When We First Met

Greg Gonzalez often thinks in cinematic terms. “It should have a rougher feel, like a documentary would,” the Cigarettes After Sex frontman tells Apple Music of the recording process for Cry, his ambient pop outfit’s sophomore LP. “In film, it's like, 'Do you shoot on location or do you shoot on set?' We weren't in some office recording studio where there were standards of how you do things and gear set up. Our overall philosophy is to avoid studios. We should just record where it feels nice.” For Cry, that meant returning to a cathedral they’d once played in Germany and setting up in the courtyard of a Mallorcan villa. “It definitely made everyone play in a very relaxed way, which was exactly what I was looking for,” Gonzalez says. “In the end, I liked the energy in the gentle landscape of Mallorca, the wind in the trees under the stars. And that's how the feeling of the record was, too.” Here are the stories behind every song on the album.

Spinnin’ is my fifth album as a leader, the first within the jazz piano trio idiom. For this recording, I called a drummer with whom I played quite a bit during my past years in NY – currently with tenor Joe Lovano – the young Otis Brown III, and the bass player everybody digs (Dianne Reeves, Joshua Redman, Charles Lloyd…), Reuben Rogers. ~ Laurent Coq.