David Gray
After eight years of touring and recording his three previous albums, 1998s White Ladder (6 million worldwide sales) established David as one of the UK’s leading artists both at home and overseas. In Ireland, White Ladder remains the best selling album of all time. His commercial success is backed up by a critical consensus that has seen him win two Ivor Novello awards for song writing, a Q award for best single, a GQ award for Best Solo Artist, two Brit nominations for Best Male, a Grammy Nomination for Best New Artist and been championed by The Sun newspaper as the "country’s real pop star."
In a break with prior tradition Life In Slow Motion is the first of David’s albums to be recorded in a ’full scale’ studio environment as opposed to the ’bedroom’ sized facilities favoured in the past. This increased physical space is matched by an evolution in David’s musical aspirations. Life In Slow Motion is the first of his recent albums on which David and his group have been abetted by an outside producer, Marius De Vries (Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Madonna, U2).
Of the change in his professional climate David says, "I don’t think you can remain the underdog forever and work in that way. I really wanted to get away from that lo-fi bedroom, programming, Midi side of things. I really wanted to experiment, so a lot of the songs came out of playing as a band or messing around with sounds. A lot of them were just written in the standard way of me sitting at the piano or whatever. But it became far more about playing, and we realised this was our strong point, we can actually play!"
With compositions dating back to David’s work on the soundtrack for Amma Assante’s film A Way Of Life (released in 2004 it received 7 BAFTA Cymru nominations as well as a BAFTA nomination for David as Best New British Composer) and others arriving by the day, the process of refining what would become Life In Slow Motion would go on to involve over 50 musicians as well as yielding David’s longest (and perhaps most structurally ambitious) song to date, ’Now And Always’. "Making this album has given me the confidence to have these audacious thoughts about sonically where you can get to using choirs for instance, or creating your own choir, sampling yourself. It was so much fun doing the vocals on ’Now And Always’. It has the most ludicrously complicated vocal line that I’ve ever sung. Probably 20 seconds long, it nearly killed me! There’s nothing more uplifting than the human voice and I was inspired when that Bjork record came out Medulla. I think it’s got some great stuff on it."