David Gray: A New Beginning (Interview)

English singer-songwriter David Gray is on his way to New Zealand where he will play three shows in April in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Gray has been recording for over 20 years now, with his latest album, Mutineers, finding him exploring new sonic landscapes thanks to producer Andy Barlow of Lamb. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to David Gray this past February about his collaboration with Barlow and how it triggered a “new cycle” in his music.

Click here to listen to the interview with David Gray:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: To start, I was wondering if you watched the Grammy Awards last night at all. Is that something of interest to you?

DG: I’m not very interested in Awards, no. Anything wonderful and glamourous, I never turn it on.

MD: Very good. I know you were nominated a few years ago, so I didn’t know if…

DG: Yeah, no. I wasn’t even aware that it was happening. I know that the BAFTAs… lots of awards this time of year isn’t there?

MD: Yup it’s the season.

DG: I wasn’t a participant even through the television.

MD: Alright, very good. I noticed Annie Lennox did a killer version of I Put A Spell On You, it was one of the highlights and I know she had worked with you in the past, she did a duet with you.

Watch Annie Lennox perform on The Grammys here:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZEChv1AaOk]

DG: Yeah good ol’ Annie, she’s great.

MD: Yeah I think she kind of took everybody by surprise there, they weren’t quite expecting it. Anyway, it’s interesting because we have the band, the electronic duo Lamb coming here to Auckland in less than a week and I know that Andy Barlow produced your most recent album.

DG: He did, yeah.

MD: Seems only right that we should talk about that. How did that come to be, why did you decide to work with him?

DG: Well I was in the market for a producer. I realised I needed somebody to unlock something new that I wasn’t going to get to myself. So we sent a few emails out to various people, the problem with all these very successful hit producers is that they’re all incredibly busy. So while I was waiting for some sort of schedules and times and replies, my manager suggested that I get in touch with Andy who was someone he knew. He said he just thought that there was something good about him and it could work. So I got in touch with him, we were going to meet for coffee to talk about music and the night before, Andy rang me and said Dave, I can’t see the point in talking about music, why don’t you just send me a track and then come down to my studio and we’ll work on it tomorrow. So we chose a song, I sent it to him and I went down and worked on it. So I loved the sort of jump in with both feet approach and it worked really well. It wasn’t an easy day but by the end of the day, I could tell that something was happening that was neither me, neither him. So we were somewhere working in a new ground that was different for both of us and that’s what I was after. So we had one more go and that went well as well and from there on, I signed up to Barlow United for the year, for the full album and it was a very intense experience but I’m very proud of what we did.

MD: What made it an intense experience?

DG: Well I mean, I gave him the keys to come in and smash up what I did and beyond that just, he has a very different way of working and he couldn’t cope with the way that I am. So we had to work to his beat, which I found drove me almost demented at times. We’d have to take breaks and we’d have to miss the odd day here and there cause he was getting tired or whatever. He was sensitive where I’m just like a… it was good, it humanized me but it drove me crazy too. It was relinquishing control essentially, If had to boil it down to a small phrase. That was very difficult and also I let him in, he smashed things up but it was very nerve-wracking before we built anything to replay them.

MD: Right.

DG: All we had was lots of broken things and that point was very harrowing. I felt like I was stepping into the void and I’m not very shy about getting naked with my music. I’m very confident in what I do, I’ll just do it. In front of people I’ll get straight into it.But at the same time you are letting someone into a very private zone. So it was a challenge, but I think all that sort of vulnerability and on edge stuff, it made something special happen and when it really started to come together, well we got very, very excited and a real sense of joy and raw energy came into the thing and something very spontaneous happened as well, we discovered things together on tape and that’s what gives the recordings their zesty quality.

MD: Right. Have you been very familiar with Lamb before working with Andy?

DG: No but I knew a few of the songs. They were pretty successful here for a while. They were a kind of hip kind of electronic kind of sophisticated kind of electronic vibe. So I did know about them, yeah but I wasn’t following them that closely but they had a few songs that kind of came through that I knew about. So I thought Andy was good but I didn’t know whether there was going to be any common ground as it were. But I mean I love the fact that he took me into a world of electronic sound and really processing the sound. It’s much more of a landscape, a soundscape, there was a real cinematic feel to what he did to the songs.

MD: Were you concerned about how your fans would react? I mean you’ve been doing this for a long time you have certainly people who follow everything that you do. When you take a left turn like that musically or  a change, is that a concern of yours that people are going …?

DG: No. It felt good to me. So I put all my eggs in this basket, I had nowhere else to go with it. I was just making it, I made it and we were both delighted and everybody who knew us and who knew the music, the band and management and family, everyone was digging it. So I wasn’t worried. It still felt very immediate to me, it wasn’t like I took a really radical left turn.

MD: Yeah.

DG: Took the lyrics out.

MD: That’s true. I think I read somewhere where you looked at this album as the beginning of a new cycle and I’m wondering why you thought that at this point in your career you needed to start a new cycle?

DG: Yeah I do feel that something ended and something else has begun. For sure, and I think it was a furnace like intensity for the making of this and I came out of it a changed person. With a little bit of help from Andy, I think with a strength of my convictions I’m going to push on some of the territory we claimed on this record sonically, I’m going to go on further into it with a little bit of help from him and maybe some others too. So I feel like it’s a new beginning and the vocabulary of sound and ideas that were springing out of this record, I want to take that further and it’s changed the way that I’m thinking. I reversed the flow in a kind of Ghostbusters reference there, I’m happy to get that one in there. I reversed the flow on my writing process, I was writing from lyrics back into music which isn’t the way that I work and it meant different things happened, I was using other people’s words as well. I was finding musical rhythms everywhere and trying to start songs with them. So I was putting myself in places I didn’t really know what I thought and only afterwards did I realise it was good or not. So those experimental things made the record a lot more interesting and they captured some new ground. So I will be continuing in that vein looking for new angles, weird and wonderful ways to make music, or not or just straightforward exercises and try to do it in a slightly different way. So I’ll be pushing the envelope to try and find something to keep my mind on fire about the whole thing.

MD:  Now this new ground, does that relate itself to your live performance as well? Do you apply that to any of the older songs? Is it an obvious thing when you perform live now?

DG: I think some of the older songs just lent themselves to the way that we’re performing this record, they’ve changed a little accordingly. So songs like My Oh My or Silver Lining, both off White Ladder fade away to having a slightly different feel but they’re very identifiably still the same song, but we’ve got 7 people singing in this band and 8 people on stage. So it’s a big soulful sound, it’s a celebrational sound. There’s lots of big vocal parts all over Mutineers. So with the live set now, that’s what it’s all about, it’s a celebrational thing. So there’s still contrast, I know I do a few songs in a real striped down way, we do old, new and other. So it’s hard to cram it all into 2 hours, that’s all I know, it just doesn’t seem quite long enough anymore. So, yeah, some of the old songs have had to change to fit this new band and this new sound and this new feeling. So it’s definitely been, every time I go out, I adapt things a little bit, I never just play the same old thing the same old way. Some songs like Please Forgive Me are harder to shake up, this year’s love They just want to be the way that they are, but even so, there are subtle things you can do.

MD: I got to say, it’s amazing how enthusiastic you sound about what you’re doing at this point in your career, a lot of people once they’ve been doing it for 10 or 15 years tend to kind of fall into kind of predictability about themselves. I read somewhere that somebody was referring to Mutineers as kind of an artistic rebirth, which I guess kind of a backhanded compliment but at the same time, was there something within you or happening within your life that caused you to possibly get a new spark and think about music more intensely than you had been?

DG: No it’s just the way that it’s going. I mean, it is a rebirth, it was the intent, yeah and that’s how it felt. So I don’t see that theres any downside to that statement, I just think that’s the nature of the seasons, there’s Spring then Summer, Autumn and Winter and then you come around again. It’s like you can’t get perpetual spring.

MD: Right.

DG: You have to go through it, you keep following your path, it takes you where it takes you. Sometimes you have to challenge yourself. So I took a bit of a fork in the road here to hopefully find something else, something new, new  vistas, that’s what I keep saying, it’s a creative traverse. You can’t just keep going up, sometimes you have to go across and then you can get a new way up. So that’s the name of the name, if your making music for 25 years, you’re going to have to find ways to re-invigorate yourself. But that’s life itself as well, we all get very jaded, we get trapped, we get deadened, we stop seeing the wood for the trees. So it’s the same thing in the creative sense. So that’s what it was this time, it wasn’t like something happened and I had some big epiphany, like it felt like I was at the end of something and I wasn’t going to make a record until I was making something that had a feeling of zest, renewal of energy to it, that’s how I wanted to feel. So it took a lot of doing.

MD: Now you just released a new single, a new version of Snow In Vegas as a duet with Leann Rimes. Working with a singer like Leann Rimes doesn’t really seem like the obvious follow up to working with Andy Barlow and his electronica. So how does that kind of fit in with things?

Click here to listen to Snow In Vegas with Leann Rimes:

DG: Well I like it cause’ it isn’t obvious. The reason this happened was a genuine reason, Leann was a big fan of my music and she came for a couple of shows. When we were talking about music backstage, I was talking about duets and I mentioned this as a possible duet and she just put it on her iPhone and sang along in perfect harmony with the whole thing and I was like wow. So she said I can sing it on stage if you want, she’s not backwards in coming forward. So I thought about it for a little bit and I said okay then you’re on. So she came out and sang it that was in Phoenix on the last tour. So it sprung from that. So I really like Leann anyway, I think she’s got an amazing voice and it suits this song, it’s got that sort of American sound.

MD: Right.

DG: It’s the most traditional sounding track on the record in some ways. So yeah, so that’s how it came about. She can really, really do it, and it was amazing hearing her put in the parts down, she’s right there all the time.

MD: Now when you come to New Zealand, you’re doing 3 dates in April in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington. Does that give you an opportunity to spend any time and look at the countryside?  I know you’ve been to New Zealand before, so I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to kind of look around and explore at all.

DG: We’ve had a few days off in the past. I’m hoping we’re going to get at least one.

MD: Right.

DG: You never know, that’s the nature of touring. You’d think that coming that far there might be some room but they usually got some promo for me to do.

MD: Right.

DG: They don’t want me to cross the cultural divide, keep me in the media so I don’t experience anything.

MD: Right.

DG: There’s one thing that’s the same the world over, its bloody media isn’t it.

MD: I’m afraid so, yes.

DG: No bloody Lord Of The Rings shit for me. Straight in the studio, talking to somebody. So that will be my interesting experience. So I don’t know how much time we’ve got, to be honest my schedule’s changed around a couple of times, I’m not actually sure how it’s working. So hopefully when I’ve some time when we get, we usually do something really good, like for one day we went out whale watching, we didn’t see any whales particularly but we had a great time and we went, what’s it called, quadbiking and that was mental.

MD: Right.

DG: So yeah, we bungee jumped. We don’t hang around.

MD: I think bungee jumping is hanging around but that’s beside the point.

DG: Yeah that’s how it finishes anyway.

Click here for more information about David Gray’s 2015 New Zealand tour dates.