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David Gray’s story is unlike any other. He spent almost a decade striving to make a breakthrough, and when it happened it did so in the biggest way imaginable as White Ladder became one of the best-selling British albums of recent decades and established him as an arena-filling artist. As the years have passed, his songcraft has only been deepened by his natural ability to convey specific emotions, atmospheres or, as heard on his acclaimed 2021 album Skellig, a perception of place – all positioning him in the lineage of classic poetic singer songwriters rather than lovestruck acoustic troubadours. While the likes of Ed Sheeran, Adele and Hozier have acknowledged his influence, David has continued to follow his own artistic path.
Now, his next chapter comes with the release of his new album Dear Life on January 17, 2025, through Gray’s own independent label Laugh A Minute Records, in partnership with Secretly Distribution, which is quite possibly the deepest, strangest and loveliest set of his career to date. He launches the album alongside its lead single ‘Plus & Minus’ and unveils plans for a forty one-date world tour, entitled the Past & Present Tour, which includes London’s Royal Albert Hall on April 3 and Dublin’s 3Arena on April 5.
Dear Life is Gray’s thirteenth album. It’s the result of “a starburst of songwriting … it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind. The doubting voices didn’t turn up.” An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.
Premiered today on The Radio 2 Breakfast Show, ‘Plus & Minus’ is David at his most immediately infectious. The song’s piano refrain frames a duet about a fractured relationship, in which his inimitable voice trades words of disillusionment and despair with newcomer Talia Rae, whose smoky vocal simultaneously evokes equal measures of wit and sadness.
Watch the video to “Plus & Minus” HERE
David adds, “Some unfinished songs just refuse to do the polite thing and go away. And that’s certainly true of this one, which had me going round in circles for nearly 20 years to the point where it almost drove me crazy. ‘Plus & Minus’ is based in part on a chord sequence that was born way back in 2004, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it has taken all those long, intervening years to fully fully resolve it. It’s an unusual sort of song for me to write in that it’s an out-and-out three minuet pop song. In a slightly ‘Babylon’ style, it revolves around the same idea three times. In ‘Babylon’, we had Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Here we have ‘You know the way desire is …You know the way the light is … You know the way that time is.’ I could see that from the word go. It’s so full of hooks both lyrically and melodically that it needed a tight arrangement to really optimise their value. This took a LOT of work to get right, but we got there in the end…even if the end was 20 years on from the beginning”
As well as changes in David’s life, an array of other events informed the album’s evolution. Its foundations were set in 2019, but progress was halted by Covid as well as the subsequent need to twice reschedule his huge White Ladder anniversary tour. Revisiting those songs was a reminder of the classic songcraft and electronic undercurrent that made them so memorable, yet David was also compelled to ambitiously broaden his palette, working with producer Ben de Vries to creat dazzlingly rich orchestral strings, horns and woodwind arrangements to correspond with the scale of the themes. A change of location was also a factor, with much of the album recorded in a makeshift studio in Norfolk.
Gray is a songwriter’s songwriter, one of those rare artists who can express themselves as fully through lyrics as through melody, a richly poetic wordsmith with vast musical flair. Dear Life is a big statement, the work of a driven man obsessively focussed on a personal artistic journey.
David adds, “A lot has happened to me. There’s been change on so many levels, all the ups and downs and dramas and tragedies and joys that the slow movement through life brings. This record has been a reckoning with stuff that’s been building up like static for years. But I say this with joy and a smile on my face. I know what I’ve done is as good as anything I could possibly do.”
The Past & Present Tour will commence in January 2025.
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