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The success of David Gray’s four year old album White Ladder is a phenomenon in rock history. Recorded on a shoe string with his good side man, the Hawaiian shirted Clune, it was nothing more than an extended EP, released most underwhelmingly in Dublin city, about the only place in the world that was any way interested. Covering the minimal costs was probably all that he intended. And then…then like a child’s snowball dropped accidentally down a mountain the momentum began slowly but surely until it was an avalanche almost out of Gray’s control. It began knocking down every music business wall that blocked it; big budget’s needed to promote artists through MTV and poster campaigns; the artistic songwriters with an acoustic guitar especially male are so uncool; you’ve been dropped twice, gone independent – catch a grip!

How did he move from the guy who kept getting dropped from labels to the guy who beat Nirvana, Manic Street Preachers, and Gareth Gates to number 1 in the UK charts? Which other singer songwriter has got anywhere near the charts never mind topping it in a week of such stiff competition?

How did David Gray fool people into buying quality music? Well, there were the loops and the samples and the little ambient noises that disguised the traditional songwriting values of Dylan et al and gave it a modern sheen. There was the move away from the harsher, bolder, and wordier political, philosophical, and spiritual sermons of his first three excellent but ignored albums Centuries End, Flesh, and Sell, Sell, Sell. Most important of all there was a dj (Donal Dineen) in Dublin who played White Ladder and a wee rapid band of Irish people, still convinced as the Irish are, by the power of the song that knocked that aforementioned snowball to the ground. It has to be an encouragement to all the other song art performers out there, who play to a background of clinking glasses and drinkers prepared to pay £10 cover charges to talk through the gig they have foolishly paid to ignore, to believe that if David Gray can do it, maybe there is hope.

Gray, however, now sits at the other side of the chasm called hope and is finding that where he now sits the expectations are high, the critics are queuing up with saliva dripping and judgement is swift. How do you follow that kind of success? What do you hear as you try? Cash registers? Sales charts? The critics? The fans? Or is it possible to do the impossible again and remain true to his artistic muse and make an album that with blinkers stays true to his vision and without glancing over his shoulders keeps his focus fixed on his very own soul. For that bizarre out of the blue commercial success and the integrity of a follow up that ignores it would be quite a thing.

That “quite a thing” is called A New Day At Midnight. It is the natural successor to White Ladder maybe even that little side project’s completion. For music critics who are always demanding reinvention there will be great wailing and erasing of stars at the foot of reviews but it was not for reviews that David Gray picked up a guitar or started to write these twelve songs. Indeed the inspiration for the song cycle here was the death of Gray’s father from cancer. That his wife was pregnant during the recording process must also have played its part but his daughter Ivy’s birth just two months before the album's release will probably not kick in until the follow up album. As a result this album is darker than White Ladder, very introspective and personal and yet dealing with all the issues that have been making Gray’s work deeper and higher and wider than his peers for almost 10 years now.

We are left here with the musings of the big questions set in the heart of sadness and loss. In the raw soul ends of mourning Gray becomes acutely more aware of the futility of what we are living in and for. On "Freedom" he sings: 

Time out on the running boards
We’re running
Through a world that lost its meaning
Trying to find the way to love
This running
Ain’t no kind of freedom

The world in all its clarity
Is glorious, is fake
The world in all its honesty
Is more than I can take.

Gray claims in interviews that he has no belief in God or the afterlife but he is not afraid to recognize the need in us all to wish for it even if we do not believe in it or believe that it is not there. As he looks, hears the wishes of "Eden in Real Love" he is seeking to meet his loved ones somewhere beyond on "The Other Side" and so adds his name to a list of songwriters singing about some beyond the grave in recent weeks – Steve Earle, Tracey Chapman, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen among them.

In the same way, there is an agnostic wondering if there might not be something to explain the mysteries:

Sing me the truth, sweet bird of youth
I got some trouble trying to understand
Beneath the veils of mystery
Are these the movements of an unseen hand?

Steve Stockman 11/18/2002