First Person: singer-songwriter David Gray on how the songs on his new album came to him

Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. 

Sometimes the making process can feel like that, a matter of training our peripheral vision to retrieve the images and ideas that are flickering at the edge of our field of view, existing in the same dimly lit space as dreams, primal impulses and hazy memories. 

It’s obvious that a lot of songs are written in response to events, either in our own lives or in the lives of those around us, and beyond that by our contact with the splendour, violence and upheaval of the observed world, as it assaults us day after day. 

But it’s also true that there are seasons and ellipses within, and that the heart has its own weather. Beneath our direct experience of the world with all its raging stimuli, is a deeper, murkier plane where emotional currents are in constant motion, drifting and churning and dredging things up from below. In a way, then, a song is like a snapshot of the storms of Jupiter.

Writing and singing are acts of devout attention. To begin, we must first nullify the noise, and then turn the heart's gaze inward, the better to approach the growing flame of the music, and to fasten mind and imagination to its strange tap-root going down.

Sadly, gone are the spacious days of only writing songs when the mood takes me. Most of my ideas for lyrics and songs these days arrive piecemeal. A new set of chords might come to me in a soundcheck, or a rhyming scheme propose itself while I’m driving my car. Life being what it is, and more often than not, I’m in no position to capitalise on these creative invitations, so have had to make a habit of squirrelling things away, in the hope that I can resume my train of thought later, when I have the necessary quiet and space. 

Depending on my schedule, this gap might be days, months or even years. Then, it’s a matter of the rather awkward process of trying to hypnotise myself back, into that state of openness and suggestibility that the initial concept or chord sequence sparked in me in the first place. It’s far from perfect, but this is the process as I’ve come to know it. A slow and measured ascent with occasional downhill sections, hopefully culminating in a view from the summit! 

Just occasionally though, a song comes suddenly and out of nowhere, fully formed. “That Day Must Surely Come” from my new album Dear Life, is a good example of this.

The writing process for Dear Life was unlike any other, dislocated as it was by the Covid pandemic. As the first lockdown took hold, I made an initial attempt at working solo in my basement studio, but as the weirdness kicked in, I had a change of heart and decided that my time might be better spent upstairs with my family. For the first time in my life, I let the creative field go fallow.

When I resumed writing in late 2021, I had a burst of creativity beyond anything I’d previously experienced, completing more than 30 songs in a remarkable four-month period of sustained intensity and focus. I got into such a rhythm that I was able to just pick up songs from my bag of half-finished ideas, flesh them out and complete them, one after the other. 

It was whilst I was working away in exactly this fashion, that I stumbled, entirely accidentally, on the opening chords of “That Day Must Surely Come”. I immediately knew that something was there, put aside what I was working on, and focused in. As I reached out for a vocal melody the first line came, and then the second. Minutes later and I had the first verse in my pocket, and was halfway through the second verse with whole song swinging into view. As each image arrived there was a sense of familiarity, and I had the realisation that I was giving shape to something that I had been meaning to say for a long time.

In rare moments like this, it is as if the walls that separate us from the great vault of memory, experience and sensation suddenly fall away, and for a brief moment we are granted full access. The song beckons. Image after image rises up and falls into place, each one pure, unfussy, and utterly of itself. Drawn through the intellect via the gut.

There is a heightened sense of subjectivity, but with a deep sense of objectivity overlaid on it. The calmer, editorial part of the mind seems to know exactly what to do, working swiftly and decisively to amend and subtract until the song stands in its optimum form. 

There’s an uncanny sense of having uncovered something that was already existent. That the song has been gestating in the mind's dark recesses for years, just waiting for this moment to be born. 

How to take account of the miraculous, even on a tiny scale. Claims of ownership seem misplaced. The atmosphere is charged, and for these brief, transcendent moments, the world seems changed, and I am awed by it, and humbled. My voice and my guitar at work like a sculptor's chisel, guided by the marble to reveal the figure lying dormant inside. 

When the lyric seems finished, I play the song through to get a proper look at it. This is like watching the song take its first breath, and it’s not unusual at times like this to have the hairs standing up on my neck and tears blurring my eyes. 

A thousand disappointments and mundanities are forgotten. The wind stiffens, the constellations blaze. These are the reasons we put to sea.

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Below: Watch David Gray perform "That Day Must Surely Come" at BAR 1200 in The Sunset Marquis, West Hollywood