Geese’s Cameron Winter Plays Secret Solo Show in New York: Live Review

“Hello, hello,” a familiar voice called out from behind the red velvet curtain hiding the stage at the Ridgewood, Queens, venue TV Eye last night around 11 p.m. It was a familiar voice, that is, if you’ve been paying any attention to rock music in the past year or two. Millions more people will get a chance to hear that distinctive soulful yawp next weekend, when his band plays Saturday Night Live. Because the man behind the curtain was none other than New York’s homegrown indie hero, Geese’s Cameron Winter.

Few bands are hotter right now than Geese, and they could sell out a 250-capacity room like TV Eye many times over without trying. So could Winter on his own; his most recent solo performance in the city was a star-studded affair at the 10-times-grander Carnegie Hall last month. Maybe that’s part of why he booked this show under a false name, “Chet Chomsky,” complete with a fanciful backstory identifying him as a troubadour from Tucson, Arizona. (“It’s his first time in the Big Apple and the congestion pricing worries him.”) It’s probably the only way he could easily play a venue this tiny now. Surprisingly little chatter got out in advance about this secret Cameron Winter show. If you nabbed a ticket before they sold out, though, you got an experience you’ll be telling people about for years.

There were about 50 people milling around the bar at the announced start time of 7 p.m. The show — which raised funds for the Olive Grove Initiative, a mutual aid group that supports families in Gaza — began a few minutes later with a solo set from Winter’s bandmate Emily Green. Her set was the first big surprise of the night: She’s a killer lead guitarist in Geese, but it turns out she’s also an excellent singer-songwriter working in a style of her own. “A lot of what I’ve got tonight I wrote for the show,” Green said, introducing five new songs full of melancholy jangle, bittersweet twang, and sincere vocals. “Is everyone excited to see Chet Chomsky in, like, three hours?” she teased the crowd. “He came all the way from New Mexico.” (A crowd member reminded her that the fake bio said “Chet” was from Arizona.) She added that she’d finished writing one of her songs just that day — “work with me here” — but there was no apology needed. By the end of her set, Green sounded like a new star in the making.

Next came Leo Paterniti, a Chicago artist who led a large band including saxophone and six-string bass through slow-building waves of noise and emotion. He had plenty of charm, and an impressive falsetto that helped him keep the crowd on board through some technical difficulties.

A packed and enthusiastic room greeted the next performer, Fantasy of a Broken Heart, who put on the best full-band rock show of the night. The duo of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz are better known for playing a supporting role in the live lineups of two of New York’s most original indie acts, This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes. On their own, joined by a bass player and a drummer, they make funhouse-mirror pop music that translates very well onstage. “Road Song” and “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways,” both from their 2025 EP Chaos Practitioner, were among the insistently melodic highlights of their set. After Wollowitz promised the crowd that we’d get to enjoy “the tropical delights of Chomp Chimpanzee” soon, they closed out with their 2024 fan favorite “Ur Heart Stops,” drawing rapturous applause.

Philadelphia’s ungoogleable @ were up next, with a quiet, folky vibe that quickly grew eerie. “I’m going through the objects in your home,” Stone Filipczak sang on “Major Blue Empty,” from the duo’s 2023 album Mind Palace Music. This band’s powerful, unsettling songs were enhanced by touches of cello, flute, and oboe (the latter played by @’s other singer, Victoria Rose). The gentle instrumentation just made the dark lyrics feel more striking.

After some interstitial selections from Neil Young’s underrated 1983 album Trans over the PA, it was time for Chet, er, Cameron. The room was very full by now, with plenty of whispers circulating about the secret headliner. The curtain parted, and there he was, sitting at a small keyboard, draped in a promotional baseball cap and hoodie for Tame Impala’s 2025 album Deadbeat. (We’re not sure why; maybe he’s just a fan of those sweet Australian beats.)

“I’m very nervous,” Winter told the crowd, though he seemed to be joking about the fake persona he’d invented for the show. He asked us to be gentle, “because of my crippling stage fright and my checkered past.”

He played the keyboard with a spiritual intensity, and he sang like he really meant every word, no matter how puckish or surreal. The lights went off after his third song, and he played the rest of the set in complete darkness — not even too many phones were out to interrupt the hushed appreciation of this singularly talented musician. Winter writes the kind of songs you can listen to in the dark in a crowded room and still feel incredibly moved.

Songs from his 2024 solo album Heavy Metal made up about half the set, including spare and deconstructed takes on “The Rolling Stones,” “Love Takes Miles,” and “$0.” These are songs that came from somewhere deep within Winter, and seeing him perform them in such a small room with so little distance between him and the crowd, or between him and the music, was stunning.

He played some new songs, too, from the batch of recent live debuts that devoted Geeseheads have already assembled into a fan-canon solo follow-up they’re calling CW2. “The fool in the corner is dead,” he sang on one song tentatively known as “Serious World.” “I don’t like what happened to Jesus, but I sure do like Saturday morning,” he sang on another that’s been identified as “Emperor XIII in Shades.” God and the devil were mentioned. The spell was strong.

Winter famously pushed to release Heavy Metal even though his own label wasn’t entirely sure about it. Now his songs have connected with an audience that’s growing by the minute and celebrating him as a legend in his own time. There’s still time to hop on the bandwagon in 2026 if you haven’t yet, though be warned, it will likely happen in a much bigger space than the one he played last night.

Cameron Winter (“Chet Chomsky”) Set List

“It All Fell in the River”
“The Rolling Stones”
“Serious World”
“Emperor XIII in Shades”
“Love Takes Miles”
“If You Turn Back Now”
“$0”