"Most of my songs are lit by the wonder of being alive. Even if that means feeling blue. And though, no, I don't usually talk or even think about my songs at this level, ultimately you do, as a singer, want to transport people. In a song, when the world is revealed in all its magic, people believe that. That's what sucks them in. You've made that connection."—David Gray
Only the great artists are able to take what's deep inside the soul, bring it to the surface, shine it up and share it like a bittersweet dessert — tastier and more fulfilling to each in their turn who sit at life's banquet. In this way, David Gray is able to touch every member of his audience with emotions: deep, sometimes dark things that reflect his own existence but resonate in some way with everyone who hears his songs.
He is a lyricist capable of navigating the twists and turns of the human condition with nimble and sometimes achingly melancholic verse. It is this quality — everyman as poet laureate — that endears David Gray to his listeners.
That, and a contagious sense of humor. And one of rock 'n' roll's great sandpaper voices.
The eldest of Peter and Kay Gray's three children, David was born in 1970 in Manchester, in Northern England. He was raised, along with his two younger sisters, across the western border in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The Welsh, of course, put a high bounty on literacy and the pursuit of the precise dramatic word, and it was here — where folk music enjoyed a rock-steady following and ageless support system — that the son of a British baker began his love affair with words and music. He recalls being transfixed by Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits as a youngster in the backseat of his dad's car, and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks had a profound effect on him.
Still, he wasn't so deadly serious—the comic ska band Madness was one of his teen-age obsessions, and today Gray still claims to be one of the world's best "nutty dancers."
Gray enrolled at Liverpool Art College because, he told an interviewer, "I knew what I wanted to do. So I worked out the path of least resistance ÷ a few dodgy paintings and I'll be there!" No less of a scholastic underachiever than John Lennon had spent several pre-Beatle years at the art college. In school, Gray formed the pubbing band Waiting for Deffo, but set it aside when offered a solo recording contract on the basis of his superlative songwriting.
In 1992, he moved to London, met and eventually married a lawyer named Olivia, and recorded the plaintive and folky single Birds Without Wings. It was released not long after on the first David Gray album, A Century Ends.
Irish disc jockey Donal Dineen took a shine to Shine, another track from the album, and began giving it regular spins on his hugely popular late-night TV program, No Disco. David Gray's first and still most loyal fan base is in Ireland, and he sends Dineen a Christmas card every year, without fail.
Although it included a number of uptempo tracks, A Century Ends was a product of Gray's strict singer/songwriterly origins. Its to-the-quick lyricism and stark accompaniment attracted a cult following, people who recognized that the purest passions need not be embellished.
It didn't sell, though, and the British Isles declined to erupt into collective spasms of Graymania.
Gray's next album, 1994's Flesh, was well received in the U.K., and great things were predicted for the fledgling artist across the pond in America. He was booked to open a national tour for songstress Shawn Colvin, then on everyone's list with "Sunny Came Home," but the experience did little to nothing to increase Gray's stateside profile.
Neither, sadly, did an opening stint for Radiohead, whose rabid fans paid little attention to the scrappy guy with the acoustic guitar, grinning like a longshoreman on leave and furiously nodding his head in time to the intense rhythms of his music.
(Gray, did, however, manage to mischeviously set fire to Radiohead's dressing room. Or so the legend goes.)
There was no shortage of powerfully emotive material on Flesh, which remains the most personal set of lyrics in Gray's well-scrawled notebook. From tender declarations of devotion (Mystery of Love, Falling Free) to a joyous testosterone rockout (Made Up My Mind), Flesh revealed Gray to be, at the end of the day, just another guy in love with his wife, albeit a guy with the ability to channel his passions into poetry at once intensely personal and universally understandable.
Flesh marked the first of Gray's many collaborations with the drummer and bassist Clune, who'd become an integral part of the artist's success strategy as the years passed.
David was back in 1996 with Sell, Sell, Sell, his most accomplished recording yet, one that took him further into rock dynamism and began his flirtation with electronica and the odd sampled sound (this would blossom into a full-fledged affair by decade's end).
Sell, Sell, Sell had more than enough glorious moments to go around — in particular the exhilarating Faster Sooner Now, and Late Night Radio, a sinewy, silven rocker.
The title song referred to the aberrant nature of the music business, which by this time had already given Gray plenty of deeply-felt headaches — each of his three albums had been released on a different label, and he was uncerimoniously pink-slipped after each had failed to ignite his career. Sell, Sell, Sell, goes the old joke, didn't do anything of the sort.
Of particular interest to Grayophiles is the inclusion on this anthology, for the first time ever, of three songs the artist cut from the final running order of Sell, Sell, Sell: Tell Me More Lies, Flame Turns Blue and the shimmery instrumental She's Gone.
Flame Turns Blue was released, in more of a home demo version, on Lost Songs 95-98, which Gray recorded at home and released on his own label. Without a record company to back him up, he distributed the disc out of the trunk of his car.
In addition, Folk Song — one of the most brilliantly evocative pictures Gray has yet to paint — appears not in its Sell, Sell, Sell incarnation but in an earlier take, featuring Gray's jagged, soul-wrenching vocal against the stately, spartan backdrop of an acoustic piano, nothing more. This version is all naked emotion and blind-man's bluffing, a lyric that the literary prince of Wales, Dylan Thomas, might have proudly taken upon his own emotionally ambiguous shoulders.
The tide began to turn for David Gray with his "last ditch" album, 2000's White Ladder, recorded at home on equipment he could barely afford. Its throbbing electronica heart pumped blood through more wistful songs of longing and love held dear, and Gray became an "overnight sensation"—nearly a decade after he'd begun his brilliant journey of self-discovery.