David Gray
David Gray was basically a dead man walking in the industry by '98. He’d been dropped by two labels, his third record went nowhere, and he was tracking White Ladder in a cramped London bedroom on a shoestring budget. He wasn't using some high-end board at Abbey Road; he was using an Akai sampler and a primitive computer setup with Clune, his drummer, trying to figure out how to make folky songwriting not sound like a coffee shop open mic. It was a desperate, DIY hail mary that only worked because the songs were bulletproof. White Ladder eventually blew up so big it became the best-selling album in Irish history, which is hilarious when you think about it being made in a bedroom. The success turned him into a stadium act, but it also trapped him. He spent the next decade trying to reconcile that gritty, electronic-undercurrent intimacy with the demands of being a massive adult-contemporary draw. Some of it got a bit too polished for its own good, but when he strips it back to that nervous, pulsing energy, he’s still one of the best out there.
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David Gray on Gatefold — the second screen for vinyl, CD, and cassette collectors.