Inside Cameron Winter’s Extremely Sold-Out Carnegie Hall Show

Can one encore break be better than another?

That is the question I found myself asking last night a little more than an hour after Cameron Winter took the vaunted Carnegie Hall stage and 11 songs later, left. He had just finished the melancholy amble of “Take It With You,” a stinging farewell to a person he needed to let go. “I found a keepsake of you/by the window in the kitchen,” Winter sang, his voice dropping instantly from pained falsetto to deadpan disappointment. “Take it with you when you leave.”

The moment he strode off stage right, a camera crew of two shot to center stage, lenses trained on the rapturous crowd leaping into ovation. One minute passed, then two, then five. People clapped until their arms drooped with fatigue. Some folks sat down, while others laughed anxiously. Eventually audience members in bulky winter coats started squeezing through the crowded aisles, like basketball fans down by 20 in the second half. The camera crew bailed, with one cameraman pausing at the door just long enough to grin at the audience, maybe even wink. Would there be more, we wondered, or had the song’s command to go away also been directed at us?

Then, before the real exodus began, Winter returned, sat back down at a black Steinway that matched his clothes from head to toe, and played “Vines,” the counterpart of “Take it With You” on the first solo single he ever released, late last October. After that, he stepped back through the stage door and all the lights came up. The ushers began moving up the aisles. Six more minutes of clapping wouldn’t bring Winter back.

The last three months have been the season of Geese. Since the quartet of New York 23-year-olds released their rambunctious and riveting third album, Getting Killed, in late September, they’ve been rightfully anointed as America’s best young rock band. Their fall tour felt like a national conquest, scalpers essentially accepting body parts for spare tickets to club dates by a band suddenly big enough to fill grand rooms. They served as righteous domestic emissaries on From the Basement and the BBC, where their songs played like hopeful dispatches from a country bent badly by hard times. And they have been, of course, nearly ubiquitous on critics’ year-end lists. Vinyl copies of Getting Killed have become so hard to come by that, after finally finding one at Best Buy a few days ago only to discover it was warped, a friend tried (and failed) to bake it back into shape with his home oven.