A Manifestation Of Songs About Getting Away

Green is greedy and blue is shy but Pink Is The Colour Of Unconditional Love, at least according to Gabriella Cohen’s new album. During our conversation Cohen shows high regard for the hue, stating that pink is also “the colour of an instinctual fact” and “of all things good”. “It’s also the colour of the clitoris, which is pretty funny,” shares the singer-songwriter, “and that’s like everyone’s favourite thing. Well, you know, mostly.”

The follow-up to her roundly lauded debut, Full Disclosure And No Details, Cohen began work on the album in 2017 with longtime collaborator Kate “Babyshakes” Dillon on a farm in the Victorian countryside.

“We had the bulk - well, no, we had the skeletons done in the country,” says Cohen, “because originally we set out to make a 24-track record. We had lots of skeletons done and we thought we were close, but, not close at all, and finished it over a really long, tedious process. But it was fun,” assures Cohen brightly. “Just travelling.”

The pair would produce and engineer the bones over an extended road trip that started with a spot on Foxygen’s US tour and then rambled through Europe. “I stayed in a family friend’s home in a little remote village in Italy, I stayed there for like a month and worked on the record, and then I did the same in Portugal, and the same — just, like, little hideouts around Europe. It’s not as wanky as it sounds, it was really great.”

Along with coastal Portugal and rural Southern Italy, Cohen’s working-holiday hideaways included Mexican cafes, Venice Beach and a small boat in rainy England. "It was Kate’s cousin’s boat," says Cohen, "and she was like, ‘Oh, you can live in that.’ So that’s what happened,” she laughs. “We spent two weeks, like, tracking vocals and finishing guitar bits.”

As far as the writing goes, Cohen maintains the songs were mostly completed two years ago, or even earlier. Lyrically, it’s a surprise to hear. The album is full of scenes from, and longing for, LA and Portugal, and when lined up with Cohen’s recent itinerary it’s not a huge leap on first listen to assume Pink Is the Colour Of Unconditional Love is at least in part a road album.

“True,” says Cohen. “I was really desperate to get to Portugal to meet someone over there. But, no, that wasn’t to do with touring. It just happened. And the writing about LA, that was also about, you know, the same human being. But, no. The songs were written in, like, Balaclava in Melbourne, mostly. When I was just dreaming about getting away... It’s like a manifestation of some kind.”

Cohen’s missing person is a driving theme in Pink Is The Colour Of Unconditional Love; at times the LP strikes as a collection of love letters to someone living in the wrong time zone, an impression that Cohen doesn’t baulk at (“Thank god,” she laughs).

The subject matter makes for a hugely different listen to Cohen’s debut. Cohen’s palette has always been intriguingly flexible, even through the course of individual songs, but the persistent layers of discontented distortion on Full Disclosure And No Details have been washed away. In their place is drawled, bass-driven rock’n’roll, sad-but-groovy bossa nova, Ray Manzarek-esque MIDI noodling and everything in between. The result is much more melancholic than... “Breakup-y,” jokes Cohen, describing the first album. “I guess that was never — the sounds that happen are natural and, yeah, this record was definitely written in love, so I would hope the sounds kind of emulate that, and are less angry and fuzzy.”

Cohen shares that the next album is already in the works, with "quite a big backlog" of songs to draw from; "It's just a question of selecting the songs that you want to bring to light.”

"Hopefully it will be less of a torturous process," says Cohen. Fewer leaky sloops and hidden villages this time around? "More wifi, always more wifi. Americans don't understand the lack of wifi. Not only in Australia but, I mean, I made a film clip last week, right, for Music Machine, and I couldn't even send it on Google Drive. I had to post the USB in the mail... I mean, it was supposed to come out today but the Post - there was a public holiday yesterday [laughs]. So there's a USB somewhere, with the film clip on it. In the mail."

Music Machine only dropped the morning of our interview and as well as being Cohen's latest single it's also her directorial debut. "I'm really excited about that clip," shares Cohen. "I directed it and worked with my two sisters on it. And my sisters, like, styled and choreographed the clip, and it's all chicks. And it's really sexy. It's just really fulfilling my pop dream of, you know, all the sex and the glamour. So that's, yeah, that's what it's about.

"I'm not in it, which is great, but I can, like, objectify my friends."