Spindizzy Records in George’s Street Arcade is rammed with David Gray fans, who’ve gathered for a listening party for his superb new album, Dear Life. The atmosphere is already electric, but ratchets up still further when the man himself struts in for a guerrilla gig.

The 56-year-old singer slings on his acoustic guitar, says, “Let’s hear how it really sounds,” and cuts into opening track ‘After The Harvest’. Svelte, with a full thatch of hair and few wrinkles, he’s still smiling – and yeah, his voice ain’t too shoddy either.

He plays four further tracks from his new record: ‘Eyes Made Rain’, ‘Acceptance’, ‘That Day Must Surely Come’ and ‘The Only Ones’. He follows those with ‘A Clean Pair of Eyes’ – cut from Lost Songs 95-98 – and finishes with a cover of Van Morrison’s ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’. His passionate, intense and consuming set delights the early evening crowd and then he is gone, out the door, away onto Drury Street.

When we meet the following afternoon, I start by complimenting his superb performance.

“In such an uncontrolled environment, where you are just basically winging it with no tech, you’re more on a knife edge with it,” he muses. “But I’ve been prepping this stuff – I’m on the case, doing it in front of people. That’s what the songs are there for, its nice to see them go down. It was very real, there was an emotional component. I had to grab onto myself at a couple of points.”

That he did. More than understandable when you consider that Dear Life, his 13th album, deals with the creeping claw of mortality that scrapes against us in mid-life – when “things start going amiss somewhat with friends and family”. The title is a salute to the Nobel Laureate Alice Munro and indeed, songs such as ‘After The Harvest’ and ‘Sunlight On Water’ are written in the manner of a short story writer.

“I think the lyrics are to the fore with this record,” David affirms. “At times before, I’ve tried to just position simple images within a soundscape and see what I could get from that – I’ve tried to keep it simple.

But this time, there were lots of stories to tell and I savoured the rhyming schemes. The words lit me up. I was carried by them, the mischief of them, the pleasure of them, the sound of them. So, like a painter with his box of paints, I got busy and delighted in the entire spectrum of ideas.”

Let’s be clear, death may circle this record, but David is not going gently into that good night. Rather, there is a rage, vehemently evidenced when he sang ‘The Only Ones’ the evening before in George’s Street Arcade.

“I’ve always been a bit of a rager,” David grins. “But whereas when I started, I would rage undiluted and unapologetically, I’ve become more artful as time has gone on. There’s a very simple song, ‘I Saw Love’, on the new record. It breathes so beautifully because it comes after ‘Leave Taking’, which is incredibly dense and complex. It presents itself as a very simple, JJ Cale-type track.

“It’s very sweet, but it’s carrying a lot of freight. It contains a Trojan horse effect, managing to get ideas into a song, but in the opposite way of, say, a classic Radiohead or Cure track – where it’s very angsty and we’re sharing our woe. Rather, this wheels them in secretly behind the battle lines. That tactic got used on a few things.

“But as I say, the album contains a real return to the lyric, and the singing is almost rap, with a Frank Ocean-style fast delivery. I became sort of intoxicated by it, and then it just kept suggesting itself on numerous songs – ‘Plus & Minus’, ‘After The Harvest’, ‘I Saw Love’, ‘Fighting Talk’.”

Does the art direct that or do you?

“It just happens naturally,” reasons Gray. “I always look for where the music wants to go. At the end of every album, there seems to always be a track or two pointing somewhere you could go further. There’s a signpost left behind before you leave on the tour. You get back, and what happens is a whole set of other ideas takes over. Something might happen in your life.

“There are things happening now, in fact, that are quite tumultuous, and they’re making me want to write. But I don’t have the time. I’m setting up this record, and there’s an awful lot of rehearsals and promo.

There’s no way I’m going to sit down and clarify my thoughts and do a load of songwriting. But I can feel the itch is there, and I think more than anything, that will power whatever happens next. I’ll be storing this stuff. I’m no longer afraid these days that it will evaporate somehow when I’m not looking. Even songs that fail, I feel you’ll use the idea again, in a different way.”

David Gray by Robert Grierson.

‘Plus & Minus’ is a 20-year-old chord progression of yours, right?

“The chord progression was a completely different song,” David explains. “You’ll get a chance to hear that in a couple of years, because they’re going to reissue Life In Slow Motion as a deluxe package, with the demos and some b-sides. And to accompany that, there’s going to be a sister record called Night Jar, which is all the stuff that we recorded.

“It was a very bountiful recording session. I had bought The Church Studios, and we basically moved in, and the band moved over, and we took out some apartments, and we just recorded non-stop. It was like a return to music for me after the dislocations of A New Day At Midnight, post-White Ladder.”

We talk more about the evolution of that ‘Plus & Minus’ chord progression. David surprises me when he says, “I knew it was kind of commercial, so I was wary of it”.

I ask him why, and he pauses before replying.

“Because there’s a sort of superstition involved in thinking too deliberately, or when you start to realise something has a commercial potential,” says Gray. “It suddenly becomes loaded – it starts turning into a product. Well, you know what’s going to happen to it, so I think you’re just sort of wary. I don’t know what that means for the ultimate destiny of that song, and how it’s going to sit in my canon, or how the fans will take to it.

“But I’ve probably had more people come up to me – normal punters, not music punters – saying how much they like that song, than I have on anything since the White Ladder/Life In Slow Motion time. I don’t know whether you’d call it a hit, but I don’t know what a hit looks like anymore.”

Says the man whose album White Ladder is the biggest selling album in Ireland of all time. The chap is humble. So, when he describes the creation of Dear Life as “a starburst of songwriting... it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind”, you sit up and take notice.

“The song ‘The Day Must Surely Come’,” he expands, “interrupted me when I was working on something else. It was just an accident. I took the capo to A, and stretched and did an extension. Then I went all the way up with a massive, stupid stretch on my pinkie. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really nice’. Then I moved the bass note and thought, ‘Wow, this is a beautiful little progression’.

“I’ve been playing the guitar for 35 years – I’ve never played that. Then I just sang the first line, and within an hour, I’d basically written four or five verses. I had the objective thing you get when things are really happening and something’s taking over. It doesn’t always mean what you’re making is great. But on that song, I just felt something deep being dredged up, and so in a way, it has a life of its own.”

David is full of praise for his producer Ben De Vries, who also worked on his two previous albums, Gold In A Brass Age and Skellig.

“This time around, I said to Ben, I trust you entirely. I want you to really take the space I’m leaving, just move in. I want your total input. I’ve got this fantastic relationship with him and that allowed me to be ambitious for this record. This is chapter one of this burst of songwriting; it feels like the start of a new era, post-Covid. Lots has changed for me – I’ve started a new record company.

“I’ve said goodbye to my old manager, and in so doing, sold all the music up until Skellig. It was the only way out of a very entangled situation. It’s been a period of tumultuous change, very stressful too. It’s not easy to disentangle 30-odd years. So, this represents a new start, and in that way, it was important to make a very positive statement. This record feels super positive, super strong. The songs were born standing up. They can go shoulder to shoulder with ‘Sail Away’, ‘My Oh My’ or ‘Please Forgive Me’.”

David elaborates further on his current mindset.

“On the tour, I’m not going to force oodles of new music down everyone’s throats,” he continues. “It’s going to be about a deep dive into the past as well. So, the set will contain certain neglected records, like Lost Songs and A New Day At Midnight. I’m going to be playing a lot of songs from Life In Slow Motion too, basically everything Clune was involved in.

“So, it’s going to be all the big songs, with a slab of new stuff. And lots of unexpected covers to keep the energy high, to buy me some time, so that I can do the deeper stuff, songs like ‘That Day Must Surely Come’ or ‘Sunlight On Water’.

‘Sunlight On Water’ – what a song man, I love it.

“I mean, the Ben de Vries string arrangement on that,” laughs Gray, “is fucking Randy Newman-level shit. ‘I Think It’s Going To Rain Today’ is one of my favourite string arrangements. And Francis Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim have a track, ‘Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars’ – and I mean, this is getting out into that weather. We went to extraordinary lengths to get that song to sound the way that it did.

“It sounds very much like a take of voice and piano, with some stuff thrown on top, right? But it was far more complicated than that. We wanted the vocal to be separate from the piano. So, I did a guitar, a piano and vocal tape. I played along with a MIDI piano and tried to exactly match it. Then we moved the MIDI notes to match exactly the original piano, and took the original piano away.”

He goes deeper into the sonic details.

“We actually used a sample we’d taken off a piano, which is this clunky, weird sound,” says David. “Then I overdubbed layers and layers of piano, so they have a glistening-type effect. We created these layers of flowing, flickering piano, and I tried to put the vocal onto it. So, this is where I would normally lose my nerve, because it’s spooky, trying to be in a space.

“It’s okay when the piano is speeding up and slowing down, while you’re singing with it, because you’re in control of both things. But I just sort of got into the trance of it, got a great vocal. I’m very proud of that track.”

Forty-odd dates are already in the book for touring the record in 2025, but David tells me the itinerary will grow to double that.

“I feel the world needs a positive charge and music can provide it,” he says. “I don’t know what difference it makes. I’m just going to emit a frequency – a positive, earthing, high energy beam of music. There’s a giant battery, from which all this incredible music has been created. I’m just going to try and discharge as much high-voltage energy from that as I can within a given year.”

It does make a difference – we talk about the recent live experience that Nick Cave delivered, and the simply brilliant Cure album Robert Smith has just released. Dear Life enters the world in January and on David Gray ploughs.

 • Dear Life is out now. David Gray plays 3Arena, Dublin (April 5 & May 2); Live At The Castle, Limerick (May 1); Gleneagle INEC Arena, Killarney (August 27); and Custom House Square, Belfast (August 30).