Music |
White Ladder
David Gray
By
Published: Jan 01, 2004
Category:
Rock
"White Ladder"
David Gray
David Gray is at the Steinway almost before anyone realizes he’s in the studio. No “hello” to the crew that’s going to tape a mini-concert and interview. Just the slightest pause to gather himself. The left hand begins playing chunky, anthemic chords. Then, eyes closed, he starts an unrelenting dirge. “All my sorrow, all my rage/A teardrop falls on every page” — and that’s just the second verse. Gray goes on to declare “The trick ain’t worth the time it buys/I’m sick of hearing my own lies.” The song’s resolution: “Honey, if I’m honest/I still don’t know what love is.”
These aren’t lyrics that suggest top ten. But it is precisely his willingness to mine the kind of heartache that won’t go away — desperately intense emotion, communicated through minimal instrumentation and a singing style blending Bob Dylan’s twang and Van Morrison’s bite — that has made David Gray stupifyingly successful. In 1998, after years of wandering in a commercial desert, he camped out in his London living room with a percussionist and a computer and created “White Ladder.” Released in 2000, it passed, like a chain letter, from devotee to devotee, until it sold 2.2 million CDs in England, another 2 million in the United States and had become the biggest-selling single-artist CD in the history of Ireland. And here was the truly strange part: There was no hype in this success. “White Ladder” was that rare event — a genuine masterpiece.
“White Ladder” — the title that comes from one of the more obscure lines in Dylan’s “Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall” — is different from Gray’s earlier CDs. This time, his creative “method” was simply to surrender to whatever he was feeling on a given day. “I turned down the volume and allowed the work to come through,
