A multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and visual artist from Southern California, Cameron Lew has crafted his Ginger Root project steadily since 2017, inviting a fervent and growing legion of fans into storylines drawn across mediums: captivating albums with accompanying films and globe-spanning tours. The Ginger Root sound — handmade yet immaculately polished synth-pop, alt-disco, boogie, and soul — takes shape through Lew's lens as an Asian-American growing up enamored by 1970s and '80s music, specifically the creative and cultural dialogue between Japanese City Pop and its Western counterparts from French Pop to Philly Soul to Ram-era McCartney. SHINBANGUMI, his long-awaited third LP, and Ghostly International debut set for physical release in 2024 with a visual album component, translates roughly to a new season of a show. It finds Lew more poised, idiosyncratic, and intentional than ever in a new chapter of life, unlocking "exactly what Ginger Root should sound and feel like," he says. "In terms of instrumentation and musicality, it's the first time that I felt very confident and comfortable with what everything should be comprised of. On the more personal side, I'm coming out of the last four years of writing, touring, and living as a different person; SHINBANGUMI is a platform to showcase my new self."
Since his first release of "aggressive elevator soul" music and dispatch from his beloved weekly YouTube cover series during college, Lew has captained the ship of Ginger Root, able to write, record, and mix the music while creating the art and videos from scratch. What makes Ginger Root special is the project's ability to weave influence beyond pastiche into a bigger picture, exploring that rarified pop pleasure center where referential meets refreshing.
In 2018, the project delivered its first album in collaboration with Acrophase Record, Mahjong Room, followed by several projects including the 2020 LP, Rikki. Between each move, Ginger Root has played alongside many modern Indie standouts, such as Khruangbin, Durand Jones, Omar Apollo, The Marias, and Hippo Campus.
With much of Rikki's release feeling lost to the moments of that year, Lew decided to take a step back and try to write a succinct project to engage listeners for as long as possible. His redirected energy, paired with the newfound influence of Japanese art and culture from his experience learning to speak the language, yielded City Slicker in 2021. On the strength of breakout songs like "Juban District" and "Loretta," the project connected with a massive audience on the internet, with his YouTube amassing 160,000 subscribers and his Spotify nearly hitting 1 million monthly listeners.
Ginger Root released the Nisemono EP in 2022 and has since played sold-out shows across North America, Europe, and Asia as fans await new music. In 2024, Ginger Root presented SHINBANGUMI across a sequential music video series, resuming the conceptual narrative from his 2022 EP Nisemono, which follows Ginger Root as a newly-fired music supervisor in 1987 starting his own media conglomerate, Ginger Root Productions. "If you watch music videos one through eight, you'll be presented with a story that’s comparable to a traditional movie; something I've always wanted to do.
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