Line of Fire

David Gray

A reinvigorated DAVID GRAY is back with a potent new album bristling with passion and purpose

If there's any modern British singer-songwriter with a set of laurels upon which he can comfortably rest, it would be David Gray. With 12 million in album sales, the best-selling album in Ireland ever (White Ladder), two Ivor Novello Awards, a Q Award, two Brit nominations and a Grammy nomination, Gray has earned his rightful place as one of today's most accomplished and revered musical artists. But to hear him tell it, he somehow lost his "voice" somewhere along the way in the recent years.

His new album, Draw the Line, his first in four years, is proof that he's found it.

Full of fiery conviction, both musically and lyrically, Gray seems to have tapped into a rich creative vein, unleashing some of the most powerful songs of his career. As he prepared to hit the road in support of the record, he talked to Playback about his new attitude.

You described your last album as having been written from perspectives outside of yourself. How would you describe the songs on your new album?

There were quite a few songs on Life in Slow Motion where it was almost like being in someone else's head. I had been writing for a film when I made that record, so maybe that influenced me. It was quite liberating. But I think the spirit of the music on this record is much more outward, more direct. A lot of these new songs are steeped in a lot of internal emotions for me. This time around it seems the dimly lit interiors have changed, the front doors have been kicked open and I'm like a Magnum photographer running around in the streets taking a snapshot of everything. It's like trying to sing the world, actually, which is like my first album in some sense. I want to encapsulate everything. I'm plucking images out of the ether.

You released White Ladder in 2000. Most of your music since then has been written and released against a backdrop of great turmoil in the world. Do you feel compelled to respond to that, directly or indirectly, in your work?

We're all woven into the fabric of what goes on in the world. The bigger world is within us, as we are within it. There's no escaping it. To be overtly political or issue-based is something I sort of struggle with, to be honest. It's very difficult to be a protest singer these days. It's like the world has eaten itself one too many times.

Yet in this new music there is a muscularity, a bit of a toughness, that was an enabling thing. It unleashed a thunderhead of ideas that had been brewing inside me for ages. And I found a voice that I had lost somewhere down the highway. There's a panorama of angst on display and it incorporates all elements of our culture and our world.

You can't avoid the world really. We're assaulted daily by this torrent of information and misinformation, truths, half-truths and outright lies. So all of this is circulating through my brain just like everybody else's. It can't help but spill out into the music.

What's happened with me is, suddenly, my mood has changed, and I've gotten over some things, be they deaths, or success or the profound changes that came all at once and tumbled on top of each other. I'm suddenly out of the shadow of them, and I just don't care about trying to prove a point.

I feel like I'm firing on all cylinders with my music and I'm reinvigorated. I'm 100% awake, 100% in command of what I'm doing and why. And that's a wonderful feeling. It doesn't last forever either. How you weave the bigger picture of politics into your work is a constant thorn in my side. But with this record I actually feel like I spat a few home truths out in my own way. So it gives me a chance to get in the world's face a bit, which I'm enjoying the sensation of immensely

You mentioned the panoramic quality of this album. The production also has a cinematic quality to it too. Having done the home studio approach as well as a big studio approach in the past, what was your goal with this record?

One of the rules I set was that I wanted to record everything live. It had to be human, and believably so. We had to be able to play it. If we couldn't play it, we couldn't record it. I wasn't interested in layering things. I wanted its elbows to be out. I wanted it to be a real thing.

Do songs come to you in one fell swoop. Or do you have seeds of ideas that germinate for awhile?

It's a mixture. The words came right along with the music for "Draw the Line" and I started to write the words straight away and I spent a whole night writing the thing. We recorded it the next morning. Another time, with "Fugitive," I got some of the words, key words like "fugitive," and bits and pieces but I didn't know what the rest of it was going to be about. And I didn't write that until about a year later -- after we had recorded the music. In "Draw the Line" I have a line: "carnivals of silverfish waiting to dance upon our bones." I had that line written down for years and years, and wondering when I would get a chance to use it. Then when that song came up, I thought "Bam! Here's the spot."

You hope all the lyrics come at once. That's the best way. Then it's all done. It's harder to get back into a song after time. That's one of my rules. If it's really starting to happen, just stick with it, even if it pisses your wife off.

Do you think you can push a song to completion through sheer discipline?

Not always. Sometimes you're just worn out. That's all you're going to get today. You shut down. Sometimes it's just a joy, and the stuff is coming. And you may have too much of it. You need to lose great lines, great verses, great choruses, because there's just too much. You have to cut something out. I think Tom Waits said, "It's like needing an acre of dough to make one biscuit."

Every creative exercise is like that. There's so much you do that doesn't go anywhere, but it sort of falls back into the soil and replenishes the next thing.

It's been a few years since pushing a new album. Where is your head at now about doing the work that needs to be done?

I believe in this record. It has a potency to it that I haven't sensed in awhile. It happened to me with White Ladder. But this time I'm trying to make it happen. It is an act of will.

-Erik Philbrook