Cigarettes After Sex is a peculiar band. They have a slow, melancholic sound inspired by niche interests and yet they have pop star numbers — 56 million listeners on Spotify — and they are in the middle of a world tour playing stadiums. Greg Gonzalez, the man behind the project, has broken through with a less-is-more strategy, where he’s been able to turn the lights down and with just a couple of elements set a mood that is cinematic.
Greg Gonzalez: Greg Gonzales is the lead singer of Cigarettes After Sex.
Justin Barney: We actually we have a DJ here [at WNXP], Aaron Monty, who went to Eastwood High School in El Paso and graduated a year ahead of you.
GG: That is unreal. That name sounds familiar.
JB: I asked for some insight and he said that you were into metal in high school.
GG: Yeah, for sure. I was a metal head when I was, let’s say, like 12 years old. I started getting a different kind of music later but metal has always stayed around. It’s always been there somewhere. The only thing that remains from that metal period is like, maybe, the all-black element. It feels like very metal to me.
JB: Have you been in metal bands?
GG: Yeah, for sure. The first album I ever made by myself was a death metal album on cassette when I was 12 years old. The band is called Mortuary. My band in high school was metal, but it was supposed to be kind of like the Beatles, Abbey Road meets Mr. Bungle with, like, metal flourishes. It’s kind of like, you know, like songs like “You Never Give Me Money” or “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” Songs that change a lot. I was really into that. There’d be a section, then another section, then another. It was kind of like patchwork writing. But then it would go into a metal section, too. I was singing melodically at that time. I was trying to sing like Paul McCartney or something.
JB: So how did you get from there to here?
GG: I think just by noticing what I liked the most. I was doing all that stuff and it was great, it felt like very clever. But then I was thinking the most fulfilment I ever get from writing is writing something about romance and love. That sort of became more of a theme in my life, falling in love for the first time in high school and other relationships I had. So I kind of got led there emotionally. Around that time, too, I started to listen to different music. It was it was discovering, you know, Francis Hardy and like Erik Satie, Chopin. Then I got really into Hope Sandoval and Mazzy Star all over again, Cocteau Twins. And I started to notice that the music that I love the most was slower music and more melancholy. So I thought, OK, let me build a new identity around the stuff that I love the most. That’s pretty much where Cigarettes took off.
JB: Your voice is really key to Cigarettes After Sex. When you approach a microphone, there is a lot of the impetus to project. How did you find that soft voice that you sing in, which is, I think, very much of a different approach than a lot of people have when they get to the mic?
GG: That I think is kind of like shyness in a way. I’d been in bands where I was singing very outward and projecting. Then I started playing a lot of like solo gigs in my hometown. They let me play in restaurants or wineries where it was just me and a guitar. And I would pick my entire repertoire. So I was playing like Ricky Nelson, Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline and Marvin Gaye and Motown songs. I started to kind of get that kind of more gentle approach, and it felt really nice to me. It just felt really right to me. It was really quiet.
I remember sometimes the owners would be like, “Hey, like you got to pick up the pace. That’s a little too mellow” or something. And they would get mad at me. But what I noticed, though, was that people in the audience would always come up and be like, “You sound amazing.” So I, stuck to my guns and didn’t really change anything up.
JB: A lot of the songs you really detailed, how much of your writing is biographical and how much of it is imagined?
GG: I try to stay as autobiographical as possible. But there’s definitely like a spectrum. Like a song like “K.,” “Hideaway” and “Dreams From Bunker Hill” those are complete memoirs where all the storytelling is totally true. Then there’s stuff where it’s a memoir, but it gets a little dreamier. That’s like a song, like “X’s.” That is a memoir that is based on a real relationship, but there’s sort of like dreamy edges to that song that make it more surreal. And then there’s like the total opposite, like “Kiss It Off Me” or “Bubblegum” where I just invented a story as if I was a screenwriter and kind of just thought that the mood seems intriguing, but the events haven’t really happened. But I’m always aiming for it to be as autobiographical as possible and for it to be a complete memoir.
JB: Listening to Cigarettes after Sex, so much of your music is driven by the bass. And that’s one thing that Aaron Monty said, he said that you played in the jazz band in high school and that you played the bass.
GG: Yeah, I started playing bass around 12 years old and pretty much played jazz bass until I left El Paso. The bass is probably the most active thing in Cigarettes, too. It leads everything and it has the freedom to move around more than the guitar and the drums. The drums are so static in Cigarettes. The guitar kind of stays really atmospheric and riff-based, for lack of a better term. So the bass is really free.
JB: Have you been surprised by the success of Cigarettes?
GG: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s weird because I’ve been dreaming about it for so long and wishing that something would happen since I was like a little kid. So it really feels like it took forever for that to happen. It feels like a cosmic event. I always dreamed that this would happen. I was always wishing that we would play somewhere like Madison Square Garden and play venues and that the band would be like a worldwide phenomenon or, you know, something like that. So it was such a long time dream. It’s like, I don’t know, I guess that’s persistence or something.