We’d thought we’d heard everything that love can do: Lift me higher and higher. Make me feel brand new. Make my dreams come true. And then “Love Takes Miles” stumbled half-drunk up to the microphone and poured its little heart out. Cameron Winter, the rookie of the year, made a solo debut that sounds like he’s a hundred years in.
You can tell from the way those first notes come out that the bruise is still fresh, but “Love Takes Miles” is like a man holding a fistful of lottery tickets: It makes you sick the way his hopes shoot up to the moon and land back in the dust. Maybe he’ll find love on the side of the road, with the blues syncopation and the juke joint piano ringing like a payphone on an empty highway. Who’s that calling? Sometimes I imagine the people in the song are just absent friends and sometimes they’re lovers with their whole lives ahead of them. Love will find you anywhere, which is what makes this one for the ages. Get a grip, you’re telling me, Who says “a-walkin’” unless they’re trying to sound like Bob Dylan on purpose? Of course he is. Lend your shoe to the young wunderkind, coming all this way on foot. Love will take you miles away, drop you off someplace you don’t recognize yourself, and years later still feel like the first time.