A Conversation with David Gray – HuffPost 9.13.10

Mike Ragogna: You have a new album called Foundling, and when I spoke to you just this last Fall, you had released your previous project, Draw The Line. These albums are coming fast and furious, so I guess you’re going through a major creative period.

David Gray: I’ve changed my pace. Enough of the jokes about my quiet years or my years off; I’m back now, and it’s like every year, there’s one coming out. People will be sick of me within months.

MR: (laughs) No, no. Hey, I remember Draw The Line had some very cool guests. You had Jolie Holland, and Annie Lennox on “Full Steam.” The vibe of that record was kind of personal in comparison to some of your previous albums. How did you approach Foundling from a production standpoint?

DG: It is very stripped down. The band is playing live, and I’m singing live. That’s what I’m after, really, capturing a moment. That became the thing that I was most interested in, and it’s really the way my career started. So, I’ve kind of gone back to my earliest principles. Foundling takes the idea further than Draw The Line does in that the songs are quieter and there’s really nothing going on at times. It’s just about as quiet as I’ve ever recorded, and I think it sounds sweet because of that. That’s what I was striving for, anyway. “Less is more” is a rather overused phrase, but elements of the song and the arrangement sing out so clearly that you don’t need to embellish with much at all. Where instruments are added, it’s kept to a minimum, and that’s my basic philosophy on both of these records, but particularly Foundling.

MR: Are you going on tour to support this record in the States?

DG: The tour that I’m doing is really the end of the Draw The Line tour. To represent this record, I’ll need to put a different kind of sound together for live, and a different kind of band. So, I’ll be doing that next year. I’m going to leave a little pause, then I’m going to come back and play some shows to support that record separately.

MR: Let’s get into some of the music on Foundling. As you mentioned earlier, it sonically has more in common with material you recorded early in your career. “Gossamer Thread,” for instance, seems like a nod to that period than most of the other tracks. Am I off base there?

DG: No, I think everything bares a relation to something else familiar, for sure. They’ve all got cousins or distant relatives on other albums. In “Gossamer Thread,” it’s just executed to a different level. It’s just a band take–with bass, acoustic guitar, drums, and that’s it. There’s just one overdub on there, which is the piano at the very end. There is the story of the song itself, then there’s an outro, where it spills over into a different section of music until it goes to a final outro, which is again, different. It’s a kind of journey song, something I’m slightly preoccupied with, like a song that changes its face several times. It’s not necessarily lyrically linked together in any particular way, but somehow, it’s all part of the same picture. It’s a bit like the song called “Dream Gerard” by Traffic, which is really inspiring, and does just that. You can look at most of the songs on Astral Weeks, and they also move off and then expand in different directions and follow a kind of stream of consciousness. So, that’s an idea I was pursuing with that. But yes, the instrumentation is basic, rugged, and it just is what it is. Hopefully, it fills up the track. I’m particularly pleased with that because it was a difficult take to get. It was a long take with a lot of complicated changes, and we managed to pull it off.

MR: You talked about stream of consciousness, and “Davey Jones’ Locker” has lyrics like, “At the edge of consciousness, where logic starts to fade. Where the spirit goes unchecked…” By the time you hit “Davey Jones’ Locker”‘s chorus, are you talking about transcendence or evolution?

DG: I’m talking about slipping through one of the side doors, and down. Take me out of my conscious mind, and take me down into dreams, into sleep, or into imagined worlds that are just as big as the real one. That’s what it means to me. Strip off the artifice and take me away from my tiresome construct that I toss up. I want to be free of my logical, conscious thought process. It’s a yearning to just go down into the kingdom of the drowned.

MR: Beautiful. I’ll bet there are those who will hear this song and say, “Woh, he’s speaking my language.”

DG: To me it’s just an alternative. Take me somewhere that isn’t here, and that’s what music does for me, and that’s what writing does. It allows me freedom to go places without getting on an airplane, which as we all know, is pretty tiresome these days. It’s an alternative form of travel, music.

MR: There’s also the very subtle “In God’s Name.” What is the exact instrumentation on that? I was hearing all sorts of things, and then later on, I started second guessing myself.

DG: It’s basically a baritone guitar, upright bass, and drums. Then there’s a hurdy-gurdy and some piano, and there’s a bouzouki, and then you hear an electric guitar as well.

MR: “The Old Chair” reminds me, thematically, of a Neil Diamond song called “Morningside,” where he talks about a table that has been in the family for many years. Everybody treasured it because it was where everybody gathered, ate, talked, and grew together. There was a lot of sentimental attachment by the parents, but when the kids inherit the table, they get rid of it. Then there’s the song “Forgetting” which ties in thematically. You’re discussing the blessing of forgetting with some great imagery, especially emphasized by the sirens…well, the musical equivalent of sirens. Then you close the song with that very dramatic string section. Do you have any thoughts about all this?

DG: Well, the lyric doesn’t really need unraveling. I think the concept is there to be understood as it stands. We forget, don’t we? Everything disappears. I remember when my dad died, and somebody rather callously said, “It’s amazing how quickly you forget what they look like, and everything about them.” It’s so true. I think without a visual prompt like a picture or some video footage, memory gets very hazy very quickly, and it’s hard to distinguish whether it’s some projection or what, anyway. I think when you get old, it becomes even more so, and also you’re living in the past, which is weird. The idea is about fleetingness of everything. The song is self-explanatory, and I don’t want to make it sound more clumsy than it already is.

It’s the only thing I’ve recorded in a long time where I’ve done the lyrics first. So, I had this writing scheme, and I thought, “This works. I could write like this all day.” And I did write about twenty verses for it. Then I just sat there at the piano on a sort of quiet day, and I picked out some chords and kept the foot pedal down to sustain them so they would blend into each other, which is kind of in keeping with the idea of the song. That was it, it just sort of clicked. I recorded two versions of it, and the one you hear is the second one. It all just came together, and I’ve never recorded so quietly. I was barely hitting the chords on the piano, and the vocal was just a whisper, really. I didn’t get above thirty percent on the singing for the whole track, and it sort of blossoms on the mic in a really lovely way. Then I added the idea of a static string line that just sort of comes from nothing and grows, then the fall on the cello, with all the notes just bleeding into itself.

We had beautiful playing for our production from Caroline (Dale) on the cello, and from Iestyn on the knobs. It really came together very simply, there was hardly anything to it. My guitarist, Neill (MacColl), put this really eloquent acoustic part to it, and it didn’t really need much, but it’s just a little bit of flavor to help the song come to a crescendo around the lyric. That’s really it, it’s as simple as possible, but I guess the ingredients were right, and the writing was strong, and the whole thing just holds together and has a real tension about it. So, yeah, it’s a bit of walled off, and it’s not like I can really follow that with another song called “Remembering” or “Walking.” It’s a “one of,” but I really love that track, it came out really good.

MR: It reminds me a lot of the old singer-songwriters, Randy Newman especially comes to mind.

DG: Yeah, we we’re talking about things like “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today,” and that kind of stuff. “Broken windows and empty hallways…” That’s a stupendous bit of string arranging there.

MR: Are you familiar with Randy’s album Sail Away, Good Old Boys, and maybe some of his older stuff?

DG: To go from a world where everyone is emoting hell for leather to that dry, calm, ironic, understated delivery, I love it. Weighty things dealt with without this sort of super emotional delivery. So, you’ve hit the nail on the head there with the Randy Newman reference.

MR: Thank you. Now, most people in the States caught on to you, in a large way, through your hit “Babylon.” But how would you guide us through your earlier records?

DG: Well, it’s weird. Listening back to your stuff is kind of embarrassing. I don’t listen back to that stuff, it sounds nothing like I sound now, in a way. Yet, there’s obviously a cause, a voice behind the song that’s mine. I think my first record came out well. I had time to prepare for it, I had a record company that gave me a budget, it was all very structured and well organized; I had a producer who was respectful of my music and made it sound good and allowed me to concentrate on performing the songs live in the studio, which is what I wanted to do. It was all done in a week or so. We added a bit of mixing, and a bit of overdubbing, and that was the end of it. It has a sort of spirit, so, A Century Ends, I think is a good place to start.

MR: Nice.

DG: I really like my very first single, “Birds Without Wings.” It’s a three track EP, and you can buy this record, which has all my early EPs together on it. These are just record company creations. Once I started selling units, all these strange records began to crop up with like Best Of The Early Years, and all this. It’s all just the same stuff, generally, packaged together differently.

MR: Is that any surprise, really?

DG: Nowadays you can buy track by track, and there’s a song called “L’s Song” on my first single, a b-side. I still hold that song very dear. Moving on, it sort of gets patchy because my career got very patchy. I knew I wanted to steer the ship, but I didn’t know quite how to do it, so, I took on a bit of water there for a while. I needed to refine my ideas for each record. There’s a slight schizophrenia between aggressive music, and quiet, sort of contemplative stuff. Not that those two things can’t co-exist, but it doesn’t always segue very smoothly–I’m covering Flesh, and Sell Sell Sell. But I do think there were moments on each of them that were worth something. Then, White Ladder came about, and I think from that point, it’s all quite straight forward. I have people coming up to me, and they’re not “weird,” but they say to me, “Oh, my favorite album is Flesh or Sell Sell Sell.” People pick the oddest things, and I’m like, “Yeah?” You never know what people are going to latch onto. There might be something that makes me feel uncomfortable now that they might like. To have a perspective on the early music that was so long ago, I think is up to the people. I think the beauty of the internet is you can go and investigate anything if you want to find out about it enough. It’s all there to be listened to. There are songs like “Shine” from my first album, that really stood the test of time. Certain things seem to last.

MR: Well, also in the U.S., as far as popularity, your music was on virtually every television show. When somebody picks up a David Gray album, there are going to be at least two or three titles that people know because you’ve been on all of these shows.

DG: Okay, well that’s good.

MR: Maybe you’re not aware of how that’s happened.

DG: I’m vividly aware of certain things, like ER used “Slow Motion,” and I think somebody used “Nemesis” recently. If it’s a good moment, in a good show, it obviously has a big effect. It brings people into your music. “Who is this guy? I like that song.” All this stuff is helpful.

MR: Who influenced you, and do you think you’re having an influence on some artists that are out there? Have any come to you and said, “Thank you, David for influencing me musically”?

DG: A few, yeah, you do get that sometimes. For me, so many people have been a big influence, but there’s none bigger than Bob Dylan. That’s really what fired my imagination when I was young. Everything is secondary to that, I would say. I discovered Dylan when I was about thirteen, and I discovered Madness, and The Specials, and all that sort of music when I was about twelve. So, I somewhat pitch between the two, that’s my identity–Dylan, in terms of writing, and just the color of his ideas was like discovering a vast continent of imagery. When I found his music, it was so pared down, and I loved that fact that there was nothing between me and what he was saying. It was all about the lyric, and that’s an appropriate way to close it because that’s pretty much what I ended up with on Foundling. I boiled it down to that again.

MR: I know we’re celebrating the new album Foundling, but are you already looking at your next album.

DG: Well, I’ve got thoughts going through my head and some lines written in my notebook, but I wouldn’t say I’m ready to head to the studio just yet. I’ve got a few songs I’ve written while I’ve been on the road for the last year or so, and obviously, there will always be stuff left over. Even with all the extra tracks that we’ve put out–with the Foundling record there’s a bonus CD that has nine or ten things on it– everybody wants a freebie nowadays. But there’s still stuff left over, things that we didn’t quite catch or I didn’t get the lyrics finished or wasn’t happy about, and there are some good ones that didn’t get on there. I wouldn’t say I’m quite set in my mind on the next album. I need to get the job done first, I need to do this big tour, and then have a few glasses of champagne and chill the f**k out.

MR: What kind of advice do you have for up and coming artists?

DG: I always stumble a bit on this question. I just think, follow your heart, and try to not listen to what the consensus view is. Follow your feelings about music, don’t listen to the media. Just play it the way you want to play it, and try to have faith in that. Stay in the game, you never know when something is going to happen for you. It could seem like nothing is ever going to happen, and then next thing you know, you’ve got a hit on your hands. It’s strange, sometimes, how things can work. Don’t listen to all the nay-sayers because music will always exist, and people need it and thrive on it. So, if you want to make it, you have to have some faith in what you’re making, otherwise you won’t be around for long. It’s a crushed world, and it’s a lacerated industry, but people still have a passion for music, same as ever. You just have to make the music good so that you don’t get sick of it, and everything else will work itself out. It’s a follow your heart business. Don’t try to play what you think someone else wants to hear. That’s really about the only advice I can give.

MR: Well, thank you, David, for coming by. I really appreciate it.

DG: Thank you.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney