DAVID GRAY TO TOUR THE UK IN SUPPORT OF HIS LATEST ALBUM DEAR LIFE

In support of his latest album, Dear Life which was released on January 17th he has announced his extensive Past & Present Tour.

David Gray’s story is unlike any other. He spent almost a decade striving to make a breakthrough, and when it happened it did so in the biggest way imaginable as White Ladder became one of the best-selling British albums of recent decades and established him as an arena-filling artist. As the years have passed, his song craft has only been deepened by his natural ability to convey specific emotions, atmospheres or, as heard on his acclaimed 2021 album Skellig, a perception of place, all positioning him in the lineage of classic poetic singer-songwriters rather than love struck acoustic troubadours. While the likes of Ed Sheeran, Adele and Hozier have acknowledged his influence, David has continued to follow his own artistic path.

Dear Life is Gray’s thirteenth album. It’s the result of “a starburst of song writing … it just seemed like the gods of song writing were being kind. The doubting voices didn’t turn up. ” An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.

Premiering on The Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, Dave’s new single, Plus & Minus catches the songwriter at his most immediately infectious. The song’s piano refrain frames a duet about a fractured relationship, in which his inimitable voice trades words of disillusionment and despair with newcomer Talia Rae, whose smoky vocal simultaneously evokes equal measures of wit and sadness.

David adds, “Some unfinished songs just refuse to do the polite thing and go away. And that’s certainly true of this one, which had me going round in circles for nearly twenty years to the point where it almost drove me crazy. Plus & Minus is based in part on a chord sequence that was born way back in 2004, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it has taken all those long, intervening years to fully resolve it. It’s an unusual sort of song for me to write in that it’s an out-and-out three minute pop song. In a slightly Babylon style, it revolves around the same idea three times. In Babylon, we had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Here we have ‘You know the way desire is … You know the way the light is … You know the way that time is.’ I could see that from the word go. It’s so full of hooks both lyrically and melodically that it needed a tight arrangement to really optimise their value. This took a LOT of work to get right, but we got there in the end…even if the end was twenty years on from the beginning!”

Gray is a songwriter’s songwriter, one of those rare artists who can express themselves as fully through lyrics as through melody, a richly poetic wordsmith with vast musical flair. Dear Life is a big statement, the work of a driven man obsessively focussed on a personal artistic journey.

TOUR DATES 2025

March

April

May

*With Talia Rae

Tickets are now on sale

www.davidgray.com