Is ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ about Cameron Winter’s polyamorous mum?: A theory
To eager fans, Geese’s ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ served as just another shining example of frontman Cameron Winter’s mordantly brittle yet highly emotionally romantic songcraft.
One of the numbers from their acclaimed Getting Killed, ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’, French for ‘In the Land of Cocaine’, serves as one of the gentler ends of Geese’s 2025 LP effort. Eschewing the hectic erraticism hovering over much of the album, ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ pursues a reflective chamber indie stroll sweeping to a stirring crescendo, seemingly scoring the gnawing aches that fruit when lost in the throes of love.
“You can stay with me, baby / You can stay with me, and nobody would care” Winter coos on the cut’s opener. Such a line evokes a number of readings. Connection fraying to co-dependency? The sick feeling in the stomach, suspicions are now unrequited?
Perhaps a more direct grapple with one’s drug addiction, as earlier live lyrics hinted at? Whatever the case, they’re sage lyrics for an artist in his early 20s and still living with his mother.
It’s the family dynamic that points to another reading. The son of prominent writer Molly Roden Winter, a recent New York Times bestseller, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, offered a frank exploration of her and her husband’s, composer Stewart Winter, embrace of the polyamorous lifestyle. To the uninitiated, polyamory is the mutually agreed freedom to seek sexual experiences or even romantic relationships with the consent of all involved parties.
Such an arrangement is difficult to hide for long amid the nuclear family. It’s not specified whether Winter or his brother first discovered their Dad’s OKCupid profile, but one of the sons unleashed a frantic flurry of texts demanding to know what exactly was going on, Molly opting to err toward honesty in handling her teen son’s anxieties.
It turned out he’d already twigged a year before, having read her diaries and absorbing God knows what details. “Long before the book, I was determined to ensure my children weren’t raised to see me as two-dimensional,” Molly told The Guardian in 2024. “Of course, nobody wants to think about their mother having sex. Trust me, I get it. But the truth is that mothers have sex. The vast majority at least once. Twice, even.”
She then further clarified her goals to instil a grounded sex positivity in her young sons, “I wanted them to know that whoever they choose to spend their life with will also be a whole person. Including once they’ve had children of their own.”
Such information can’t help but offer a new lens to ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’. Rather than a pained love song, could Winter be processing the complex nature of relationships wrought from his parents’ open activity? Whether it was he who read his mother’s diaries or not, lines like “You can be free and still come home,” and “…you can change and still choose me” take on a new dimension of untanglement, lyrically stepping into the shoes of any given parent similarly working through the death knell of sexual desire often buried underneath motherhood, domesticity, and monogamy, while also prodding at the raw nerve endings of jealousy forever kept far at bay.
