David Emery Online

The Rolling Stones (Live at Carnegie Hall) by Cameron Winter

22 October 2026

I can be difficult, sometimes, with where I get music recommendations from. It is to my own disservice, and yet I cannot help but continue the same deeply-grooved, trodden path. I find out about new music through a distillation of sorts, a subliminal condensation of different mentions and posts and scrolls, until finally I crack and actually listen to it.

My problem is this: the mist can be poisoned by some of the drops coming from the wrong cloud. A few to many mentions, or overly enthusiastic support, can lead me to ignoring something for far too long that I should not.

This has happened many times; it will happen again; the most recent is Cameron Winter, and his band Geese.

Geese are great — really great — but I was late to the party. My suspicion is that there was just too much excitement, too much hype, which was aided and abetted by his voice grating on me to start with. It turns out it just needed time, it is a vocal with deep character. But traveling back to his acclaimed solo record, ‘Heavy Metal’, it never quite clicked for me.

‘Live at Carnegie Hall’, however, is stunning.

It takes the songs from that record and reformats them for solo piano in such a way that it’s difficult to conceive that they were not always so. You can also feel and hear Winter’s progression as an artist and performer, to such an extent that I think it’s fair to draw the comparisons that a Live at Carnegie Hall performance would imply; Dylan, Young, Simon & Garfunkel, and the rest.

This track is a highlight in an album of highlights; I would listen to the whole thing (and have, several times today already).