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In Conversation With Colin – David Gray

today2 February 2025 222 115 5

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"David Gray: From White Ladder to Dear Life – A Timeless Journey in Song"

During the late 1990s and early into the millennium, there was one man who personified the British singer-songwriter: David Gray. The multi-million selling arena artist is an ambitious and self-propelled musician originally from Sale, he had released three overlooked albums by the time White Ladder arrived in 1997 to widespread commercial and critical acclaim. What appeared to be an effortless blend of acoustic instruments and electronic samples put David on the map, but it hadn’t been plain sailing. 

Dear Life is the thirteenth studio album and almost a quarter of a century on from his enormous success White Ladder, one of the ten best-selling albums in Britain of the twenty-first century. Gray is still a master in crafting emotional, beguiling folk and rock music as Colin Palmer found out in a recent conversation ahead of a USA and UK tour that includes a date in Swansea. 

The latest release turned out to be a protracted process as David explains “Well it started in 2019 when I got off tour, I had these drum machines and things and I started making these jam tracks and writing songs over the drum machines. We went into the studio and started work and I knew that 2020 was going to be the White Ladder anniversary tour so I knew there was going to be a limit to how much we would get done by the end of the year so I had a few new ideas coming which we didn’t really crystalize into recording form and then obviously what happened with Covid, two days off playing the first show suddenly we had a two year wait before we could play a show.” 

David released the record Skellig during Covid but admits that the recording process for Dear Life was dislocated because of the pandemic. “I basically downed tools” he tells me. “I stopped working with any regularity or intensity, so I let the field go fallow creatively and I didn’t start up properly until we had a zoom call at the end of 2021 when Omicron was happening and there were so many tours in a holding pattern so I suddenly had this time clear and I started to write. That’s when this starburst of writing was happening, then I had to do the whole tour and after that I could get down to finishing this new record. So it was drawn out but I feel time was a great helper it all enriched the process and decisions were taken that made the music stronger as a result, but the whole thing was dragged out over a long period of time.” 

Lyrically the album isadventurous, literate and complete enough to visit repeatedly, “I think if there’s anything that’s really obvious from a song writing point of view is the relish I had in the rhyming schemes and the structure of the lyrics. So if anything has happened in the last thirty years I’ve always been wordy, I love the fabric and the substance of words and the sound of words. The music and the landscape of words they are a place in themselves. But this was more like Blood On The Tracks style writing where I was doing very ambitious rhyming schemes, mad things like going through a whole song and doing the same rhyming scheme from start to finish like I Saw Love and I love the writing process so much but lyrics can be such a bind and they really are the hardest part of the job.” 

David is returning to Wales in March as part of an extensive three month tour. “It’s called Past & Present Tour for the reason that I wanted to make it really obvious that you can expect to hear the big songs from my catalogue – Babylon, This Year’s Love, Please Forgive Me, Sail Away etc. but I feel these new songs are strong enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. So there will be a good swathe of new music mixed in and there’s also going to be some deep dives into the past so the set list will change enormously from night to night. We’ll focus on one particular album or maybe two albums from the past each night so I’m going to do a dive into the past at the same time as playing the big songs and honouring my new music so it’s going to be a highly energised show. 

“I’m playing in Swansea instead of Cardiff and I’ve never played this venue before. I famously had a gig on the White Ladder tour in 1999 and I tried to play the Welsh card, things were going well in Ireland and it didn’t really work out though, I played in Swansea and I remember it was a Tuesday night and we were in a sort of railway arch in a small club and we were sitting backstage having sold forty five tickets and we had a walk-up of minus thirteen, I’ve got unfinished business with Swansea”. 

David chuckles at the memory and is clearly in good humour and high spirits ahead of the upcoming tour safe in the knowledge he has written a new record that easily stands with his best work, and perhaps even surpasses it.  

MARCH 16th SWANSEA ARENA 

Written by Colin Palmer

 

Written by: Kym Frederick

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