Take It With You

• Song: Take It With You
• Artist: Cameron Winter
• Date: Released October 2024
• Genre: Indie/Folk

There are some songs that hit you so hard, you will always remember where you were the first time you heard them. I heard Cameron Winter's "Take It With You" for the first time as a live performance and I was overcome with emotion, mostly from the song being so hauntingly beautiful but also the circumstance that this was likely the last song I would ever see this particular group perform.

Looking at the Cameron Winter cover photo for the single (above), you might expect something raw and that is exactly what you get. The story he tells is the saddest I can remember, a blunt confessional laying out the stark remnants of a horribly failed relationship. The vocal for each stanza has an aching vibrato that sets a beautiful scene, and then a cold final line that snatches it away. An unexpected A5 note exactly half way through snaps your attention to the line that sums it all up: "If you're aching to come home, remember | It's not here anymore".

The classic songs of heartbreak repeat every generation. and there is no greater heartbreak than not being welcome to go home again. For my generation, that song was Pink Floyd's "Nobody Home" and I am struck by the similarities between how these two songs sound and make me feel. I recall the unique feeling of listening to Nobody Home during my senior year of college, having no idea where my life would be a year later but knowing for sure that it wouldn't be anywhere I had been before.

One of the things I love about Take It With You is how it repeatedly subverts the hopes of the listener. Every stanza sets a beautiful scene and then destroys it in a way that you can feel how much pain there must have been in this relationship. You could imagine the singer taking a song they had written for their lover and simply making a tiny tweak to each of these last lines. This means we can do the opposite and make it back into a love song:

The listener can only speculate as to what series of events could have led to this song being written. 'Don't come back'. 'Take the keepsakes'. 'I won't think about you'. I'll always wonder about that latter sentiment in particular, and its fundamental irony - could you truly forget about someone who led you to write a song like this?