Who is Nina in Cameron Winter’s ‘Nina + Field of Cops’?
Since the release of Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal, one comparison keeps cropping up: people are obsessed with calling him the new Bob Dylan, but really, if they have but one thing in common, it’s a complete refusal to give their audience any real semblance of their songs’ meanings.
Obviously, there are moments when this falls away, where the meaning of ‘I Want You’ is pretty on the nose and ‘Love Takes Miles’ also isn’t much of a mystery. On occasion, it falls into more open, universal statements, even if still refusing to be cliché. In one of his most impactful, yet unreleased tunes, Winter croons, “my heart is for those who leave me alone”, writing a perfect statement on avoidance but without the need to be basic with it.
However, what Dylan and Winter do share is the occasional desire to push their meaning completely and utterly into nonsense. On tracks like ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’, or ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, Dylan is clearly getting at something, but he makes you work for it. You have to do some digging and some analysing, and on Winter’s debut, it’s ‘Nina + Field of Cops’ that hands fans the shovel.
On every level, the song feels like a barrage, like having a storm pelting at you full force, as Winter’s piano playing is also its most abrasive here. It’s relentless in both sonics and lyrics as the piano and the poem just keep on coming. Trying to understand it almost feels like walking through treacle in heavy rain, as the mind can’t keep up, but the lines keep pouring in.
Even with the lyrics laid out, it’s tough to unpick; there are so many images at play here, with cops, doughnuts, coconuts, fights, carnivals, peanuts, cavemen, kissing, everything is happening in this song. Unlike the rest of the record, where Winter overwhelmingly takes slow, considered steps, repeating key phrases and slimming down his imagery to a key thing or figure, like Brian Jones or a dollar in his hand, ‘Nina + Field of Cops’ is everything, all at once, for almost six minutes.
At the centre, though, there stands a figure: Nina.
Each time Nina appears in the picture, she’s a symbol for stability and understanding. The verses spiral through these insane scenes, and then she materialises, while Winter sings outright, “Nina knows the reason”. She becomes the antidote to the song’s panic, and it’s only with that knowledge that really any of it makes any sense.
Overwhelmingly, this is a song about exactly that, panic, and specifically, it seems to be about the futile panic of the artist and the scared, or angry, or even just devastated wail that being an artist is so hard.
“Your building is full of people who hate you / And bite off fingers and eat from piles / And someone’s knocking / All things spit towards and stutter at you / Closer and closer until the whole city falls over”, Winter goes on and on in the opening lines, painting this scene of greedy hostility, kind of like a label office building.
In some ways, these few lines alone feel like the story of his career. We know Geese, at first, were doubted; we know Winter’s label, at first, pushed back against Heavy Metal, doubting him again. As he sings “the music breaks a window”, it’s the sound of the breakthroughs he’d had both in the band and solo, but that still doesn’t undo the stress and upset of the industry side of it all and the criticism.
These sorts of industry-tinged images keep coming: “I’ll talk to every crowded room / I’ll go to the great carnivals of pain”, sounds like the vows of a nervous showman, revealing himself to his audiences. “I’ll hold these lemons in my mouth and run” sounds like the artist enduring through bitterness towards it all, and while “I’ll love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth” is evocative, it could mean a million things, but the thought that springs to mind first is the artist actively seeking pain to convert into work.
It keeps spiralling, and then there she is: “Nina knows the reason that she’s seen into the mouth / Of what it is to be a mountain”.
Nina keeps coming back as this beacon of hard-earned understanding, a figure that’s been through all these listed trials and survived. While the figure could be anyone, or could just be fictional, much like all the various names Marie’s and Jane’s in Dylan’s work, it seems most likely that Nina is Winter’s idol: Nina Simone.
When he sings of her, he sings in total awe. “Nina, I’m not nothing, but when you lie on the piano, I am reminded I am stupid,” he says, humbling himself in her presence. But amidst his own artistic panic, she appears as a tough and unphased figure as he imagines, “In every upstairs room / The deep and smiling voice is shushing / Kicking everything to powder / Throwing music out the window”, finished with an amazed, “Woah, woah”, much like all the stories of people recalling Simone concerts or times she told her crowds to simply shut up and listen.
“It is very hard to listen to most music after listening to Nina Simone,” Winter once tweeted, “Her best work is so emotionally gigantic that comparing it to some best new music indie release is like watching Mike Tyson in the ring against Car Seat Headrest”. Seeming to be the key to it all, seeing Simone as the ultimate heavyweight champ, he panics about what he would do for his art, claiming he’d fight “entire fields of cops” but knows she would’ve knocked them out in an instant.
