Mudita Journal

David Gray and the Return to Simplicity

August 3, 2007 · Filed under: Music, Reviews
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I’ve recently become enchanted with David Gray’s albums White Ladder and Life in Slow Motion. Something in his voice … demolishes mere form.

While doing a little reading about him on the internet, I came across this interesting anecdote:

In 1996, he found himself running out of patience and, as is unfortunately common for emerging artists, a disastrous run of luck with major record labels.

He had released three albums in as many years, first with Caroline, then Virgin and finally EMI. Each received critical acclaim, but Gray still had no more than a devoted cult following, despite opening for big acts including Radiohead and Matthews.

After EMI (then about to go belly up) bungled promotions for his album Sell Sell Sell, Gray decided he’d had enough. He broke his contract with EMI, despite being signed for an additional two albums.

“There was a big advance waiting, but we just decided to get out, because it was just like death, basically,” he recalls. “I couldn’t face going through anything like that anymore.”

The period that followed was one of personal and creative uncertainty for Gray. “At that point, I was really confused as to why I was doing it,” he says. “It wasn’t as simple as getting up and playing music. I was not meeting any of the commercial criteria, obviously. So I had to go back to the drawing board.”

The “drawing board” consisted of Gray’s electric and acoustic guitars (Martin, Lauden and Gibson), an Electro-Voice D257 microphone, a 4-track, an Akai S3000 sampler and a Roland Groovebox synth. (“About half the sounds on the album come from the Groovebox,” Gray explains.)

Without a recording contract or a proper studio, Gray and his drummer and sometime bassist Clune began “messing around,” without any intention of making an album. “I was writing a lot of stuff, all kind of miserable, trying to get something going again, trying to find out what I was doing,” he says.

As they recorded, something began to change for Gray. Previously, he had always felt intimidated by the studio environment — mostly, he admits, because he knew nothing about the technical side of recording. But that changed as he learned the process at home.

“I was absolutely free as a bird to twiddle anything… experiment in a very basic way,” he relates. “I got really excited about it all. It brought me closer to the character of what I was doing.”

These livingroom recordings ultimately became his breakthrough album White Ladder, yielding greater commercial success than any of his studio recordings.

Isn’t it interesting — how returning to simplicity can so often put us back in touch with real inspiration.

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