Encore episode:: David Gray Interview; Musical Roots and Tour Life | Takin A Walk with Buzz Knight"

Summary

Takin' A Walk - Music History with Buzz Knight
Encore Episode: David Gray Interview – Musical Roots and Tour Life
Original release date: June 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Buzz Knight sits down for a candid, winding, and heartfelt conversation with acclaimed singer-songwriter David Gray. The discussion explores Gray’s 13th album Dear Life, his approach to songwriting, the influence of musical greats, reflections on mortality and resilience, and the profound joys and challenges of touring and collaboration. Intimate and searching, the episode reveals the creative currents that shape Gray’s art, and offers listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look into the making of his latest work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Dream Walks, Music Icons, and the Mystical in Language

[03:32 – 04:27]

• Buzz Knight kicks things off with the signature “Dream Walk” question: Who would David Gray (living or dead) take a walk with and where?

• David Gray:

  • Would walk with the mystic Rumi along the dunes and coast east of England; drawn to Rumi’s mystical wisdom and desire to “consider the mysteries of the universe.”
  • “Assuming that there was a magical language dissolving barrier, I might take a walk with the mystic Rumi... We’d wander through the dunes and the beach and consider the mysteries of the universe and everything contained therein.” (David Gray, 03:50)

• Opening lines from Gray about the mysticism of words:

  • “Each word was a magic incantation when it began. We...fail to see them now for what they are. They were magic things that could only be uttered by magic people.” (David Gray, 02:36)

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Deep Roots: Early Influences, Family Soundtracks, and Songwriting Heroes

[05:31 – 10:33]

• Boston Connection – Gray’s enduring popularity in Boston, which he attributes to “that Irish influence.”
• Influence of parental music taste from the 1970s:
  • Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, Rod Stewart, Stones, Beatles.
  • Father’s love of Cat Stevens, especially albums like Tea for the Tillerman.
  • “They were mainstream but they had a kind of soulful lean…they were intimate encounters.” (David Gray, 06:42)
• Discovering Bob Dylan as a teenager:
  • Road trip soundtracked with only two cassettes: Pavarotti and Dylan’s Greatest Hits.
  • Profound impact of Dylan’s early acoustic material:
    • “The way he painted with words is so evocative and so unique. He remains a sort of Picasso-esque figure…” (David Gray, 06:42)
  • Discovering Dylan led him to explore Leonard Cohen, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and more— word-of-mouth, not algorithms.
  • “My very first attempts at writing songs were like a sort of hybrid of Robert Smith and Robert Zimmerman.... Robert Zimmer Smith.” (David Gray, 10:36)

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The Making of Dear Life: Mortality, Lockdown, Reflection, and Renewal

[10:42 – 19:51]

• Themes of Dear Life

  • Mortality features due to Gray approaching the age his father died and his guitarist’s recent cancer diagnosis:

    • “I’m approaching the age that my father was when he died. So...that’s a strange thing to think.” (David Gray, 11:12)

  • COVID lockdown led to deep reflection and changed creative habits:

    • Early attempts to be “productive” in the studio during the pandemic led to stress—eventually, Gray let himself “just exist for a while.”
    • “We just had the space and time around us, that’s always there that we failed to see...and we had each other and we began to assess the riches that lie just in our locale.”

  • Dear Life written following that period of reflection; themes address both the micro and cosmic, the personal and the philosophical.

    • “Some...very directly but I think one of the things that rescues this album from worthiness is that...there’s a lightness and a humor.” (David Gray, 11:12)
    • Artistic voice combines microscope and telescope: “a sense of just planetary perspective, cosmological perspective almost too.”

  • Songwriting as alchemy:

    • “I’m basically, chiefly, a lyricist. The music supports the lyrics. I’m with Sinatra on that...the music is to me...a stage set so the words can happen.” (David Gray, 11:12)

  • On words as magic:

    • “When they were devised as a descriptive labeling tool, to say the word of something precious was in itself an act of being precious or being with something magic.” (David Gray, 19:14)
    • This poetic motif is woven throughout the conversation.

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Songwriting Process: Flow, Attention, and Being in the Zone

[23:03 – 26:51]

• The “Zone” of Creativity

  • “This time around...everything fell into focus and I had just huge amounts of pleasure in the writing.” (David Gray, 23:32)

  • Normally songwriting is fragmentary, interrupted; this album, there was unusual flow—a series of productive, connected days.

  • The tricky part is lyrics, not music:

    • “Anyone can write music. It’s getting the song out...most of my work is picking up other bits and trying to finish them...I was like, oh, that idea. Yeah.” (David Gray, 25:19)

  • On the nature of attention:

    • Shares a quote:
      “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolute unmixed attention is prayer. That’s Simone Weil.” (David Gray, 25:19)
    • His “attention levels” were at a heightened level during album creation.

• Touring and Emotional Presence

  • “In order for songwriting or any writing or art to happen. Openness, it’s a heart led thing. You have to be open.”
  • Striving for emotional risk and presence in live performances, both for audience and longtime bandmates:
    • “Just because you hit the right notes and you stand in the right place...doesn’t mean you’re doing what you need. You need to be there, like there. They’re an at-risk, so you need to be risking something. It’s entirely risk and reward. The. I want the audience to feel like something just happened.” (David Gray, 28:47)

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Collaboration, Creative Spaces, and Breaking Habits

[28:47 – 36:47]

• Recording “Plus and Minus” feat. Talia Ray

  • Longest gestation for any Gray song—20 years from first chords to final vocal.
  • Seeking the right duet partner; Talia Ray, recommended to Gray’s manager after a performance in New York, ended up being the perfect fit:
    • “She’s the same age as my daughter...She came to the thing and she’d really done her homework...it wasn’t an easy song to sing. She was great. She’s kind of up for everything, but not in a horribly ambitious...kind of way.” (David Gray, 28:55)

• Impact of the Makeshift Studio in Norfolk Nature Reserve

  • Forced from his London home studio by a neighbor’s construction, Gray converted his coastal garage, finding a profoundly inspiring creative environment:
    • “It’s a world of stars, wind through reeds, of bare branches, sounds of the geese on the marsh...I’m already in a suggestible state, more broadly than a creative state, a state of suggestibility. So the quiet that was there was, was wonderful...” (David Gray, 31:21)
  • Collaboration with his producer involved three-day creative cycles, fluid schedules, and spontaneous evening “free hit” sessions leading to breakthroughs:
    • “That was the sort of template. So we’d work on things during the day and then we’d have the sort of free hit in the evening...no distractions...that was rather marvelous.”
  • Gray describes recovering a sense of creative humanity after years dominated by career and family:
    • “It’s like the story of the puppet becoming a real boy. I’m sort of slowly turning back into a human being. I’m on the other side of bringing up children and having a career. I’ve kind of. I’m becoming human again.” (David Gray, 36:47)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Dream walk? I might take a walk with the mystic Rumi...through the dunes and the beach...consider the mysteries of the universe.”
  — David Gray [03:50]

• “Discovering Bob Dylan was like...finding another continent.”
  — David Gray [06:42]

• “I’m basically...a lyricist. The music supports the lyrics. I’m with Sinatra on that.”
  — David Gray [11:12]

• “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.”
  — David Gray quoting Simone Weil [25:19]

• “You need to be there, like there. They’re at risk, so you need to be risking something. It’s entirely risk and reward. The. I want the audience to feel like something just happened.”
  — David Gray [28:47]

• “It’s like the story of the puppet becoming a real boy...I’m becoming human again.”
  — David Gray [36:47]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:32 – 04:27: David Gray’s “Dream Walk” with Rumi
• 06:26 – 10:36: Family musical roots and the evolution of songwriting influences
• 11:12 – 19:51: Mortality, loss, COVID reflections, and the creation of Dear Life
• 23:03 – 26:51: The songwriting “zone,” lyric-writing, and creative attentiveness
• 28:47 – 31:14: Collaboration story with Talia Ray for “Plus and Minus”
• 31:21 – 36:47: The Norfolk makeshift studio, creative process, and personal human “transformation”

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Tone & Closing Reflections

Throughout, the conversation is open, poetic, relaxed, and tinged with both wit and a deep sense of lived experience. Buzz Knight provides gentle, thoughtful prompts, while David Gray’s answers evoke both the joy and gravity of artistry, the magic of music, and the pleasures of a life well-reflected upon.

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Summary prepared for music fans, artists, and creative souls alike seeking an inside look at the mind and heart of David Gray—direct, unfiltered, and full of inspiring wisdom.

Transcript

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[David Gray]

and mysticism is contained within a word. Each word was a magic incantation when it began. We we don't we fail to see them now for what they are. They were magic things that could only be uttered by magic people. We, when they were devised as the descriptive labeling tool to say the word of something precious was in itself an act of being precious or being with something magic.

[Buzz Knight]

Welcome to the Taking a Walk podcast with your host, Buzz Knight. If you like this podcast, share it with your friends and check out our companion podcast, Music Saved Me, hosted by Lynn Hoffman. Today, Buzz gets the inside story from the acclaimed singer songwriter David Gray. Buzz Night is joined by David Gray on the Taking a Walk podcast Now.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

David Gray, thanks for being on the Taking a Walk podcast.

[David Gray]

My pleasure.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

So since the podcast is called Taking a Walk, I do have to ask you first if you could take a walk with someone living or dead, possibly in the music side of things, but it doesn't have to be who would you take a walk with? And where would you take a walk with them?

[David Gray]

That's interesting. Assuming that there was a magical language dissolving barrier, I might take a walk with the mystic Rumi. I'd imagine he'd have a few things to say. He's just popped into my head and have a little wander. I'd take him along the coast east of England where I've got a house, which is probably my favorite place to be. So we'd wander through the dunes and the beach and consider the mysteries of the universe and everything contained therein.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Just you describing it took me there. David, that was just fabulous. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Well, first of all, we're going to talk about your 13th studio album, Dear Life. And also you've been out on the Past and Present world tour. And I have to tell you a story. I live outside of Boston, and I popped in just a little while ago to my favorite restaurant called Helen's Restaurant in Concord, Mass. And the gentleman there who works behind the oven came running up to me like he often does, and he said, I have to tell you, I saw David Gray recently in Boston. He was unbelievable. He was just going on and on how fabulous you were. And I said, I'm going to be speaking to him in a little while. So then the waitress comes over, you're going to be speaking to David Gray. So I was the Buzz, if you will, of Helen's Restaurant, but more importantly, you were the buzz of Helen's Restaurant.

[David Gray]

Excellent. Well, I've got great support up in the Boston area. I think that Irish influence has made it a very strong. It's always even going back to, like, early shows on the White Ladder run. Back in 2000, when we were just starting, Bo was a sort of stronghold. So. And it's remained one. And people are very sort of passionate readily. So I think in. In a way that's a little more relatable, I think because of that sort of Irish influence. It feels very strong there. So, yeah, it's been a good spot. And that was the very first show of this tour, so there was a lot built into it. It was a. It was a joyful occasion. We just had to go for it. The rehearsal time was over. Let it all hang out on stage, which we surely did. So I'm glad everyone enjoyed it. That was there.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

So I've heard that you were inspired by, among other folks, Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Cat Stevens. Can you talk about how their storytelling styles have influenced your lyrics and music?

[David Gray]

Of course, yeah. I mean, the. The sort of ambient influence of the music. My parents was. List we're listening to in the early 70s when I was just a little boy, definitely sort of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Rod Stewart, the Stones, the Beatles. And my dad was crazy about, like, T for the Tillerman and, you know, Catch Bullet four and several of those early Jesus Cat Stevens records. So they. They definitely seeped in, I think the sort of soundscape of them and the kind of passion of them. I know they were very mainstream, but they had a kind of. Kind of very soulful lean. So they were. I. I think that. That caught my ear and. And the directness of the. The songwriting, the slightly questing, kind of spiritual, questing style of writing from Cat Stevens anyway. And then. So that's. That has informed my awareness of what music could be like. Intimate encounters with that music. Early on, discovering Bob Dylan was like. It was like finding another continent. I mean, I think when I sort of. When I was about 13, 14 and becoming very. I was very interested in pop music. I took a road journey with my dad through France. And we had one cassette and it was Pavarotti on one side and the Greatest hits of Bob Dylan on the other. And I particularly loved the acoustic stuff. So side one of that very first greatest hits record, which went from sort of Blowing in the Wind to Tambourine Man, I suppose so it ain't Me, Babe, it's all over Baby Blue. You know, the times they are changing. Those sort of early kind of big Dylan cuts, if you like. And. Yeah, that's the. The texture of his music, the minimalism that, the abrasive quality of his sound. And there's just enough delicacy to frame concepts. And his voice just took up a huge space because there was nothing else to compete with it. So those sort of things. But just the way he painted with words is so evocative and so unique. And he was like a sort of. He still is. He remains a kind of Picasso esque sort of figure in the way that with. With a few brushstrokes he can make something happen. And there's a sort of total confidence, a very sort of earthy directness to what he does. So I think that, yeah, I was, I was utterly hypnotized and I wasn't listening to that kind of music at all. I was listening to the music of the day. But then in parallel, I began to discover these other singer songwriters. It was. There wasn't an algorithmic means of, of finding out about music when I was young. And anyway, I lived in a very remote place. It's always been word of mouth. So the other kind of, kind of cool people who might be listening to something, you talk to them about listening to Bob Dylan, they'd say, what have you listened to Leonard Cohen? You go, no. So then you have to start listening to Leonard Cohen and then it's John Martin, then it's Nick Drake and then it's Joni Mitchell and it's, you know. And eventually ended up with Van Morrison. So all, all of those things. I was avidly interested in the writing. Tom Waits as well, Discovering Tom Waits, Asylum Years. I bought a compilation record when I was about 16 and I loved that. But I was listening to the pop music at the time and I was dressed in sort of bangles and sort of lippy and kind of back combed hair. I was like a Cure fan, so. But I was really, really passionate about all that. And when it came to writing, my very first attempts at writing songs were like a sort of hybrid of Robert Smith and Robert Zimmerman.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

That's fabulous. That's wonderful.

[David Gray]

Robert Zimmer Smith. That is marvelous.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Wow. Congrats on your 13th album, Dear Life, and of course the tour as well. The album is, is wonderful and it's, it's, it's touching, you know. Once again, your signature deeply personal way of looking at life's ups and downs. Can you share any personal experiences that shaped some of the themes of this new album?

[David Gray]

I don't know about personal experiences, but I mean, I, I'm approaching the age that my father was when he died. So. And that's a strange thing to think. So I. I haven't got some sort of strange sense of prophecy that I will collapse and expire on exactly the same date or anything. It's just more that to think that this is the point he was at in his life when he had to stop. And just before we came out on this tour, my guitarist Neil of 32 years was diagnosed with cancer and just a couple of weeks shy of rehearsals he had to pull out. So we've got this mortality idea that's becoming stronger, informs more of the way that you think. It's like an accent on the words that your mind turns round. It's just there. I think it sharpens your. Sharpens flavors. It's like. It's like seasoning in a way for your thinking. So you've got finite time, finite resources. And so these things have definitely had a profound effect on the way. Ever since my father died and I witnessed that magical, strange and heartbreaking event. It's changed my life, my thinking forever. So I've seen people born and I've left. I've lost a few friends and very close friends and close family members too. So I think that this weighs down on the writing and, and comes through into the song. So some very directly but I think one of the things that rescues this album from worthiness is that when the images came there's a lightness and a humor to the way that they're presented so that they're angst ridden sort of. There's. Yeah, there is a grace about the way that the subjects are handled. There's a kind of microscope and a telescope being used. So there's looking at the minutiae of detail of life and feeling and then there's a sense of just planetary perspective, cosmological perspective almost too. I'm using a lot of imagery from space and think. I mean I read about all that stuff a lot. I. I didn't really sort of pay attention at science in school. I found it rather dull. But now I'm avidly interested both in the natural world and that becomes very scientific when you start to analyze things, but also just the nature of matter and time and things as we start to learn these sort of mind bending depth of what's out there and, and the contradictory nature of quantum. The quantum world. It's. I mean I can't assume to understand even a fraction of it. But I, I try and grasp the basic threads. So I, I used a sort of short story writers trick of like slightly imagined perspectives, characters that were placed. So there's female perspectives on some of the songs. After the Harvest, for example, fighting talk is like a dialogue between me and imagined me and songwriter and wife or loved one. And so lots of different facets are seen. So it's lots of views of the same mountain. So that's, that's kind of. I, I didn't, I didn't head out with, with, with massive sort of ambitions of the scope of what the lyrics were going to contain. But the, the, the, the, the songwriting gods were kind. And one of the things that I think that did inform or enrich the perspectives of the record was the COVID lockdown just stopping. And I did what a lot of creative people do when things ground to a halt. I thought, well, guess what? I'm go down to my studio and make stuff. Check this out. World stopped. Gray won't stop. Well, after about three or four weeks of messing down there, I found I was getting quite stressed because I was already going, I'm going to make an album. And I was like, can you never stop? I mean, like I, I was saying to myself, why this? Surely this is an opportunity to be with my family under unprecedented circumstances. And I've been telling myself the lie that, that I was going to stop at some point and spend some time with them, but. So I just downed tools and I only really worked when I really felt like it and let the field go fallow. So rather than just the consolation of constant activity, I allowed myself to just exist for a while under these extraordinary circumstances. So we were in a world where suddenly this event horizon that's always racing towards us of the next day, the thing that's coming, the plan, the next year, the next six months, the next six weeks wasn't there. There was just a sort of frozen line and we just had the space and time around us that's always there that we failed to see. And we had each other and we began to assess the sort of. The riches that lie just in our locale. And just that little bit of time, the seasons, the birds singing, whatever. And also we were just watching a death, a death count. We were watching a sort of mortality graph. And seeing as that's the part of our culture that we suppress so, so passionately, you know, we are still searching for eternal youth and eternal idiocy, it seems. It's, it's. It's something that suddenly we were. We were just staring at these stats on a sort of city by city, country by country, global scale. So I think that that period of reflection Enforced reflection and. And dislocation from this norm, this racing, rushing norm, where you're never really anywhere at any given time. It. I think that played into my hands when I came. Well, it's tempting to see a correlation between this huge slowdown, me downing tools, and then when I did pick my tools up again at the end of COVID because I had the white laboratory, which had been postponed for two years, coming right at me, I knew I had five months to work. I just began to work like a demon. And I wish it was always like that. I wish I could turn it on like a tap and this, this stuff would just pour out. It's never usually that simple, but that's what happened this time. And I got into such a flow. But I'm basically chief. Chiefly, I'm a lyricist. The music supports the lyrics. I'm with Sinatra on that. I think I see it all as a prop. It's a stage set so the words can happen. That's what the music is to me. And that's the sort of. That's the influence of Dylan, I guess, right there. Because it's, it's. It's so you can deliver the line. And what songwriting is, is looking for delicious space amongst chords and sounds where their vocal needs to be and the story can be told. So you're sort of creating a stage set, a tableau almost. And yeah, this time around, the lyrics just poured out. I've been in a process of sort of simplification since I started writing as a teenager to be less adjectives, less descriptive language, more simplicity. But this time around it just completely reversed and I went into these mad kind of crazy multi line rhyming schemes that were more like rapping in a way, and lots of fast vocal deliveries. But the pleasure of writing is obvious, I think, in listening to the record. The joy of the music and mysticism as contained within a word. Each word was a magic incantation when it began. We fail to see them now for what they are. They were magic things that could only be uttered by magic people. When they were devised as a descriptive labeling tool to say the word of something precious was in itself an act of being precious or being with something magic. So I think they still contain these things. And when they're combined in these strange chemical combinations, crazy things can happen. And. And that little dynamo drives the obsession of my existence, really.

[Buzz Knight]

We'll be right back with more of the Taking a Walk podcast this Friday. Toy Story is back.

[David Gray]

I came here as fast as I could.

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It's been too Long Cowboy featuring Taylor

[Buzz Knight]

Swift's all new song. I knew it.

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I knew you.

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I remembered I loved you.

[David Gray]

Came back when it mattered.

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I saw you.

[David Gray]

Our mission on this planet is to make a child happy.

[Buzz Knight]

You make us proud to be toys. Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5. Rated PG. Parental guidance suggested only in theaters Friday.

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[Hoda Kotb]

Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges.

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I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.

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Our podcast is called hey Jonas. We figured since everyone has a podcast,

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we wanted to as well.

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And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend Niall Horn is joining the show.

[Niall Horan]

How's it going, boys?

[Jonas Brothers Host]

Hey, Niall.

[Niall Horan]

It's the same thing with slow hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or tastes so good can be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.

[Jonas Brothers Host]

You too, Joe. Drop what you're doing and listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Champs podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Swae Lee.

[David Gray]

Do you realize how legendary you are?

[Jonas Brothers]

I appreciate that I be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got,

[David Gray]

like, so much more to do. Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now. That's the rate we gotta be going. Yep, that's a good attitude.

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You'll also hear stories from industry legends and hip hop Pioneers like Fab five Freddy.

[Drink Champs Guest]

I directed one of Nas's early videos.

[Buzz Knight]

Which one?

[Drink Champs Guest]

One Love.

[David Gray]

Wow.

[Brandon Kyle Goodman]

Yes.

[Drink Champs Guest]

I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Nas was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harlem. His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy.

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No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Buzz Knight]

Welcome back to the Taking A Walk podcast.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

You take those themes and you kind of describe that of, you know, the mortality themes and themes of resilience, but within there. And maybe it's that aspect of awareness of what's around you that you described within there. There's also feelings of joy and optimism in there as well, and it's just marvelous how you deal with the complexity of that.

[David Gray]

Thanks. Yeah, but I. I think all that working is, is putting yourself in the way of something good happening. So I don't know why. Sometimes it works out better than other times. I guess it's the seasons of self as well, the. Our own sort of shedding of skins and, you know, the changes that are wrought upon us. And sometimes you're still in a process of coming to terms with something, maybe not completely ripened in your viewpoint, but anyway, this time around, as I say, everything fell into focus and I had just huge amounts of pleasure in the writing. And the writing is the tricky part. The lyrics are the tricky part of the process. As far as I'm concerned. Anyone can write music. It's. It's getting the song out, and they don't often land in one go. I'm not often positioned to take advantage of inspiration, as it's termed. I normally have to start and then pick it up some other point later, because life is what it is. I've got a lot of stuff I've got to try and squeeze into my life. It's. It rarely offers me just infinite opportunities to just think about what I want to do every day. There's usually other stuff getting in the way, so I have to kind of find ways to pick up the loose ends and. And pick. What was remarkable this time is just how easily that happened. Like, it. It's one thing writing songs off the cuff when. When it all starts to flow, that's great. But usually most of my work is picking up other bits and trying to finish Them. And what was remarkable, I'm writing this record was just how, how much of that I managed to do. I just. I was like, oh, that idea. Yeah.

[Mazda CX5 Advertiser]

Okay.

[David Gray]

I've just got one verse and I've got one line for the chorus. And it would be like, right, okay. I just sit down and I just write my confidence levels. Well, I read a lovely line today. Hang on, I might be able to find it. And this I thought was very pertinent because I used the word attention. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolute unmixed attention is prayer. That's Simone Pyle. So I'd say that my attention levels were a heightened, heightened level. I. I managed to. Everything else disappeared. And I was just in world for a sustained period of time, day after day after day. And it allowed my reach to become much more natural. Anyway, these. I'm just trying to explain something I don't really fully understand.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Well, you, you explain it well. And it almost is like the equivalent of being in, as they say, for, you know, athletes being in the zone. Right. I mean, you were in the zone.

[David Gray]

Yeah. And that. I'm trying to keep an equivalent zone on the tour I'm doing. I'm trying to keep a. In order for songwriting or any writing or art to happen. Openness, it's a heart led thing. You have to be open. I think, anyway, I believe at the very core of what I'm doing, it's about allowing the deepest thing to be. To become visible.

[Niall Horan]

So.

[David Gray]

And that's a very awkward process in the world we live in. It's a hostile environment a lot of the time. So it's. But I'm trying to persevere and keep that to the fore during all these concerts and not just play the songs and get the lights working, but to actually be there for the audience and talk and bring them in to some of the stories and specifics to do with it. And not only that, for my band too. It's about them. They've been playing with me for a long time. Yeah. I'm trying to keep them emotionally available. When you've spent as long as we have together on the back, in the back of a tour bus, inevitably the shutters start to come down at some point. Like, oh, Jesus. You know, such and such is on one, you know, oh, Christ, he's been at the vodka. You know, like, quick into your bunks. It's like, it's. I'm trying to keep. I'm trying to keep everything. I'm trying to keep people there for each other. Because I think just somehow the emotional presence is just vital to this thing that I'm trying to do, which is not just playing the new record. I'm deep diving into all the old albums as well. So, like really picking tracks from places that I haven't been for a long time. So some of the stuff, Life in Slow Motion, New Day at Midnight, Lost songs, albums that I haven't been giving that much attention to. So it's really exciting. But making sure you don't lose sight of the bigger picture. Just because you hit the right notes and you stand in the right place and the Lightning man gets his cues, it doesn't mean it's the. You're doing what you need. You need to be there, like there. They're an at risk, so you need to be risking something. It's entirely risk and reward. The. I want the audience to feel like something just happened.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Can you talk about the collaboration on plus and Minus with Talia Ray? What that was like. That song is. Is fabulous.

[David Gray]

Thanks. Yeah. This is the song that's taken. Of all the songs I've ever written, it's the one that's taken the longest to complete. So it's. It's 20 years between the first time I played the chord sequence and Talia putting her voice onto what was basically by then a finished song. So it was lovely the way it worked with her getting involved. She's so young. I mean, she's the same age as my daughter, so. And she was doing some event in New York and my manager just happened to see her and at this point we'd finished the track. I got my daughter to sing on it a bit. I'd done some of the BVs and we kind of created a semi duet, but I. I couldn't find the right voice. We were trying to get certain people to do it and then their schedules were just. It was hanging around waiting for someone to find a day. I was becoming frustrated and we just wanted to move on. So anyway, he heard this Talia singing at this thing in New York and he just said, I heard this girl sing last night and she's got a great voice. I think it could really work for what you've been describing. She's got quite a low voice, she could do the low parts. And he said. And then when I talked to her after the show to say, well done. She said, oh, who do you manage? And I mentioned your name and she said, oh my God, I'm like obsessed with David Graham. I'm listening to White ladder all the time at the moment. So I said, wow, okay. And then we had a zoom call. I met her, I really liked her. She had a picture of Amy Winehouse on her wall behind her. I thought, oh, yeah, I get that, yeah. She's like a North London girl, so. But she was super cool. I. I said, listen, obviously tuning's important. Singing the song, learn the parts, but listen very carefully to the phrasing. It's about rhythm. It's a very fast vocal. You gotta learn how to breathe. So if you're going to practice, I believe you can sing in tune. So I said, concentrate on the rhythm. And she came to the thing and she'd really done her homework, so it wasn't an easy song to sing. So, I mean, I know because I've recorded it myself and done various parts. So she. She was great. She's kind of up for everything, but not in a horribly ambitious, kind of like tread on you with my stilettos kind of way.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Oh, brilliant. Tell me about the makeshift studio and what impact that had on this process.

[David Gray]

Yeah, well, I was forced out of my home studio in London because my awful neighbor was doing a refurbishment and decided he was going to dig out his basement. And my studio was down there. And it was ridiculous. It was so loud, we couldn't even think, let alone work. So I hastily turned my garage. I've got a house on the coast up in Norfolk. I turned my garage into a sort of recording space. Well, I say recording space, I basically just put a floor and walls in and we moved some gear in there. So I was sort of reluctant to use. When I go up there, it's generally a place for recharging and absorbing the world rather than trying to make things, I might be ruminating on things that I'm working on and singing them to myself and play a bit on my piano up there. But I don't sit down and work. So I was reluctant to kind of confuse the two worlds, but actually it was the greatest thing ever because the sort of quiet that. That reigns up in this part of the world is I'm on a nature reserve. I'm out in the middle of, you know, you know, in a marsh. Basically, we're just heading down towards the ocean. So it's. It's a very empty, pure place. I think suggestibility is a key ingredient for the sort of self hypnosis that's required to make things, to write, to suddenly be in a creative mood. And the moment I close the car door when I go up there, I mean, it's my happy place. It's a world of stars, of wind through reeds, of bare branches, of the sounds of the geese on the marsh. It's a world of sound and spectacle and subtlety and nuance. And I'm immediately awakened the moment I'm in it. So I'm already in a suggestible state, more broadly than a creative state, a state of suggestibility. So the quiet that was there was, was wonderful and, and as, as I say, this kind of relaxed state of being when you haven't got sirens and buses screeching and all the kinds of angst that the city brings, you basically freed from that. So it was, it was remarkable. And the other key thing was I normally work a sort of rigid, semi rigid day, so we'll Normally meet at 10 in the morning, have a cup of tea, chat, start work at about 10:30, quarter to 11 and finish at about quarter to 7 with a little lunch break and a few cups of tea thrown in. But that would be my working day. But up there, my producer came and stayed. So we'd work like a three day cycle. So he'd come up on the first day, we'd work Tuesday, then stay Tuesday, Wednesday night. But we'd go. If I'd go and he'd be tidying up what we'd recorded and I'd go and make some supper, we'd have a glass of wine and the very first night that we were down there, it was like this beautiful evening, early spring or maybe probably winter actually, to be honest. And a clear evening. I made some supper, we had a glass of wine, we were sitting there, it was about 9:00, and he said, well, should we just go back in the studio? And I said, yeah, yeah, three hit, let's do it. And so we had this. We had this little space in the evening if we wanted it, where we could go and try things out. So not work on the track we were working on or just. I said, oh, I've got this set of chords and a kind of feeling that there's a fast vocal that's going to go with them. I said, I was just working on this the other day and I didn't really have a chance to look at it. So we. And that was after the harvest and that was the very first night we were up there. So we just started working and I started coming out with. I didn't get the entire lyric, but I got these kind of soft word endings, almost French word endings, so all these cadences and I thought oh, there's something here. This is new. And also I was almost rapping. It was like a semi rap. He put this little drum machine rhythm in and we put these synths on and I put the guitar parts down and suddenly I came up with the second section, which is, I know that love is bigger, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, whoa, you know, this is it, we're off. This is the stuff. So then I, I, you know, he left and I finished that song at the end of the week and then we finished recording it up there. But that was the sort of template. So we'd work on things during the day and then we'd have to sort of free hit in the evening till like midnight when we could work on other stuff. And, and that was very, very fruitful. So, yes, it was a total breaking of my, my heavy compartmentalization was, was shattered by the new, new world of being just up in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do and no one else to tell you what they to do or come to bed or watch a TV series, you know, there was, there was nothing else, no distractions. So that was rather marvelous. Yes. It's like the story of the puppet becoming a real boy. I'm sort of slowly turning back into a human being. I'm on the other side of bringing up children and having a career. I've kind of. I'm becoming human again.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Congratulations on dear life, David Gray. I could listen to you talk all day. I could listen to your music all day. This is such joy for me talking to you on the podcast and I just thank you for everything.

[David Gray]

My pleasure. Buzz. Say hello to the chaps at the restaurant in Concord.

[Drink Champs Guest]

I will.

[Buzz Knight Interviewer]

Thank you, David.

[Buzz Knight]

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends friends and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

[Duracell Battery Advertiser]

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[Mazda CX5 Advertiser]

What is that?

[Duracell Battery Advertiser Sidekick]

Oh yeah, it's a World cup holder,

[Mazda CX5 Advertiser]

like the soccer tournament World cup holder

[Duracell Battery Advertiser Sidekick]

for the world Fits. Every car holds every cup.

[Mazda CX5 Advertiser]

It has a Carvana logo.

[Duracell Battery Advertiser Sidekick]

Carvana made it. They buy and sell cars, so they made a car cup holder. So. Got any good cups lately?

[Mazda CX5 Advertiser]

Used to. Just couldn't figure out where in the world to put them.

[Duracell Battery Advertiser Sidekick]

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sign up today to win [e-mail] not authorized or endorsed by FIFA. Not a real product for parody and fair use purposes only.

[Hoda Kotb]

Joy is essential, and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me. How to Kot Me. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Joy101 and listen now. Joy101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CBS.

[Jonas Brothers Host]

All right, listen up.

[Jonas Brothers]

The Jonas Brothers here.

[Jonas Brothers Host]

Our podcast is called hey Jonas. We figured since everyone has a podcast,

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we wanted to as well.

[Jonas Brothers Host]

And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend Niall Horn is joining the show.

[Niall Horan]

How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with slow hands. Slow hands is not about anything else really, is it? You know, or tastes so good. Can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.

[Jonas Brothers Host]

You too, Joe. Drop what you're doing and listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[Brandon Kyle Goodman]

Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud and all always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships and adulting. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes. And there are no girls on the Internet for all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity Kikis, check out outlaws with T.S. madison. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF Black Fat Femme. And start your day with intention with Waking up with Ryan. Coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the Outspoken Network. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Pride and listen now.