DAVID GRAY has confirmed release details for a new album Gold In A Brass Age – his first album of new material in four years – alongside a seventeen-date tour of the UK which commences at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall on March 15.
The album will be available on March 8 through IHT Records / AWAL Recordings, with first single ‘The Sapling’ out now. Produced by Ben DeVries, son of producer and soundtrack composer Marius, Gold In A Brass Age finds Gray in renewed creative form.
Speaking about the creation of Gold In A Brass Age, Gray says; “With this album, my default position was to do everything differently. I didn’t think ‘this would be a good hook or ‘these lyrics could work for a chorus’. I was keen to get away from narrative. Instead of writing melodies, I looked for phrases with a natural cadence, so that the rhythm began with the words. I reimagined where a song might spring from and what form it could take.”
Written in breaks between several month-long tour stints – which included a US co-headline run of shows with Alison Krauss – Gold In A Brass Age sees Gray’s unmistakable vocal hushed in many places to an intimate falsetto, to compelling effect. Hypnotic lead single & album-opener ‘The Sapling’ bears out the nuanced approach in spades, with Gray’s rumination on the brevity of life tempered by layered vocals and a brass section including cor anglais and baritone sax. “Time ticking by is a theme that recurs throughout the record’ says Gray. “Fragility, renewal, a changing of perspective.”
Gold In A Brass Age will be David Gray’s eleventh album in a career that spans over 25 years, several Brit and Grammy nominations, and three No.1 UK albums, including for the breakout multi-platinum White Ladder. It is also a vital new collection of songs from an artist still revelling in his passion for song-craft, pushing himself into unfamiliar terrain, surprising himself as much as his fans along the way.
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Photograph by Derrick Santini
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