After an album like “White Ladder,” you’d think David Gray would be on cloud nine. Before Dave Matthews decided to make “Ladder,” the flagship release of his new ATO label, Gray was toiling thanklessly through a career that was all but burned out.
After hearing the album when Gray released it on his own IHT label, Matthews became the Don King to Gray’s Mike Tyson. He promoted the album and its scratchy-voiced troubadour with every breath he got, going so far as to call Gray “one of my absolute favorite artists — beautiful in the purest and most honest way.”
“Anything I can do to turn more listeners on to his music I will,” Matthews said and he did.
After “Ladder” got the Matthews treatment in 1999, Gray rose to full-on pop star status. The album charted two hits, “Babylon” and “Please Forgive Me,” earning Gray a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist (which he lost to Alicia Keys). “White Ladder” was certified platinum five times. So why is Gray’s newest, “A New Day at Midnight” so somber?
Simply put, his dad died. Throughout Gray’s mostly disappointing career, his father was his truest supporter. When his albums “The End of a Century,” “Flesh” and “Sell, Sell, Sell” failed commercially, his father was a pillar of support. If “A New Day” is any indication, Gray is a man in pain.
Fortunately, David Gray’s loss is our gain. Death and dying is a recurring theme within “A New Day.” “Dead in the Water” and “The Other Side” bookend the album, reinforcing Gray’s obsessions with loss, longing, and eventually, hope.
“This is a very personal record, really,” Gray said. “‘A New Day at Midnight’ acknowledges that this is sort of a dark time but also that something’s been born out of it. It’s obviously quite a troubled record. I don’t think it’s without hope.” Cutting right to the issue at hand, Gray makes his grief plain.
“Tell it like it is, It’s like they always say/ You’re dead in the water now,” he sings on the first track.
On previous albums, Gray clouded his emotions more but this time he’s laying his cards on the table.
“Make me a boat, away I’ll float into the stillness of a pure blue sky/ There’s nothing here to hold me now and I got no more tears to cry,” he sings on “Last Boat.”
“December” promises “all my tears will dry,” as a dreamy, vibrating keyboard assuages the singer’s pain. “Caroline” and “Long Distance Call” are the only songs preventing “A New Day” from drowning in tears.
Gray hasn’t mastered yet his incorporation of samples and canned-beats. Many of the album’s computer-generated effects distract from its ultra-human, bare bones eloquence. If Gray ever figures out how to digitally synthesize sorrow, we’re all in for it. Until then, his real-life heartache will suffice.