David Gray

Twenty one years since his first studio album, David Gray’s tenth and latest, Mutineers, finds the singer-songwriter steering into unfamiliar territory while cultivating a pugnacious but respectful relationship with his own history. “I think if you’re going forward with an open heart, good things will happen,” says David. “You have to sort of tear up the past and let it go.” David’s past includes the phenomenal success of White Ladder (seven million copies sold), one of three UK number one albums, with records that became ubiquitous and others that needed to be sought out to be heard. It’s a richness of terrain and experience over a duration that belies the traditions and expectations of popular music as surely as the songs themselves. Despite such variance in both the content and reception of his prior output, the only certainty David had at the commencement of his new recording was the need to surprise himself, not just in terms of how he worked, but the ideas that drove him and the people he worked with. “I always write melody first and lyrics second, so I started to write lyrics down and think, right, I’m going to put this to music now. And that was... more...