David Gray
MANY SHADES OF GRAY
David Gray Paints the Big Picture on Life in Slow Motion
David Gray has never gone out of his way to demand attention. In fact, with albums such as his international breakthrough, White Ladder, he stamped himself as one of the most subtle, unostentatious performers ever to enter the multi-platinum club. A New Day at Midnight,, his 2002 follow-up, cemented Gray's low-key agenda. Yet, with Life in Slow Motion, the Welsh singer-songwriter has changed his approach a bit. No, he hasn't emerged from seclusion draped in leathers and swilling Jack Daniel's. He has, however, dramatically rethought the intimate, ethereal hush of days gone by, in a way that makes perfect sense given the new disc's cinematic scope. Gray explained the priorities of Life in Slow Motion to Barnes & Noble.com's David Sprague.
Hear an exclusive stream of the B-side track, "With Open Arms"!
Barnes & Noble.com: By your standards, it took a long while to record Life in Slow Motion -- what were the reasons behind that?
David Gray: It took 18 months from start to finish, but I was in no rush to bang another record out. I felt, with White Ladder and all that happened with it, that I'd missed a creative beat. So I was anxious to take enough time to develop my ideas and the music. I felt like the formula I was using was a bit worn out, so I wanted to try something new. Change takes time, and I think it's more important to get somewhere than worry about how long it's taking.
B&N.com: Were you intentionally trying to make a "bigger-sounding" record?
DG: Definitely. From the opening moments, it announces categorically that this is a completely different proposition. You sort of travel into the record over this bridge of cinematic music and drop into the first song. The whole thing has a far greater range of musical colors. I guess I was very thirsty for a new sound, to move away from the bedroom-based, programming-based thing. I basically wrote songs that I could sense would stand up to big arrangements.
B&N.com: It seems as if the songs themselves are very distinct little stories, as opposed to specifically personal ones.
DG: They are. I don't think I intentionally went about doing things that way, I found myself enjoying writing in the third person. I didn't adhere to that religiously, there's a blurred line between when that's happening and when it isn't. On some of them, I'm employing a device of looking at an imagined world through someone else's eyes and I found that to be a liberating experience. It began, really, with the first work I did when I came off the road, and that was for a film. That immediately set parameters that were very different, and those sort of rolled over into the record.
B&N.com: When you're writing in that manner, do you envision full-blown characters?
DG: I get an image. It's not as if I can see a face, but I get a sense of the world around them and a feeling within them. It's like looking through their heart, rather than through their eyes. I'll latch on to an image and bring it into focus -- you get a detail and you enlarge it.
B&N.com: What was your inspiration for the song "The One I Love"?
DG: It's very much a story. It caused me so much trouble because it was so generic, but everything I seemed to add to it just made it less interesting. In terms of the story line, I had this image of someone running through a field of snow, then an image of them suddenly lying down in a pool of their own blood -- but in a beautiful setting. Basically, they're watching the world spinning past them and appreciating the glory of life at the moment that it's being taken away. I thought it was going to be very sparse and melancholy, but it ended up being quite uplifting.
B&N.com: Why did you choose to dabble in the Welsh language on the song "Nos Da Cariad"?
DG: Different languages offer different things, and I wouldn't dare to do it in any other language than Welsh, because I've lived in Wales so long. The English language is much stiffer, more rigid. Words are in sort of sealed capsules, whereas Welsh flows and there's an emotion and sensitivity to it. "Nos Da Cariad" means "Goodnight Sweetheart" or "Loved One" -- but it means more than that. It's engraved at a place I like to go, and when I started writing the song, I began thinking about putting someone to sleep to escape the world, and I began thinking about that place and that carving.
B&N.com: How do you expect the songs to translate in a live setting?
DG: They're already developing significantly. We still need to work on liberating some of them from their recorded incarnations, but a lot of them have evolved spectacularly. Obviously, it's not easy to simulate the orchestral setting of some of the tracks in concert, but we'll give them more urgency and drive live than on record. Records are all about making things understated, in a sense, but live is a different organism altogether. The sounds won't match exactly, but they'll certainly be convincing.
September 2005
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