It’s hard to imagine, now that David Gray has one of music’s most familiar voices, that the entertainer toiled in obscurity through three unsuccessful albums before self-financing his 1998 breakout, “White Ladder.”
Then again, Gray may never have forged the heartfelt, confessional timbre that wooed rock fans with the hit single “Babylon” and helped shoot his most recent album, “Life in Slow Motion,” up the pop charts without years spent as the proverbial starving artist.
“(My career) would have been a lot different, I suppose,” Gray said recently from his cottage in the English countryside, where he had just returned from an autumn walk with his young daughter. Gray plays the Colorado Convention Center Lecture Hall on Monday.
“With your first (album), you have time to prepare, so I have an affection for that one,” the Manchester native said of his 1993 Caroline Records release, “A Century Ends.” The album met with a lukewarm critical response but revealed the beginnings of Gray’s characteristically personal songwriting. It also hinted at an innocence Gray would lose after two subsequent albums fell on deaf ears thanks to industry politics.
“The earlier records are more political, and just very raw,” he said. “Apart from the first album, the two that followed it … never really got a chance.”
Being a frustrated, unsuccessful musician gave Gray perspective that he draws on now as one of England’s most familiar pop stars.
“When you’re vulnerable and alone, it’s like death of a thousand cuts,” he said. “I got to a point where I was going to get eaten up by frustration and pain and blame. I felt wronged by the record company and all the idiots and their false promises. … So I said goodbye to everyone and went off alone, metaphorically.”
The result was “White Ladder,” a career-defining, expertly crafted collection of songs with legs so long that Gray continued to tour behind the album four years after its debut.
“‘White Ladder’ is the sound of me escaping from the demons,” he said. “It doesn’t have that edge to it.”
And the specter of loneliness and disappointment almost completely falls away with Gray’s new album, written during a time when the musician was able to take a step away from the spotlight and take stock. He married and became a father but also lost his own father and grandfather. All of which surfaces on “Life in Slow Motion,” a more symphonic, textured album than those that preceded it thanks in part to producer Marius DeVries, whose list of collaborators includes Annie Lennox, David Bowie and Rufus Wainwright.
“With this record, I just wrote and wrote and wrote,” said Gray, 37. “I’ve come to terms with who I am.”
That includes tracks like “Alibi,” a ballad in which Gray waxes poetic about maturing relationships and lifestyles. And like subsequent songs on the album, “Alibi” begins with stripped-down instrumentation and then unfolds into a euphoric, orchestral crescendo.
“It tells you immediately this record is different than the ones I’ve made before,” he said. “You enter the album through a bridge of music, like a scene in a movie.
“(‘Alibi’) was a key track to let people know this was going to be a sonic journey,” he said.
That journey includes “The One I Love,” a track prompted by loss that’s written from the perspective of someone on the brink of death, and “Tell Me Something,” a song about learning to live without complete control of one’s circumstances.
“Even though the lyrics remain unremittingly bleak and there’s a sort of desperation to (the new songs),” Gray said, “the music tells you something else is possible.”
With that, Gray summarizes the depth that continues to draw listeners in despite a songwriting style detractors describe as limited and overly emotional. Gray also captures that introspection onstage, which is why this tour has appealed to a broad spectrum of music-lovers regardless of whether they’re still lost in “Babylon.”
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
David Gray
ROCK|Colorado Convention Center Lecture Hall; 7:30 p.m. Monday|$32.50-$42.50|through Ticketmaster, 303-830-8497 or ticketmaster.com.
