David Gray made his musical name at the turn of the 21st century, but it would not be until halfway through its first decade that he released his true masterpiece. 1999’s White Ladder put Gray on the global map, fueled by the success of lead single “Babylon”. On that album and its successor, A New Day at Midnight, Gray pursues an electronic-inflected style of folk – “folktronica”, as one neologism has it – that lends him aesthetic uniqueness, bridging the old-fashioned guy-with-a-guitar setup and the new kinds of production and instrumentation available in a changing technological landscape.
After breaking into the international mainstream, however, Gray would not stick to folktronica. As 2005’s Life in Slow Motion attests, his music blossomed with organic instrumentation and fuller arrangements, in contrast to the intimate bedroom sound that makes White Ladder endearing still. Life in Slow Motion, now re-released in deluxe digital and vinyl editions that include demos and B-sides, testifies that for whatever Gray was able to get out of a spare recording setup, he knew how to take advantage of a full studio setup and a whole series of accoutrements, including brass string sections on the likes of “Alibi” and the haunting title track. The sonic canvas is as expansive as the arctic environs on the cover art.
Six albums have followed Life in Slow Motion, bringing the tally to 13 for Gray’s career. With the new edition of that LP as exigence, PopMatters looks back on Gray’s artistic output, delving deep into his catalogue to highlight ten songs that, in various ways, illustrate the many facets of his songwriting that culminate on Life in Slow Motion.
No songs from the much-lauded White Ladder appear here, intentionally. “Babylon” and its siblings, like “Sail Away” and “This Year’s Love”, still feature at any concert of Gray’s, and more ink, physical and digital, has been spilled about them than anything else in his discography. This article prefers the deep cut over the smash single, and Gray is one of those artists who shine most brightly on the songs that were never meant for radio’s circulation. The singles featured below dropped after the days when radio charts reigned supreme, but in a different musical reality, they still deserved to shoot to number one.
“Falling Free” (from Flesh, 1994)
This hushed piece from David Gray’s early and pre-fame years sounds in every aspect like an artist coming into his voice. Consisting of nothing more than Gray and a piano, “Falling Free” signaled his aptitude for writing love songs. “We’re standing face-to-face / With the angel of grace / Don’t it just taste so pure?” he cries at the song’s climax, a rupture of emotion in a gentle ballad.
The juxtaposition of stark piano chords and Gray’s poignant lyrics marks an essential passing of a test for a young songwriter: how well can you paint a musical picture with the barest of ingredients? “Falling Free” gives us a protean version of the Gray that would blossom in the years to come: earnest without being cloying, emotionally direct, and lyrically rich.
“Late Night Radio” (from Sell, Sell, Sell, 1996)
Despite its title, Sell, Sell, Sell ended up being the record that preceded the one that sold copies in the millions. Still, “Late Night Radio” should have been as big a hit as “Babylon” was, perhaps even more so. The song tells a story familiar to the annals of rock ‘n’ roll – a small-town woman having her world expanded with a move to a big city – but does so with a catchy chord progression and an intriguing chorus metaphor (“She don’t mind the late-night radio”).
Gray peppers in imagery that adds vivacity to the familiar picture he conjures, as when he describes New York as “dark, dirty and stark / Burning with yellow wings.” When in the final verse he describes his protagonist as “alive with the sound”, the same feels true of him.
“Flame Turns Blue” (from Lost Songs 95-98, 2000)
Of the songs written by David Gray that should make the mythical songwriter’s canon, the kind of song that anyone with a voice and a guitar would do well to know, “Flame Turns Blue” stands out as the best candidate. Gray regularly introduces the song onstage by explaining its backstory, which was written after a stolen tour bus incident during a US tour. However, “Flame Turns Blue” might be the most timeless thing he’s written; the particularity of his experience in writing the song translates into an expression of universality.
The final verse contains some of Gray’s finest lyrical poetry: “Through the lemon trees the diamonds of light / Break in splinters on the pages where I write.” Lost Songs is an interstitial moment in Gray’s career, compiling tracks written in the years leading up to White Ladder. “Flame Turns Blue” confirmed a year after that record’s release that the brilliance had been in the works for some time.
“Knowhere” (from A New Day at Midnight, 2002)
The deepest of deep cuts, “Knowhere” might not be on the radar of even the most enthusiastic Gray devotees. No live versions of the song exist on YouTube, and the archival website Setlist only logs three performances, all in 2002, the year of A New Day at Midnight’s release. This brooding electronic number captures the outer edge of Gray’s “folktronica” experimentation.
Unlike “Flame Turns Blue”, “Knowhere” doesn’t sound like the kind of song one could effectively capture with only a guitar or piano as an aid. The brooding opening image (“Slow voices speaking through a hurricane”) and skeptical chorus refrain (“I don’t know where I / I don’t know what I’m / Supposed to do now”) provoke a curious disquiet. One could call it a mood piece, albeit one with which it is easy to sing along.
“Ain’t No Love” (from Life in Slow Motion, 2005)
Nestled in the midsection of Life in Slow Motion, an album that begins with orchestral bombast (“Alibi”) and concludes in a squall of distortion (“Disappearing World”), “Ain’t No Love” does not assert itself the way one might expect of a great song. The simple C-major chord progression and brief structure – which, unusually, concludes after just a single chorus, right as the music achieves liftoff – is downright spartan in contrast to the string-soaked lushness of “Alibi” or the gradual build of “Now and Always”.
Simplicity works to Gray’s advantage in this case. The delicate piano chords that augment the closing verse’s glistening imagery (“On winter trees the fruit of rain / Is hanging trembling on the branches / Like a thousand diamond buds”) are a respite amidst the dynamic volleys of Life in Slow Motion, a reminder that resting for a breather affords its own kind of power.
“Full Steam” (from Draw the Line, 2009)
Gray would do well to indulge in a duets record, considering the collaborations he’s put to tape over the years. “Full Steam” is the boldest of that small group, a rousing tune featuring Annie Lennox that, given its context of the Great Recession, feels like a renunciation of neoliberalism. “Forlorn, adrift, on seas of beige / In this, our golden age,” Gray and Lennox harmonize together, before admitting in the chorus: “Now you saw it coming / And I saw it coming / We all saw it coming / And we still bought it.”
Gray, of course, is hardly a polemicist, and “Full Steam” is no fiery manifesto. The reluctance in the lyrics to name specific political targets ultimately proves to be an asset. In many situations, Gray and Lennox remind us, the first step toward change often involves recognizing our own complicity. Barring that, we are “running full steam ahead” into destruction.
“Birds of the High Arctic” (from Mutineers, 2014)
Arriving after the more organically instrumented Draw the Line and the stripped-bare Foundling (2010), Mutineers hearkened back to the electronic textures of Gray’s years most centrally in the public spotlight. Yet there is a maturity there built from the more robust arrangements on Life in Slow Motion and Draw the Line, making Mutineers a unique point of synthesis. “Birds of the High Arctic” recalls the dramatic piano balladry of “Alibi” while washing it in layers of reverb.
Gray sounds like he set up microphones in the frigid landscape on the cover of Life in Slow Motion. The song ascends to a pained moment of revelation: “Baby say that it isn’t true / You were never there and it wasn’t you.” Lyrically, he indulges one of his beloved topics, avian life, equating a now-departed presence to a speck with wings on a whiteout sky.
“Hall of Mirrors” (from Gold in a Brass Age, 2019)
Gold in a Brass Age is, in many ways, the logical aesthetic follow-up to White Ladder and A New Day at Midnight, in its embrace of electronic textures. Still, it could only have been written by a songwriter who expanded his horizons in the way Gray did after the early 2000s. The jittery “Hall of Mirrors” proves illustrative in this regard: chiming guitars intertwine with spastic programmed drums and layered vocals, coming to glorious fruition with a hymnal of an outro: “Baby when that oh-too-solid ground / Comes a-risin’ up, hey don’t look down now,” Gray chants, his voice a choir in miniature. New-school in sound but old-school in feeling, “Hall of Mirrors” is, as its name suggests, a showcase of Gray’s artistry. (Read the author’s interview with Gray about this album for PopMatters here.)
“Accumulates” (from Skellig, 2021)
A simple hammered-on guitar lick defines David Gray’s biggest hit in “Babylon”, so it’s unsurprising that a reprisal of that technique works brilliantly on “Accumulates”. Like the rest of the tunes on Skellig, “Accumulates” captures Gray at his most elemental, with voice and guitar doing the heavy lifting, adornments minimal at most. The origin of the album’s name, taken from remote islands off the coast of Ireland, informs the meditative isolation that characterizes “Accumulates”, whose post-2020 release felt all the more apt, given the containment experienced by Gray’s listeners worldwide.
He dances around the subject of the song; “Well it grips / And it grins / It cavorts / and it gyrates,” he sings, never giving the “it” a proper noun. The repetitive hammered guitar note and lyrically hypnotic quality of “Accumulates” suggest the image of someone trying their best, on their own, to think their way to identifying a force they sense but cannot name. Who among us hasn’t been there?
“Plus and Minus” (from Dear Life, 2025)
Now over 30 years into a musical life, David Gray continues to add gems to his songwriting trove. “Plus and Minus”, the first single from his latest LP Dear Life, ranks with the likes of “Sail Away” and “Please Forgive Me.” A mercurial duet with a young UK singer named Talia Ray, “Plus and Minus” deploys a perfectly placed modulation in the prechorus that includes a poetic phrase that could be describing the trials of creativity, or of the pursuit of love: “For the fire that gets lit / And the flame that regrets it.”
The electronic drum track and repetitive Euro dance-style piano chords that anchor the song evoke Gray’s 1990s roots. However, the cumulative effect is contemporary, a testament to an artist who can adapt to the times while still sounding like himself. “This whole routine is getting old,” Gray sings in unison with Rae, an ironic statement for an artist like himself.
