Sex and the songwriter

“The name was based on a friends with privileges relationship I had a while back. The girl would always smoke after we were together...I liked the feeling and ritual of it,” recalls singer-songwriter Greg Gonzalez, founder of ambient pop collective Cigarettes After Sex. Sure enough, there's a lot of sex in Gonzalez's songs, a select sheaf of which will be crooned out to the band's protracting fan base at the NH7 Weekender music festival in Pune today.

But sex in the Texan's songs does not come with the finger-flippin' moaning of a Rocket Queen (Guns N' Roses), nor the barely-concealed innuendos of an Ariana Grande (Side to Side). Sex, for Gonzalez, seems to be yearnful, even affectionate, awash with a sense of intimacy many fail to associate with the purported unincredibility of Tinder-Bumble haunted millennial loves. Lyrics like you know that I'm obsessed with your body /But it's the way you smile that does it for me (Sweet) seem to look at both love and sex through a lorgnette of desire and melancholy, not necessarily in isolation, not essentially in company. But it's a given with Gonzalez, should the two (love and sex) make an appearance together, in his life or in his writing, he'll be cool to tell you so, in so many words. "These (songs) come from an honest place for me, from real stories or inside jokes with lovers, and all represent real situations or at least real people in my life,” he explains. 

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Not surprising then, that album opener K (part of the band's eponymous debut studio album, dropped in 2017), an ode to Gonzalez's muse Kristen, lingers in the same hazy horizon of friendship, love and lovemaking, with lines like We had made love earlier that day with no strings attached / But I could tell that something had changed, how you looked at me then. The band's loyal base amongst youngsters can be explained by this unaffected connect between the fleeting and the feeling, and Gonzalez's easy acknowledgement of both. 

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But that's not to say that his songs are all the colour of strawberry-shakes and stolen kisses. This is a man that's pally with his swear words and brings them out out when you're least expecting it, like, what does it mean, if I tell you to go f*ck yourself / or if I say you're beautiful to me (Affection). Whatever the mood, Gonzalez keeps reiterating that his songs come from a space entirely personal — so then, to lay bare this private world in front of strangers, at concerts and across the big bad Internet – how challenging is it? “Somehow, Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby, our first EP (released in 2012) went viral in the fall of 2015. We're still not sure how it happened,” laughs the frontman, recalling the YouTube ascent of the quartet, currently involving Phillip Tubbs, Randall Miller and Jacob Tomsky. The breakaway fame, of course, meant further blurring of the public and personal, but the man who names Francoise Hardy, Erik Satie, Miles Davis and Bob Dylan as his greatest musical influences, (though the band's sound is attributed more to Julee Cruise and Cocteau Twins), wasn't too shook. Instead, he began the next big adventure of meshing into his original memories, fragments of listener response. “My favorite memories (of a song) could be a fan sobbing, two lovers holding each other tightly to the music, or the girl holding her phone up to the music, obviously letting it play for someone she cares about on the other end of the line,” Gonzalez rummages. 

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These memories, collected in course of a single studio album and the ensuing world tour, might add depth and dimension to Gonzalez's future writing, but the sound would still be distinguished by the woozy androgyny of his vocals, or the cinematic descriptors he's partial to. Does he worry? About the band being stuck in its own otherness? “Of course. But I’d like to follow more in the footsteps of artists I feel went very deep into one sound and were cohesive, rather than attempt to be eclectic and constantly reinvent ourselves. I think of Enya, Mark Rothko, Morton Feldman, Chet Baker…” trails off Gonzalez, with a discreet promise of “something to show from the second LP soon”. Which leaves lovers, loners and star gazers at the mercy of an existing body of 27 Cigarettes After Sex songs. For now.