December 21, 2025 • 31 mins
Join Buzz Knight on Takin’ A Walk for an music interview with British singer-songwriter David Gray, the multi-platinum artist behind the iconic album “White Ladder” and timeless hits like “Babylon,” “Sail Away,” and “Please Forgive Me.”
In this compelling conversation , David Gray opens up about his latest music and creative evolution, sharing insights into his songwriting process and what drives his artistic vision today. The Grammy-nominated musician reflects on the musical influences that shaped his distinctive sound—from folk legends to contemporary artists—and how those inspirations continue to inform his work decades into his career.
Gray takes listeners behind the scenes of life on tour, discussing the challenges and rewards of performing live, connecting with audiences around the world, and maintaining artistic authenticity while touring. From intimate venues to festival stages, hear stories from the road that only a veteran performer can tell.
This episode explores David Gray’s remarkable journey from struggling artist to international success, the enduring legacy of “White Ladder”—one of the best-selling albums in UK history—and how he’s continued to evolve as a songwriter and performer. Whether you’re a longtime fan or discovering his music for the first time, this conversation offers rare insights into one of the most respected voices in contemporary music.
Topics covered:
∙ David Gray’s latest music and creative projects
∙ Musical influences and inspirations throughout his career
∙ Stories from decades of touring and live performance
∙ The making and impact of “White Ladder”
∙ Songwriting craft and artistic evolution
∙ British folk and singer-songwriter traditions
Tune in to Takin’ A Walk with Buzz Knight for this essential conversation with David Gray—where music history meets contemporary artistry.
If you like this show check out the podcast Artist Friendly with Joel Madden
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Support the show: https://takinawalk.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Taking a Walk the music and mysticism. It's contained within
a word. Each word was a magic incantation when it began.
We don't we failed to see them now for what
they are. They were magic things that could only be
uttered by magic people when they were devised as a
descriptive labeling tool. To say, the word of something precious
(00:23):
was in itself an act of being precious or being
with something magic.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to the Taken a Walk Podcast with your host,
Buzz Night. If you like this podcast, share it with
your friends and check out our companion podcast, Music Save Me,
hosted by Lynn Hoffman. Today, buzz gets the inside story
from the acclaimed singer songwriter David Gray. Buzz Night is
joined by David Gray on the Taken a Walk Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Now, David Gray, thanks for being Undertaken a Walk Podcast,
My pleasure. So, since the podcast is called taken, I
do have to ask you first if you could take
a walk with someone living or dead, possibly in the
music side of things, but it doesn't have to be
(01:11):
Who would you take a walk with and where would
you take a walk with them?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's interesting. Assuming that there was a magical language dissolving barrier,
I might take a walk with the mystic Roomy. I'd
imagine he'd have a few things to say he's just
popped into my head, and have a little wander. I'd
(01:36):
take him along the coast of east of England where
I've got a house, which is probably my favorite place
to be. So we'd wander through the dunes and the
beach and consider the mysteries of the universe and everything
contained therein.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Just you describing it took me there, David, that was
just fabulous. Thank you so much. I appreciated. First of all,
we're going to talk about your thirteenth studio album, Dear Life,
and also you've been out on the past and present
world tour, and I have to tell you a story.
I live outside of Boston and I popped in just
(02:15):
a little while ago to my favorite restaurant called Helen's
Restaurant and conquered mass and the gentleman there who works
behind the oven came running up to me like he
often does, and he said, I have to tell you
I saw David Gray recently in Boston.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
He was unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
He was just going on and on how fabulous you were,
and I said, I'm going to be speaking to him
in a little while, so then the waitress.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Comes over, you're going to be speaking to David Gray.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
So I was the buzz, if you will, of Helen's restaurant,
but more importantly, you were the buzz of Helen's restaurant.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Excellent. Well, I've got great support up in the Boston area.
I think that Irish influence has made it a very
strong it's always even going back to like early shows
on the White Ladder run back in two thousand when
we were just starting, Boston was a sort of stronghold
and it's remained one and people are very sort of
(03:18):
passionate readily, so I think in a way that's a
little more relatable. I think because of that sort of
Irish influence that feels very strong there. So yeah, it's
been a good spot. And that was the very first
show of this tour, so there was a lot built
into it.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
It was.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
A joyful occasion. We just had to go for it.
The rehearsal time was over, let it all hang out
on stage, which we surely did so I'm glad everyone
enjoyed it. That was there.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So I've heard that you were inspired by, among other folks,
Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Kat Stevens. Can you
talk about how their storytelling styles have influenced your lyrics
and music?
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Of course, yeah, I mean the sort of ambient influence
of the music my parents were listening to in the
early seventies when I was just a little boy. Definitely
sort of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Rod Stewart, the Stones,
the Beatles, and my dad was crazy about like Tea
(04:29):
for the Tillerman and you know, Catch Bull at four
and several of those early Jesus Cat Stephens records. So
they definitely seeped in. I think the sort of soundscape
of them and the kind of passion of them. I
know they were very mainstream, but they had a kind
of kind of very soulful lean so they were I
(04:52):
think that that caught my ear and the directness of
the songwriting they slightly questing, kind of spiritual questing style
of writing from Cat Stevens anyway. And then so that's
that has informed my awareness of what music could be.
(05:13):
Like intimate encounters with that music early on. Discovering Bob
Dylan was like it was like finding another continent. I mean,
I think when I sort of when I was about
thirteen fourteen and becoming very I was very interested in
pop music. I took a road journey with my dad
through France and we had one cassette and it was
Pavrotti on one side and the Greatest Hits of Bob
(05:36):
Dylan on the other. And I particularly loved the acoustic stuff,
so side one of that very first Greatest Tits record,
which went from sort of blowing in the wind to tambourine. Man,
I suppose so it ain't me, babe, it's all over
baby blue. You know the times they are changing, those
sort of early kind of big Dylan cuts, if you like.
(05:58):
And yeah, the texture of his music, the minimalism, that
the abrasive quality of his sound, and there's just enough
delicacy to frame concepts. And his voice just took up
a huge space because there was nothing else to compete
with it. So those sort of things, but just the
(06:21):
way he painted with words is so evocative and so unique,
and he was like a sort of he still is.
He remains a kind of picasso Esque sort of figure
in the way that with a few brushstrokes he can
make something happen, and there's a sort of total confidence
of any sort of earthy directness to what he does.
So I think that, yeah, I was utterly hypnotized, and
(06:44):
I wasn't listening to that kind of music at all.
I was listening to the music of the day. But
then in parallel I began to discover these other singer songwriters.
There wasn't an algorithmic means of finding it out about
music when I was young, and anyway, I lived in
a very remote place. It has always been word of mouth.
(07:05):
So the other kind of cool people who might be
listening to something, you talk to them about listening to
Bob Dinner and they said, well, if you listen to
Leonard Cohen, you go no. So then you have to
start listening to Leonard Cohen. And then it's John Martin.
Then it's Nick Drake, and then it's Joni Mitchell, and
it's you know, and eventually it ended up with Van Morrison.
So all of those things. I was avidly interested in
(07:26):
the writing Tom Waits as well, discovering Tom Waits's Asylum years.
I bought a compilation record when I was about sixteen,
and I love that. But I was listening to the
pop music of the time, and I was dressed in
sort of bangles and sort of lippy and kind of
backcomed hair. I was like a Cure fan, but I
was really really passionate about all that, and when it
(07:47):
came to writing, my very first attempts at writing songs
were like a sort of hybrid of Robert Smith and
Robert Zimmermann. That's fabulous, That's wonderful, Robert Zimba Smith.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
That is marvelous. Well, congrats on your thirteenth album, Dear Life,
and of course the tour as well. The album is
wonderful and it's touching. You know, once again your signature
deeply personal way of looking at life's ups and downs.
(08:29):
Can you share any personal experiences that shaped some of
the themes of this new album.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I don't know about personal experiences, but I mean, I'm
approaching the age that my father was when he died,
So that's a strange thing to think. So I haven't
got some sort of strange sense of prophecy that I
will collapse and expire on exactly the same data or anything.
(09:00):
It's just more that to think that this is the
point he was at in his life when he had
to stop and just before we came out on this tour,
my guitarist Neil of thirty two years it was diagnosed
with cancer and just a couple of weeks, shy of rehearsals,
he had to pull out. So we've got this mortality
(09:22):
idea that's becoming stronger, informs more of the way that
you think. It's like an accent on the words that
your mind turns around, it's just there. I think it
sharpens your sharpens flavors. It's like it's like seasoning in
a way for your thinking. So you've got finite time,
(09:45):
finite resources, and so these things have definitely had a
profound effect on the way. Ever since my father died
and I witnessed that magical, strange and heartbreaking event, It's
changed my life, my thinking forever. So I've seen people
(10:05):
born and I've left. I've lost a few friends and
very close friends and close family members too. So I
think that this weighs down on the writing and comes
through into the song so some very directly. But I
think one of the things that rescues this album from
(10:27):
worthiness is that when the images came, there's a lightness
and a humor to the way that they're presented, so
that they're not angst ridden sort of that there's yeah,
there is a grace about the way that the subjects
are handled. There's a kind of microscope and a telescope
(10:48):
being used, so it's looking at the minute shai of
detail of life and feeling. And then there's a sense
of just planetary perspective, cosmological perspective almost. I'm using a
lot of imagery from space and things. I mean I
read about all that stuff a lot. I didn't really
sort of pay attention at science in school. I found
(11:11):
it rather dull. But now I'm avidly interested, both in
the natural world and that becomes very scientific when you
start to analyze things, but also just the nature of
matter and time and things. As we start to learn
the sort of mind bending depth of what's out there
(11:34):
and the contradictory nature of quantum, the quantum world, it's
I mean, I can't assume to understand even a fraction
of it, but I try and grasp the basic threads.
So I used the sort of short story writer's trick
of slightly imagined perspectives characters that were placed, so there's
(11:58):
female perspectives on some of the songs. After the Harvest,
for example, Fighting Talk is like a dialogue between me
and I imagined me and songwriter and wife or loved one,
and so lots of different fassets have seen, so it's
lots of views of the same mountains. So that's that's
(12:19):
kind of I didn't I didn't head out with with
with massive sort of ambitions of the scope of what
the lyrics were going to contain. But the songwriting gods
were kind and one thing I think that did inform
or enrich the perspectives of the record was the COVID
(12:39):
lockdown and just stopping. And I did what a lot
of creative people do when things gound to a whole.
I thought, well, guess what, I'm go down to my studio,
make stuff. Check this out. World stopped, Gray won't stop.
And after about three or four weeks of messing down there,
I found I was getting quite stressed because I was
(13:00):
already going I'm going to make an album, and I
was like, can you never stop? I mean, like I
was saying to myself, why this Surely this is an
opportunity to be with my family under unprecedented circumstances. And
I've been telling myself the lie that I was going
to stop at some point and spend some time with them.
But so I just down tools, and I only really
(13:22):
worked when I really felt like it, and let the
field go fallow. So rather than just the consolation of
constant activity, I allowed myself to just exist for a
while under these extraordinary circumstances. So we were in a
world where suddenly this event horizon that's always racing towards
us of the next day, the thing that's coming, the
(13:44):
plan that the next year, the next six months, the
next six to six weeks, wasn't there. There was just
a sort of frozen line, and we just had the
space and time around us that's always there that we
failed to see, and we had each other, and we
began to assess the sort of the riches that lie
just in our locale and just that little bit of time,
(14:05):
the seasons of the birds singing whatever. And also we
were just watching a death, a death count. We were
watching a sort of mortality graph, and seeing as that's
the part of our culture that we suppress so so passionately.
You know, we are still searching for eternal youth and
eternal idiocy. It seems it's it's it's something that suddenly
(14:27):
we were just staring at these stats on a sort
of city by city, country by country, global scale. So
I think that that period of reflection enforced reflection and
dislocation from this norm, this racing, rushing norm where you're
(14:47):
never really anywhere at any given time. I think that
played into my hands when I came well. It's tempting
to see a correlation between this huge slowdown, me downing tools,
and then when I did pick my tools up again
at the end of COVID, because I had the white
Lander tool, which had been postponed for two years, coming
(15:08):
right at me, I knew I had five months to work.
I just began to work like a demon. And I
wish it was always like that. I wish I could
turn it on like a tap and this this stuff
would just pore out. It's never usually that simple, but
that's what happened this time, and I got into such
a flow. But I'm basically chiefly I'm a lyricist. The
(15:29):
music supports the lyrics. I'm with Sinatra on that. I
think I see it all as a prop. It's a
stage set so that the words can happen. That's what
the music is to me, and that's the sort of
that's the influence of Dylan, I guess right there, because
it's it's it's so you can deliver the line. And
(15:50):
what songwriting is is looking for delicious space amongst chords
and sounds where their vocal needs to be and the
story can be told. So you're sort of create eating
a stage set, a tableau almost, And yeah, this time
around that the lyrics just poured out. I've been in
a process of sort of simplification since I started writing
(16:12):
as a teenager, to be less adjectives, less descriptive language,
more simplicity. But this time around it just completely reversed,
and I went into these mad, kind of crazy multi
line rhyming schemes that were more like rapping in a way,
and lots of fast vocal deliveries. But the pleasure of
writing is obvious. I think in listening to the record,
(16:35):
the joy of the music and mysticism that it's contained
within a word. Each word was a magic incantation when
it began, we don't we failed to see them now
for what they are. They were magic things that could
only be uttered by magic people. When they were devised
as a descriptive labeling tool to say the word of
(16:58):
something precious was in it self an act of being
precious or being with something magic. So I think they
still contain these things, and when they're combined in these
strange chemical combinations, crazy things can happen, and that little
dynamo drives the obsession of my existence.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Really, we'll be right back with more of the Taking
a Walk podcast. Welcome back to the Taking a Walk Podcast.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
You take those themes and you kind of describe that
of you know, the mortality themes and themes of resilience.
But within there, and maybe it's that aspect of awareness
of what's around you that you described within there, there's
also feelings of joy and optimism in there as well,
(17:52):
and it's just marvelous how you deal with the complexity
of that.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Thanks. Yeah, But I I think all working is is
putting yourself in the way of something good happening. So
I don't know why sometimes it works out better than
other times. I guess it's the seasons of self as well.
They our own sort of shedding of skins, and you
(18:18):
know the changes that are brought upon us, and sometimes
you're not you're still in a process of coming to
terms with something maybe not completely ripened and your viewpoint.
But anyway, this time around, as I say, everything fell
into focus and I had just huge amounts of pleasure
and in the writing, and the writing is the tricky part.
(18:39):
The lyrics are the tricky part of the process. As
far as I'm concerned. Anyone can write music, it's it's
getting the song out, and they don't often land in
one go or I'm not often positioned to take advantage
of inspiration as it's termed. I normally have to stay
(19:00):
and then pick it up some other point later. Because
life is what it is. I've got a lot of
stuff I've got to try and squeeze into my life.
It rarely offers me just infinite opportunities to just think
about what I want to do. Every day. There's usually
other stuff getting in the way, so I have to
kind of find ways to pick up the loose ends
and pick What was remarkable this time was just how
(19:21):
easily that happened. It's one thing writing songs off the cuff.
When it all starts to flow, that's great, But usually
most of my work is picking up other bits and
trying to finish them. And what was remarkable on writing
this record was just how how much of that I
(19:42):
managed to do. I just I was like, oh that idea, Yeah, okay,
I've got one verse, I've got one line for the chorus,
and it would be like right, okay, and I just
sit down and I just write my confidence levels. I
read a lovely line today, hang on, I might be
able to find it. And this I thought was very
pertinent because I use the word tension. Attention is the
(20:03):
rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.
That's simone bile. So I'd say that my attention levels
were a heightened, heightened level. I managed to everything else disappeared,
and I was just in this world for a sustained
(20:24):
period of time, day after day after day, and it
allowed my reach to become much more natural. Anyway, these
I'm just trying to explain something I don't really fully understand. Well,
you explain it well.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
And it almost is like the equivalent of being in
as they say, for you know, athletes being in the zone, right,
I mean you were in the zone.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yeah, And I'm trying to keep an equivalent zone on
the tour I'm doing. I'm trying to keep in order
for songwriting or any writing or art to happen. Openness.
It's a heart led thing. You have to be open,
I think anyway. I believe at the very core of
(21:08):
what I'm doing, it's about allowing the deepest thing to
be to become visible. So and that's a very awkward
process in the world we live in. It's it's a
hostile environment a lot of the time. So it's I'm
trying to persevere and keep that to the fore during
(21:31):
all these concerts and not just play the songs and
get the lights working, but to actually be there for
the audience and talk and bring them in to some
of the stories and specifics to do with it. And
not only that. For my band too, it's about them.
They've been playing with me for a long time. Yeah,
I'm trying to keep them emotionally available. When you've spent
(21:54):
as long as we have together on the back in
the back of a tour bus, inever to be the
shutterest stuff to come down at some point like, oh Jesus,
you know such and such is on one. You know,
oh Christ, he's been at the vodka, you know, like
quick into your bunks. It's like it's I'm trying to
(22:17):
keep I'm trying to keep everything. I'm trying to keep
people there for each other because I think just somehow
the emotional presence is just vital to this thing that
I'm trying to do, which is not just playing the
new record. I'm deep diving into all the old albums
as well, so like really picking tracks from places that
I haven't been for a long time, so some of
(22:38):
the stuff of Life in Slow Motion, New Day at Midnight,
Lost songs, albums that I haven't been giving that much
attention to. So it's it's really exciting, but making sure
you don't lose sight of the bigger picture. Just because
you hit the right notes and you stand in the
right place and the lighting man gets his cues, it
doesn't mean it's the you're doing what you need. You
(22:58):
need to be there, like there they're and at risk,
so you need to be risking something. It's entirely risk
and reward. I want the audience to feel like something
just happened.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Can you talk about the collaboration on Plus and Minus
with TALLYA Ray, What that was like? That song is fabulous?
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Thanks. Yeah, this is the song that's taken of all
the songs I've ever written. It's the one that's taken
the longest to complete, so it's twenty years between the
first time I played the chord sequence and Italian putting
her voice on to what was basically, by then a
finished song. So it was lovely the way it worked
(23:41):
with her getting involved. She's so young. I mean, she's
the same age as my daughter. So and she was
doing some event in New York and my manager just
happened to see her. And at this point we'd finished
the track. I got my daughter to sing on it
a bit. I'd done some of the bvs and we'd
kind of created a semi but I couldn't find the
(24:03):
right voice. We were trying to get certain people to
do it, and then their schedules were just it was
hanging around waiting for someone to find a day. I
was becoming frustrated and we just wanted to move on.
So anyway, he heard this Talia singing it this thing
in New York, and he just so, I heard this
girl sing last night, and she's got a great voice.
I think it could really work for what you've been describing.
(24:24):
She's got quite a low voice. She could do the
low parts. And he said, and then When I talked
to her after the show to say well done, she said, oh,
who do you manage? And I mentioned your name and
she said, oh my god, I'm like obsessed with David Graham.
I'm listening to White Lader all the time at the moment.
So I said, wow, okay, and then we had a
zoom call. I met her. I really liked her. She
(24:45):
had a picture of Amy Wyanhouse on a wall behind her.
I thought, oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah, she's like
a North London girl. So but she was super cool.
I said, listen, obviously, tuning is important singing the song,
learn the part. Listen very carefully to the phrase it
it's about rhythm, so very fast vocal. You're going to
(25:05):
learn how to breathe. So if you're going to practice,
I believe you can sing in tune. So I said,
concentrate on the rhythm. She came to the thing that
she'd really done her homework, so it wasn't an easy
song to sing. So I mean, I know because I've
recorded it myself and done various parts. So she was great,
and she's kind of up for everything, but not in
(25:28):
a horribly ambitious kind of like tread on you with
my Stiletto's kind of way.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Oh brilliant. Tell me about the makeshift studio and what
impact that had on this process.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah. I was forced out of my home studio in
London because my awful neighbor was doing a refurbishment and
decided he was going to dig out his basement and
my studio was down there, and it was ridiculous. It
was so loud we couldn't even think, let alone work.
So I hastily turned my garage. I've got a house
(26:07):
on the coast up in Norfolk. I turned my garage
into a sort of recording space. Well I say recording space.
I basically just put a floor and walls in and
we moved some gear in there. So I was sort
of reluctant to use When I go up there, it's
generally a place for recharging and absorbing the world rather
(26:30):
than trying to make things. I might be ruminating on
things that I'm working on and singing them to myself
and play a bit on my piano up there, but
I don't sit down and work, So I was reluctant
to kind of confuse the two worlds. But actually it
was the greatest thing ever because The sort of quiet
(26:51):
that rains up in this part of the world is
I'm on a nature reserve. I'm out in the middle
of you know, you know, in a marsh. Basically we're
just heading down towards the ocean, so it's a very empty,
pure place. I think suggestibility is a key ingredient for
(27:12):
the sort of self hypnosis that's required to make things
to write. To suddenly be in a creative mood, and
the moment I close the car door when I go
up there, I mean it's my happy place. It's a
world of stars, of wind through reads of bare branches,
(27:33):
of the sounds of the geese on the marsh. It's
a world of sound and spectacle and subtlety and nuance.
And I immediately awakened the moment I'm in it, So
I'm already in a suggestible state, more broadly than a
creative state, a state of suggestibility. So the quiet that
(27:56):
was there was wonderful, and as as I say, this
kind of relaxed state of being when you haven't got
sirens and buses screeching and all the kind of angst
that the city brings you basically freed from that. So
it was remarkable and the other key thing was I
normally work a sort of rigid, semi rigid day. So
(28:16):
we'll normally meet at ten in the morning, have a
cup of tea, chat, start working about ten thirty, quarter
to eleven, and finish at about quarter to seven, with
a little lunch break and a few cups of teeth
thrown in. But that would be my working day. But
up there, my producer came and stayed, so we'd work
(28:39):
like a three day cycle. So he'd come up on
the first day. We'd work Tuesday and then stay Tuesday
Wednesday night, but we'd go. I'd go and he'd be
tidying up what we'd recorded, and I'd go and make
some supper. We'd have a glass of wine. And the
very first night that we were down there, it was
like it was beautiful evening, early spring, or it may
(29:00):
probably winter actually, to be honest and clear, evening. I've
made some supper, we had a glass of wine. We
were sitting there. It was about nine o'clock and he said, well,
should we just go back in the studio, and I said, yeah, yeah,
three hit let's do it. And so we had this
We had this little space in the evening if we
(29:21):
wanted it where we could go and try things out,
so not work on the track we were working on,
or just I said, oh, I've got this set of
chords and a kind of feeling that there's a fast
vocal that's going to go with them. I said, I'm
just working on this the other day and I didn't
really have a chance to look at it. So and
that was after the harvest, and that was the very
(29:42):
first night we were up there. So we just started
working and I started coming out with I didn't get
the entire lyric, but I got these kind of soft
word ending its almost French word endings, so all these cadences,
and I thought, there's something here, this is new, and
also I was almost it was like a semi wrap.
(30:02):
He put this little drum machine rhythm in, and we
put these synths on and I put the guitar parts down,
and suddenly I came up with the second section, which
is I Know that Love is Bigger, blah blah blah,
and I was like, wow, well, you know this is it.
We're off. This is the stuff. So then I, you know,
he left and I finished that song at the end
of the week, and then we finished recording it up there.
But that was the sort of template. So we'd work
(30:26):
on things during the day and then we'd have a
sort of free hit in the evening till like midnight
when we could work on other stuff. And that was very,
very fruitful. So yes, it was a total breaking of
my my heavy compartmentalization was shattered by the new new
world of being just up in the middle of nowhere
with nothing else to do and no one else to
(30:47):
tell you what to do or come to bed or
watch the TV series. You know. There there was nothing else,
no distractions, So that was rather marvelous. Yes, it's like
the story of the puppet becoming a real boy. I'm
sort of slowly turning back into a human being. I'm
on the other side of bringing up children and having
(31:08):
a career. I'm becoming human again.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Congratulations on dear life, David Gray. I could listen to
you talk all day, I could listen to your music
all day. This is such joy for me talking to
you on the podcast, and I just thank you for everything.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
My pleasure. Buzz say hello to the chaps at the
restaurant in Concord.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I will thank you, David.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a
Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends
and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking
a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
and wherever you get your podcasts.
Taking a Walk the music and mysticism. It's contained within
a word. Each word was a magic incantation when it began.
We don't we failed to see them now for what
they are. They were magic things that could only be
uttered by magic people when they were devised as a
descriptive labeling tool. To say, the word of something precious
(00:23):
was in itself an act of being precious or being
with something magic.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to the Taken a Walk Podcast with your host,
Buzz Night. If you like this podcast, share it with
your friends and check out our companion podcast, Music Save Me,
hosted by Lynn Hoffman. Today, buzz gets the inside story
from the acclaimed singer songwriter David Gray. Buzz Night is
joined by David Gray on the Taken a Walk Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Now, David Gray, thanks for being Undertaken a Walk Podcast,
My pleasure. So, since the podcast is called taken, I
do have to ask you first if you could take
a walk with someone living or dead, possibly in the
music side of things, but it doesn't have to be
(01:11):
Who would you take a walk with and where would
you take a walk with them?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's interesting. Assuming that there was a magical language dissolving barrier,
I might take a walk with the mystic Roomy. I'd
imagine he'd have a few things to say he's just
popped into my head, and have a little wander. I'd
(01:36):
take him along the coast of east of England where
I've got a house, which is probably my favorite place
to be. So we'd wander through the dunes and the
beach and consider the mysteries of the universe and everything
contained therein.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Just you describing it took me there, David, that was
just fabulous. Thank you so much. I appreciated. First of all,
we're going to talk about your thirteenth studio album, Dear Life,
and also you've been out on the past and present
world tour, and I have to tell you a story.
I live outside of Boston and I popped in just
(02:15):
a little while ago to my favorite restaurant called Helen's
Restaurant and conquered mass and the gentleman there who works
behind the oven came running up to me like he
often does, and he said, I have to tell you
I saw David Gray recently in Boston.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
He was unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
He was just going on and on how fabulous you were,
and I said, I'm going to be speaking to him
in a little while, so then the waitress.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Comes over, you're going to be speaking to David Gray.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
So I was the buzz, if you will, of Helen's restaurant,
but more importantly, you were the buzz of Helen's restaurant.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Excellent. Well, I've got great support up in the Boston area.
I think that Irish influence has made it a very
strong it's always even going back to like early shows
on the White Ladder run back in two thousand when
we were just starting, Boston was a sort of stronghold
and it's remained one and people are very sort of
(03:18):
passionate readily, so I think in a way that's a
little more relatable. I think because of that sort of
Irish influence that feels very strong there. So yeah, it's
been a good spot. And that was the very first
show of this tour, so there was a lot built
into it.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
It was.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
A joyful occasion. We just had to go for it.
The rehearsal time was over, let it all hang out
on stage, which we surely did so I'm glad everyone
enjoyed it. That was there.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So I've heard that you were inspired by, among other folks,
Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Kat Stevens. Can you
talk about how their storytelling styles have influenced your lyrics
and music?
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Of course, yeah, I mean the sort of ambient influence
of the music my parents were listening to in the
early seventies when I was just a little boy. Definitely
sort of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Rod Stewart, the Stones,
the Beatles, and my dad was crazy about like Tea
(04:29):
for the Tillerman and you know, Catch Bull at four
and several of those early Jesus Cat Stephens records. So
they definitely seeped in. I think the sort of soundscape
of them and the kind of passion of them. I
know they were very mainstream, but they had a kind
of kind of very soulful lean so they were I
(04:52):
think that that caught my ear and the directness of
the songwriting they slightly questing, kind of spiritual questing style
of writing from Cat Stevens anyway. And then so that's
that has informed my awareness of what music could be.
(05:13):
Like intimate encounters with that music early on. Discovering Bob
Dylan was like it was like finding another continent. I mean,
I think when I sort of when I was about
thirteen fourteen and becoming very I was very interested in
pop music. I took a road journey with my dad
through France and we had one cassette and it was
Pavrotti on one side and the Greatest Hits of Bob
(05:36):
Dylan on the other. And I particularly loved the acoustic stuff,
so side one of that very first Greatest Tits record,
which went from sort of blowing in the wind to tambourine. Man,
I suppose so it ain't me, babe, it's all over
baby blue. You know the times they are changing, those
sort of early kind of big Dylan cuts, if you like.
(05:58):
And yeah, the texture of his music, the minimalism, that
the abrasive quality of his sound, and there's just enough
delicacy to frame concepts. And his voice just took up
a huge space because there was nothing else to compete
with it. So those sort of things, but just the
(06:21):
way he painted with words is so evocative and so unique,
and he was like a sort of he still is.
He remains a kind of picasso Esque sort of figure
in the way that with a few brushstrokes he can
make something happen, and there's a sort of total confidence
of any sort of earthy directness to what he does.
So I think that, yeah, I was utterly hypnotized, and
(06:44):
I wasn't listening to that kind of music at all.
I was listening to the music of the day. But
then in parallel I began to discover these other singer songwriters.
There wasn't an algorithmic means of finding it out about
music when I was young, and anyway, I lived in
a very remote place. It has always been word of mouth.
(07:05):
So the other kind of cool people who might be
listening to something, you talk to them about listening to
Bob Dinner and they said, well, if you listen to
Leonard Cohen, you go no. So then you have to
start listening to Leonard Cohen. And then it's John Martin.
Then it's Nick Drake, and then it's Joni Mitchell, and
it's you know, and eventually it ended up with Van Morrison.
So all of those things. I was avidly interested in
(07:26):
the writing Tom Waits as well, discovering Tom Waits's Asylum years.
I bought a compilation record when I was about sixteen,
and I love that. But I was listening to the
pop music of the time, and I was dressed in
sort of bangles and sort of lippy and kind of
backcomed hair. I was like a Cure fan, but I
was really really passionate about all that, and when it
(07:47):
came to writing, my very first attempts at writing songs
were like a sort of hybrid of Robert Smith and
Robert Zimmermann. That's fabulous, That's wonderful, Robert Zimba Smith.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
That is marvelous. Well, congrats on your thirteenth album, Dear Life,
and of course the tour as well. The album is
wonderful and it's touching. You know, once again your signature
deeply personal way of looking at life's ups and downs.
(08:29):
Can you share any personal experiences that shaped some of
the themes of this new album.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I don't know about personal experiences, but I mean, I'm
approaching the age that my father was when he died,
So that's a strange thing to think. So I haven't
got some sort of strange sense of prophecy that I
will collapse and expire on exactly the same data or anything.
(09:00):
It's just more that to think that this is the
point he was at in his life when he had
to stop and just before we came out on this tour,
my guitarist Neil of thirty two years it was diagnosed
with cancer and just a couple of weeks, shy of rehearsals,
he had to pull out. So we've got this mortality
(09:22):
idea that's becoming stronger, informs more of the way that
you think. It's like an accent on the words that
your mind turns around, it's just there. I think it
sharpens your sharpens flavors. It's like it's like seasoning in
a way for your thinking. So you've got finite time,
(09:45):
finite resources, and so these things have definitely had a
profound effect on the way. Ever since my father died
and I witnessed that magical, strange and heartbreaking event, It's
changed my life, my thinking forever. So I've seen people
(10:05):
born and I've left. I've lost a few friends and
very close friends and close family members too. So I
think that this weighs down on the writing and comes
through into the song so some very directly. But I
think one of the things that rescues this album from
(10:27):
worthiness is that when the images came, there's a lightness
and a humor to the way that they're presented, so
that they're not angst ridden sort of that there's yeah,
there is a grace about the way that the subjects
are handled. There's a kind of microscope and a telescope
(10:48):
being used, so it's looking at the minute shai of
detail of life and feeling. And then there's a sense
of just planetary perspective, cosmological perspective almost. I'm using a
lot of imagery from space and things. I mean I
read about all that stuff a lot. I didn't really
sort of pay attention at science in school. I found
(11:11):
it rather dull. But now I'm avidly interested, both in
the natural world and that becomes very scientific when you
start to analyze things, but also just the nature of
matter and time and things. As we start to learn
the sort of mind bending depth of what's out there
(11:34):
and the contradictory nature of quantum, the quantum world, it's
I mean, I can't assume to understand even a fraction
of it, but I try and grasp the basic threads.
So I used the sort of short story writer's trick
of slightly imagined perspectives characters that were placed, so there's
(11:58):
female perspectives on some of the songs. After the Harvest,
for example, Fighting Talk is like a dialogue between me
and I imagined me and songwriter and wife or loved one,
and so lots of different fassets have seen, so it's
lots of views of the same mountains. So that's that's
(12:19):
kind of I didn't I didn't head out with with
with massive sort of ambitions of the scope of what
the lyrics were going to contain. But the songwriting gods
were kind and one thing I think that did inform
or enrich the perspectives of the record was the COVID
(12:39):
lockdown and just stopping. And I did what a lot
of creative people do when things gound to a whole.
I thought, well, guess what, I'm go down to my studio,
make stuff. Check this out. World stopped, Gray won't stop.
And after about three or four weeks of messing down there,
I found I was getting quite stressed because I was
(13:00):
already going I'm going to make an album, and I
was like, can you never stop? I mean, like I
was saying to myself, why this Surely this is an
opportunity to be with my family under unprecedented circumstances. And
I've been telling myself the lie that I was going
to stop at some point and spend some time with them.
But so I just down tools, and I only really
(13:22):
worked when I really felt like it, and let the
field go fallow. So rather than just the consolation of
constant activity, I allowed myself to just exist for a
while under these extraordinary circumstances. So we were in a
world where suddenly this event horizon that's always racing towards
us of the next day, the thing that's coming, the
(13:44):
plan that the next year, the next six months, the
next six to six weeks, wasn't there. There was just
a sort of frozen line, and we just had the
space and time around us that's always there that we
failed to see, and we had each other, and we
began to assess the sort of the riches that lie
just in our locale and just that little bit of time,
(14:05):
the seasons of the birds singing whatever. And also we
were just watching a death, a death count. We were
watching a sort of mortality graph, and seeing as that's
the part of our culture that we suppress so so passionately.
You know, we are still searching for eternal youth and
eternal idiocy. It seems it's it's it's something that suddenly
(14:27):
we were just staring at these stats on a sort
of city by city, country by country, global scale. So
I think that that period of reflection enforced reflection and
dislocation from this norm, this racing, rushing norm where you're
(14:47):
never really anywhere at any given time. I think that
played into my hands when I came well. It's tempting
to see a correlation between this huge slowdown, me downing tools,
and then when I did pick my tools up again
at the end of COVID, because I had the white
Lander tool, which had been postponed for two years, coming
(15:08):
right at me, I knew I had five months to work.
I just began to work like a demon. And I
wish it was always like that. I wish I could
turn it on like a tap and this this stuff
would just pore out. It's never usually that simple, but
that's what happened this time, and I got into such
a flow. But I'm basically chiefly I'm a lyricist. The
(15:29):
music supports the lyrics. I'm with Sinatra on that. I
think I see it all as a prop. It's a
stage set so that the words can happen. That's what
the music is to me, and that's the sort of
that's the influence of Dylan, I guess right there, because
it's it's it's so you can deliver the line. And
(15:50):
what songwriting is is looking for delicious space amongst chords
and sounds where their vocal needs to be and the
story can be told. So you're sort of create eating
a stage set, a tableau almost, And yeah, this time
around that the lyrics just poured out. I've been in
a process of sort of simplification since I started writing
(16:12):
as a teenager, to be less adjectives, less descriptive language,
more simplicity. But this time around it just completely reversed,
and I went into these mad, kind of crazy multi
line rhyming schemes that were more like rapping in a way,
and lots of fast vocal deliveries. But the pleasure of
writing is obvious. I think in listening to the record,
(16:35):
the joy of the music and mysticism that it's contained
within a word. Each word was a magic incantation when
it began, we don't we failed to see them now
for what they are. They were magic things that could
only be uttered by magic people. When they were devised
as a descriptive labeling tool to say the word of
(16:58):
something precious was in it self an act of being
precious or being with something magic. So I think they
still contain these things, and when they're combined in these
strange chemical combinations, crazy things can happen, and that little
dynamo drives the obsession of my existence.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Really, we'll be right back with more of the Taking
a Walk podcast. Welcome back to the Taking a Walk Podcast.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
You take those themes and you kind of describe that
of you know, the mortality themes and themes of resilience.
But within there, and maybe it's that aspect of awareness
of what's around you that you described within there, there's
also feelings of joy and optimism in there as well,
(17:52):
and it's just marvelous how you deal with the complexity
of that.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Thanks. Yeah, But I I think all working is is
putting yourself in the way of something good happening. So
I don't know why sometimes it works out better than
other times. I guess it's the seasons of self as well.
They our own sort of shedding of skins, and you
(18:18):
know the changes that are brought upon us, and sometimes
you're not you're still in a process of coming to
terms with something maybe not completely ripened and your viewpoint.
But anyway, this time around, as I say, everything fell
into focus and I had just huge amounts of pleasure
and in the writing, and the writing is the tricky part.
(18:39):
The lyrics are the tricky part of the process. As
far as I'm concerned. Anyone can write music, it's it's
getting the song out, and they don't often land in
one go or I'm not often positioned to take advantage
of inspiration as it's termed. I normally have to stay
(19:00):
and then pick it up some other point later. Because
life is what it is. I've got a lot of
stuff I've got to try and squeeze into my life.
It rarely offers me just infinite opportunities to just think
about what I want to do. Every day. There's usually
other stuff getting in the way, so I have to
kind of find ways to pick up the loose ends
and pick What was remarkable this time was just how
(19:21):
easily that happened. It's one thing writing songs off the cuff.
When it all starts to flow, that's great, But usually
most of my work is picking up other bits and
trying to finish them. And what was remarkable on writing
this record was just how how much of that I
(19:42):
managed to do. I just I was like, oh that idea, Yeah, okay,
I've got one verse, I've got one line for the chorus,
and it would be like right, okay, and I just
sit down and I just write my confidence levels. I
read a lovely line today, hang on, I might be
able to find it. And this I thought was very
pertinent because I use the word tension. Attention is the
(20:03):
rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.
That's simone bile. So I'd say that my attention levels
were a heightened, heightened level. I managed to everything else disappeared,
and I was just in this world for a sustained
(20:24):
period of time, day after day after day, and it
allowed my reach to become much more natural. Anyway, these
I'm just trying to explain something I don't really fully understand. Well,
you explain it well.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
And it almost is like the equivalent of being in
as they say, for you know, athletes being in the zone, right,
I mean you were in the zone.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yeah, And I'm trying to keep an equivalent zone on
the tour I'm doing. I'm trying to keep in order
for songwriting or any writing or art to happen. Openness.
It's a heart led thing. You have to be open,
I think anyway. I believe at the very core of
(21:08):
what I'm doing, it's about allowing the deepest thing to
be to become visible. So and that's a very awkward
process in the world we live in. It's it's a
hostile environment a lot of the time. So it's I'm
trying to persevere and keep that to the fore during
(21:31):
all these concerts and not just play the songs and
get the lights working, but to actually be there for
the audience and talk and bring them in to some
of the stories and specifics to do with it. And
not only that. For my band too, it's about them.
They've been playing with me for a long time. Yeah,
I'm trying to keep them emotionally available. When you've spent
(21:54):
as long as we have together on the back in
the back of a tour bus, inever to be the
shutterest stuff to come down at some point like, oh Jesus,
you know such and such is on one. You know,
oh Christ, he's been at the vodka, you know, like
quick into your bunks. It's like it's I'm trying to
(22:17):
keep I'm trying to keep everything. I'm trying to keep
people there for each other because I think just somehow
the emotional presence is just vital to this thing that
I'm trying to do, which is not just playing the
new record. I'm deep diving into all the old albums
as well, so like really picking tracks from places that
I haven't been for a long time, so some of
(22:38):
the stuff of Life in Slow Motion, New Day at Midnight,
Lost songs, albums that I haven't been giving that much
attention to. So it's it's really exciting, but making sure
you don't lose sight of the bigger picture. Just because
you hit the right notes and you stand in the
right place and the lighting man gets his cues, it
doesn't mean it's the you're doing what you need. You
(22:58):
need to be there, like there they're and at risk,
so you need to be risking something. It's entirely risk
and reward. I want the audience to feel like something
just happened.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Can you talk about the collaboration on Plus and Minus
with TALLYA Ray, What that was like? That song is fabulous?
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Thanks. Yeah, this is the song that's taken of all
the songs I've ever written. It's the one that's taken
the longest to complete, so it's twenty years between the
first time I played the chord sequence and Italian putting
her voice on to what was basically, by then a
finished song. So it was lovely the way it worked
(23:41):
with her getting involved. She's so young. I mean, she's
the same age as my daughter. So and she was
doing some event in New York and my manager just
happened to see her. And at this point we'd finished
the track. I got my daughter to sing on it
a bit. I'd done some of the bvs and we'd
kind of created a semi but I couldn't find the
(24:03):
right voice. We were trying to get certain people to
do it, and then their schedules were just it was
hanging around waiting for someone to find a day. I
was becoming frustrated and we just wanted to move on.
So anyway, he heard this Talia singing it this thing
in New York, and he just so, I heard this
girl sing last night, and she's got a great voice.
I think it could really work for what you've been describing.
(24:24):
She's got quite a low voice. She could do the
low parts. And he said, and then When I talked
to her after the show to say well done, she said, oh,
who do you manage? And I mentioned your name and
she said, oh my god, I'm like obsessed with David Graham.
I'm listening to White Lader all the time at the moment.
So I said, wow, okay, and then we had a
zoom call. I met her. I really liked her. She
(24:45):
had a picture of Amy Wyanhouse on a wall behind her.
I thought, oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah, she's like
a North London girl. So but she was super cool.
I said, listen, obviously, tuning is important singing the song,
learn the part. Listen very carefully to the phrase it
it's about rhythm, so very fast vocal. You're going to
(25:05):
learn how to breathe. So if you're going to practice,
I believe you can sing in tune. So I said,
concentrate on the rhythm. She came to the thing that
she'd really done her homework, so it wasn't an easy
song to sing. So I mean, I know because I've
recorded it myself and done various parts. So she was great,
and she's kind of up for everything, but not in
(25:28):
a horribly ambitious kind of like tread on you with
my Stiletto's kind of way.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Oh brilliant. Tell me about the makeshift studio and what
impact that had on this process.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah. I was forced out of my home studio in
London because my awful neighbor was doing a refurbishment and
decided he was going to dig out his basement and
my studio was down there, and it was ridiculous. It
was so loud we couldn't even think, let alone work.
So I hastily turned my garage. I've got a house
(26:07):
on the coast up in Norfolk. I turned my garage
into a sort of recording space. Well I say recording space.
I basically just put a floor and walls in and
we moved some gear in there. So I was sort
of reluctant to use When I go up there, it's
generally a place for recharging and absorbing the world rather
(26:30):
than trying to make things. I might be ruminating on
things that I'm working on and singing them to myself
and play a bit on my piano up there, but
I don't sit down and work, So I was reluctant
to kind of confuse the two worlds. But actually it
was the greatest thing ever because The sort of quiet
(26:51):
that rains up in this part of the world is
I'm on a nature reserve. I'm out in the middle
of you know, you know, in a marsh. Basically we're
just heading down towards the ocean, so it's a very empty,
pure place. I think suggestibility is a key ingredient for
(27:12):
the sort of self hypnosis that's required to make things
to write. To suddenly be in a creative mood, and
the moment I close the car door when I go
up there, I mean it's my happy place. It's a
world of stars, of wind through reads of bare branches,
(27:33):
of the sounds of the geese on the marsh. It's
a world of sound and spectacle and subtlety and nuance.
And I immediately awakened the moment I'm in it, So
I'm already in a suggestible state, more broadly than a
creative state, a state of suggestibility. So the quiet that
(27:56):
was there was wonderful, and as as I say, this
kind of relaxed state of being when you haven't got
sirens and buses screeching and all the kind of angst
that the city brings you basically freed from that. So
it was remarkable and the other key thing was I
normally work a sort of rigid, semi rigid day. So
(28:16):
we'll normally meet at ten in the morning, have a
cup of tea, chat, start working about ten thirty, quarter
to eleven, and finish at about quarter to seven, with
a little lunch break and a few cups of teeth
thrown in. But that would be my working day. But
up there, my producer came and stayed, so we'd work
(28:39):
like a three day cycle. So he'd come up on
the first day. We'd work Tuesday and then stay Tuesday
Wednesday night, but we'd go. I'd go and he'd be
tidying up what we'd recorded, and I'd go and make
some supper. We'd have a glass of wine. And the
very first night that we were down there, it was
like it was beautiful evening, early spring, or it may
(29:00):
probably winter actually, to be honest and clear, evening. I've
made some supper, we had a glass of wine. We
were sitting there. It was about nine o'clock and he said, well,
should we just go back in the studio, and I said, yeah, yeah,
three hit let's do it. And so we had this
We had this little space in the evening if we
(29:21):
wanted it where we could go and try things out,
so not work on the track we were working on,
or just I said, oh, I've got this set of
chords and a kind of feeling that there's a fast
vocal that's going to go with them. I said, I'm
just working on this the other day and I didn't
really have a chance to look at it. So and
that was after the harvest, and that was the very
(29:42):
first night we were up there. So we just started
working and I started coming out with I didn't get
the entire lyric, but I got these kind of soft
word ending its almost French word endings, so all these cadences,
and I thought, there's something here, this is new, and
also I was almost it was like a semi wrap.
(30:02):
He put this little drum machine rhythm in, and we
put these synths on and I put the guitar parts down,
and suddenly I came up with the second section, which
is I Know that Love is Bigger, blah blah blah,
and I was like, wow, well, you know this is it.
We're off. This is the stuff. So then I, you know,
he left and I finished that song at the end
of the week, and then we finished recording it up there.
But that was the sort of template. So we'd work
(30:26):
on things during the day and then we'd have a
sort of free hit in the evening till like midnight
when we could work on other stuff. And that was very,
very fruitful. So yes, it was a total breaking of
my my heavy compartmentalization was shattered by the new new
world of being just up in the middle of nowhere
with nothing else to do and no one else to
(30:47):
tell you what to do or come to bed or
watch the TV series. You know. There there was nothing else,
no distractions, So that was rather marvelous. Yes, it's like
the story of the puppet becoming a real boy. I'm
sort of slowly turning back into a human being. I'm
on the other side of bringing up children and having
(31:08):
a career. I'm becoming human again.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Congratulations on dear life, David Gray. I could listen to
you talk all day, I could listen to your music
all day. This is such joy for me talking to
you on the podcast, and I just thank you for everything.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
My pleasure. Buzz say hello to the chaps at the
restaurant in Concord.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I will thank you, David.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a
Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends
and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking
a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
and wherever you get your podcasts.
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