared it with every friend I could think of, returning to it religiously. Songs like “$0” and “Cancer of the Skull” carry a soul-crushing weight that reminds you why music can feel like a lifeline in moments of quiet despair. Meanwhile, “Nausicӓ” and “Try as I May” lean into pop stylings that show Winter’s ability to balance vulnerability with accessibility, proof that emotional complexity doesn’t have to be hidden behind walls of noise or irony. This balance is what makes Heavy Metal important: it’s an album that meets you wherever you are.

This obsession continued for days, until a quick Google search revealed something, Cameron Winter and I were the same age, 22. That realization hit me harder than I expected. Here was someone my exact age, maybe even a few months younger, who had created something I couldn’t have dreamed of making, something I deeply admired.

It wasn’t just the album itself, but the sheer act of bringing it into the world fully formed, confident, and unapologetically strange. Meanwhile, I was still fumbling through half-finished projects, unsure if anything I made would ever feel this real or meaningful. The comparison could have been discouraging, but instead it sparked something else: a quiet reminder that the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be was smaller than I thought.

 If someone my age could take a risk like that, maybe I could, too.

This idea didn’t come easy to me. I’d spent so much time telling myself that trying is corny. That effort without guaranteed results was a joke, a performative act meant to impress others or fill the silence. Real trying felt vulnerable. I was transfixed by the idea of someone my age creating something so raw, but wasn’t sure if that earnestness was something I could re-learn.

And then I remembered The Shed, an idea my friend Cevi and I had cooked up back when Trump was still campaigning. Our original plan was to cover the madness, to be on the ground, documenting the chaos, offering something raw and unfiltered. I even flew out to New York to join Cevi at the MSG rally.

But things didn’t go as planned. Instead of plunging into the heart of the rally, we ended up standing outside, awkwardly filming people holding signs with slogans like “Kamala isn’t black”, half unsure of what we were even doing there. Eventually, we gave up and walked away. We spent the rest of the evening playing pool at some dive bar, the rally already fading behind us. At that moment, The Shed was dead before it even started. The big idea of starting something meaningful, felt like a joke. 

The Shed, while a half-baked attempt at us becoming the new premier Youtube journalists did have good bones. The idea of a group of young writers straying away from the corporate writing scene felt important to me. My issue wasn’t that I didn’t want to try, it was that I wanted to try at something I actually cared about.

So months later, Cevi and I came back to the idea, but with no illusions of grandeur or perfect timing. It was no longer about chasing big stories or viral moments anymore. We just wanted a space where messy, imperfect writing could live without pressure or pretense. A place where trying didn’t have to look impressive to count. 

It was around this time where I was listening to Heavy Metal the most. Much like The Shed, it’s not perfect, polished, or designed to please everyone. Heavy Metal however was fully committed to its own vision. Cameron Winter unintentionally became a vessel for what genuine effort could look like: personal, deliberate, and uninhibited.

That perspective gave me permission to do the same. To see something through. So Cevi and I bought the domain, set up a simple site, and started publishing our writing. 

And slowly, something has begun to form. What started as a personal attempt became an outlet for others. Writers like Cameron and Travis asked if we could publish their work. Pieces that weren’t written for an algorithm or an editor, but for the sake of getting something out. Even if it’s only a handful of people, there’s a quiet kind of momentum in it. We send each other drafts, talk about ideas that don’t quite make sense yet, and share work without pretending it’s finished. It’s not a platform or a publication in the traditional sense. There’s no growth strategy. But it’s something. A place that didn’t exist before, where a few of us can put our work somewhere that feels low-stakes and honest.I’m glad Heavy Metal came to me when it did. If I’d listened to it back in December, I probably would’ve written it off after one track and gone back to something familiar. But hearing it on that quiet drive through Wadmalaw, sun filtering through the trees, Juice hanging his head out the window, it was the first time in a while I felt open to something new. The album didn’t demand anything from me. It just existed, weird and confident and sincere. It made me want to try.