Head Butler - Music

"White Ladder"
David Gray

David Gray is at the Steinway almost before anyone realizes he's in the studio. No "hello" to the crew that's going to tape a mini-concert and interview. Just the slightest pause to gather himself. The left hand begins playing chunky, anthemic chords. Then, eyes closed, he starts an unrelenting dirge. "All my sorrow, all my rage/A teardrop falls on every page" --- and that's just the second verse. Gray goes on to declare "The trick ain't worth the time it buys/I'm sick of hearing my own lies." The song's resolution: "Honey, if I'm honest/I still don't know what love is."

These aren't lyrics that suggest top ten. But it is precisely his willingness to mine the kind of heartache that won't go away --- desperately intense emotion, communicated through minimal instrumentation and a singing style blending Bob Dylan's twang and Van Morrison's bite --- that has made David Gray stupifyingly successful. In 1998, after years of wandering in a commercial desert, he camped out in his London living room with a percussionist and a computer and created "White Ladder." Released in 2000, it passed, like a chain letter, from devotee to devotee, until it sold 2.2 million CDs in England, another 2 million in the United States and had become the biggest-selling single-artist CD in the history of Ireland. And here was the truly strange part: There was no hype in this success. "White Ladder" was that rare event --- a genuine masterpiece.

"White Ladder" --- the title that comes from one of the more obscure lines in Dylan's "Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall" --- is different from Gray's earlier CDs. This time, his creative "method" was simply to surrender to whatever he was feeling on a given day. "I turned down the volume and allowed the work to come through,” he told Butler . “I used to break strings; I started playing guitar softer. Same with my adjectives. I reduced writing to the bare essentials. The music sets the mood, the words fire the imagination, the space between the words does the talking --- I learned these things all at once. And what came out of that was a warts-and-all record, with a kind of coherence from first note to last."

Indeed, there's not a weak song on the CD. And everything bears frequent replaying, because the marriage of words and music is so very, very interesting. On the page, that makes no sense. Consider:

What on earth is going on in my heart
Has it turned as cold as stone
Seems these days I don't feel anything
Less it cuts me right down to the bone
What on earth is going on in my heart

My oh my you know it just don't stop
It's in my mind I wanna tear it up
I've tried to fight it tried to turn it off
But it's not enough
It takes a lotta love
It takes a lotta love my friend
To keep your heart from freezing
To push on till the end
My oh my

What on earth is going on in my head
You know I used to be so sure
You know I used to be so definite
Thought I knew what love was for
I look around these days and I'm not so sure

Not the most amazing lyrics. But if you hear the song only once, it scorches itself in your memory. The way he says “freezing.” The splintering of “definite” into three syllables, with the final “t” delivered like a curse. And no singer Butler can think of can pack more meaning into “My oh my.”

“White Ladder” is an exquisitely textured CD, with the songs set in an order that seems …inevitable. What they have in common: the levels. “Please Forgive Me,” for example, starts like a novelty song: the clicking of typewriter keys as Gray writes an apology to his lover. But pay attention to all the changes he rings on those typewriter keys --- and how, at the end, they return in a deep-grooved passage that almost makes you want to dance. Or “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” an old Soft Cell number that Gray changes so drastically it bridges, at the end, into Van Morrison's “Into the Mystic.” And “This Year's Love,” which Butler would choose as the First Dance in the wedding scene, were he to be so fortunate as to find himself making a romantic movie.

Butler came to David Gray late. After “White Ladder,” he went back and bought Gray's earlier CDs, winners all. Not so Gray's most recent release, “A New Day at Midnight ,” which is an inexplicable dud. No matter: “White Ladder” is the CD that Butler discovered just before 9/11. It's the CD that helped him get through. Other devotees have their own David Gray stories. (Feel free to send mini-essays: What “White Ladder" Means to Me.) Listen to it, and you'll soon have a David Gray story of your own.

--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To order "White Ladder" from Amazon.com, click here.