Buayy-BEE

Geese, “Cobra” | Getting Killed, 2025

Cameron Winter has brought new life and soul to “baby” as a muse. On “Can’t Keep Anything” — found on his solo venture, 2024’s Heavy Metal — he channels the ghost of Leonard Cohen and Marianne to give us a couple of heart-wrenching “babies” that emanate with empathy and maybe hope or just pity. “BAYy-bee, where I’m going,” he sings, “You can’t keep anything / You can’t keep anything but me.”

Then, on his band Geese’s 2025 release, Getting Killed, Winter’s “Au Pays du Cocaine” offers another tender wish with the sweet “baby” line, “BAYYyy-baaeaeyyy, you can stay with me and nobody would care.”

It’s on that album’s “Cobra,” however, that “baby” becomes part of the foundational beat in a song of love and sex and shame and fear and really knowing someone (maybe?), a Sunday song that you might shuffle to in your apartment with your lover. There are eight “babies” — some playfully low, almost-Elvis-like — in it, but it’s at :50, when Winter sings/croons/moans a teasing and slightly acidic, “Buayy-BEE, you should be ashamed,” that we appreciate this young musician’s broad, odd, talent-addled voice and lyricism … and feel a certain elation over what he and his bandmates will come up with next.