David Gray: Past & (Still) Present
UK artist David Gray returned this year with his 13th studio album, Dear Life. Ahead of his upcoming Australian tour, Gray opened up to The Note about performing live, singing with his daughter and how the current world is shaping his songwriting.
Words Isaac Selby // Image supplied
There seems to be two camps when it comes to David Gray awareness in 2025 - people who vividly remember his music soundtracking every poignant moment of the early 2000s and beyond, and those who ask, “Who’s David Gray?”
It seems remarkable to have missed his output, considering his signature album (1998’s White Ladder) is two times platinum in Australia, sold 3 million copies in the UK and is the greatest-selling album of all time in Ireland.
It’s odd to pin him as an underdog considering these stats, but it can perhaps be attributed to his deft blend of tasteful folktronica and the charming consideration he relays when reflecting on his ever-growing body of work, following the release of his 13th studio album, this year’s Dear Life.
The new record plays to his strengths: subtle electronic twists, astute observations of the heart and a playful songwriting nous sharpened from years in the biz. Gray admits that he borrowed the album title in tribute to one of his favourite writers, Alice Munroe, whose final collection of stories shared this purposefully ambiguous, yet all-encompassing title.
“I think that lots of my songs are like little letters or character studies. Sometimes you can't just blurt out the raw experience or something that's utterly autobiographical - that would be too exposing and almost encourages a kind of journalistic curiosity in the listener,” Gray explains. “I don't always want to show exactly where it derives from or who it relates to. I find I want something mysterious, that has an ambiguity to it, that even I am kind of slightly haunted and troubled as to what that exactly means. Something in my heart that my head doesn't understand yet.”
Dear Life sifts through reflections on mortality, as Gray settles into his fourth decade as a recording artist. In the same boat as many, he’s trying to navigate life while the noisy din of the surrounding world gets louder.
“There's all this very dark stuff going on out there, and of course that does feed into the context of how people listen to and receive the music and how I make music,” says Gray. “It's always infiltrating. I don't often turn to the world and say, ‘Right, all these problems, I'm going to channel them into this song.’ It's hard to do ‘the protest song’ or ‘the angry song’ successfully. I feel the layers of irony that have been varnished over music across the last 50-60 years are hard to chip away, so that you can’t have that sort of straight, honest [like] ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, or whatever. I mean ‘Masters of War’ by Dylan - it's hard to beat that as a piece of protest writing.”
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As a touring artist, Gray wants to make the most of his existing window to tour, with his band keeping more than 70 rehearsed tracks in their back pocket, ensuring that Australian audiences will be treated to a diverse range of the hits they love alongside a carousel of deeper cuts.
During his recent world tour, Gray and his band spent time touring America and extracting his dubious view on the state of world politics from the “incredibly sweet” people he spent time rubbing shoulders with. This influenced his desire to have his music available for all who choose to tap in, regardless of political differences, in an effort to slow down the “emotionally heightened” world he witnessed, divided by general turmoil, unrest and power-hungry political dynasties.
“I want these gigs to be super real and supercharged and very emotionally present, but very much for people of all political codes without there being any, ‘Hey, I'm on this side and this is what I think of those people’,” Gray explains. “Everything seems to go towards some kind of emotional extreme; otherwise it doesn't seem to engage anybody. So there's very little sort of calm and candid appraisal. It's always just straight away to [pointing] the finger and a judgey kind of polarity that exists in politics and the presentation of information and how people receive that information. If you get caught up in these wheels, you can get mangled very quickly. And I don't feel I'm in a position to preach to anyone, as strongly as I may feel about some of these things. So I'm trying to make my music feel as real in the room as I possibly can, and that means I've accommodated all of that reality already in me.”
David cites his family as a positive guiding influence that helps curb the clamour of the world at large, enlisting his daughter to help out on Dear Life with some (this time around) uncredited guest vocals for the album.
“She was working in my studio and writing her songs and doing a thing, and I was helping her out a little bit to get going, and then I just said, ‘Well, you can make yourself useful now because if you want to learn about working in the studio, you can come and do some singing for me’. I can't just do falsetto myself over my main vocal all the time. It's a sound I've heard too much of. So I said, ‘You've got nothing to do, you're sitting on the sofa looking at TikTok. You can come downstairs’. It's like asking your daughter to do the washing up - the musical washing up,” Gray says with a wry laugh.
Catch David Gray at Thebarton Theatre on Friday 7 November.
