The growth of Cigarettes after Sex has been a slow burn. A heartbroken drive on Valentine’s Day 10 years ago, with Sade on repeat, provoked the question in frontman and songwriter, Greg Gonzalez’ mind, “How do I make a record that feels like that?”.
Borrowing erotic romanticism from the immortal RUSSH male, Leonard Cohen and taking themes of Bob Dylan’s narrative vignettes, Gonzalez and his band have created a sound that is brave in both honesty and simplicity. Ever consistent in lyrical themes, Gonzalez has given us a third album, X’s, about his personal experiences with relationships and one in particular that lasted four years. RUSSH spoke to Gonzalez about his lyrical style, permanent influences and music as medicine.
Whilst Gonzalez has an androgynous voice that floats above reverb drenched instrumentation, his latest record, X’s, focuses on the heavy feeling of heartbreak and wanting to crystalise those memories in art to forever remember and learn from. When writing such a personal and honest record, I’m curious to know whether Gonzalez finds this confronting to lay it all on the line or whether it's a compulsion.
“There's definitely a need to it, but I know it does take a bit of courage... and usually it’s better to go with what felt like it was going to be too much," says Gonzalez. "That can be really rewarding, and that a lot of those times when I've done that, it seems to be what people latch on to."
Cigarettes After Sex, as the name would imply, lyrically deal with lust, desire and sex, and for Gonzalez, he is “just saying that romance and sexuality exist, personally, for me, and in the sphere where you can't divorce them. And so to talk about romance in a powerful and true way, it has to contain the sexuality.”
Whilst female writers might have cited Anaïs Nin, Gonzalez was deeply influenced by the work of Richard Brautigan, in particular The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, admiring his ability to write about things that were a little vulgar or dirty, but which retained a sweetness in their telling.
However, it is not just the lyrics of Cigarettes after Sex that are revealing, the instrumentation and production, though sophisticated, is quite minimal and sits behind Gonzalez’s image making. When asked why the record could be described as a little sparse, Gonzalez explained that he’s mostly painting these memories, almost writing memoirs, which can be linguistically rich.
For some songs, like Kiss It Off Me, it is more like screenwriting where he can see interesting images that he has not necessarily lived through. There is an imagined reality and a lived experience, but “they still exist in the same universe in my writing at least. To me it’s like there's a dream, and then there's a reality, and there's the in between stuff you know?”
So for the sound of X’s, Gonzales wanted it to sound “kind of like late 80s, early 90s soft hits radio” which he would have heard as a kid – Paula Abdul, Madonna, Richard Marx and Roxette he cites as references, along with the Bee Gees, Marvin Gaye and Sade, of course.
All these artists made up the palette and can be heard as distant murmurs in the record. Gonzalez explains to me that “one of my favourite songs is Blue Moon by Elvis. There's almost nothing in that song. It's just his voice and, kind of, guitar. That's all you need, and it feels celestial” so rather than adding swirling orchestra arrangements to heighten feeling, Gonzalez takes everything away. You are only left with the feeling, leaving space for the emotion to breathe within the song.
Whilst the song writing process might be solo, the rest of the band are essential in bringing together the Cigarettes After Sex sound, and Gonzalez feels like Dylan going to the band, or perhaps works like Tom Petty taking a song to The Heartbreakers. “We're all united, they're brothers to me.” Cigarettes After Sex as a band grew into the atmosphere that their name generates, as the band left the bright electronic sounds they began with into the darker dream-like world they now inhabit.
In spite of honest lyricism, there is a mystery to the band that has been preserved through their organic growth and the fact they have never made a music video, despite millions of plays on YouTube. I’m curious to know why the band shied away from this added layer of storytelling or if they were ever tempted to make one.
Gonzalez reveals he “was totally tempted, because I thought about this and music videos were actually so important growing up".
"When I grew up, I'd be about five years old and my grandmother had this huge big screen TV, so I would watch VH1, and feel blown away by the video for Mysterious Ways, Like A Prayer or, like, Sledgehammer.” However, when he started the band, he felt it was more powerful not to make videos, in a similar way to J.D. Salinger saying, “you can’t make a movie out of Catcher in the Rye”, Gonzalez wanted the listener to create their own imagery in their mind, and not rob anyone of that experience.
Gonzalez is always chasing the universality of art and it’s eternal themes, when thinking about his music he thought, “I want this music to be around for you, eternally, like listening to Chopin or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is “just a beautiful romantic song. It's elemental.”
Cigarettes After Sex look forward to touring the new record, with Gonzalez balancing it out with some more creative pursuits: having those traditional long nights of drinking in bars til sunrise, and allowing for some time his more introverted self that likes to watch movies alone. However, the wanderlust is there, “if we could play Antarctica, I'd play Antarctica. Like I really want to go whenever we can go.” An audience of penguins could match the band's monochromatic aesthetic…
Having written the new record in the light of a recent heartbreak, and it being an area of expertise it would seem, I’m curious as to how Gonzalez got over that first big heartbreak, and unsurprisingly it was with medicinal music.
"Not to sound pretentious but it was really music that saved me back then," he says. "I remember I could not sleep, my mind was spinning out like crazy all night. I just had to like reach for albums. I don't want to take drugs, I don't want to drink, I don't want to do anything. I just had to face it. And there's some beautiful records you can put on.”
For those nursing a broken heart, the Gonzalez go-to sonic soothers are, Brian Eno, With Love by Ennio Morriconi and Floating Into the Night by Julee Cruise. And he hopes his records will be as medicinal for someone else.
