David Gray

Published Jan 23, 2025, 11:00 AM

He just released a new album, "Dear Life."

Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the barber of Certified That. My guest today is David Great. David, you have a new album. Tell me about it.

Yeah, it's called Dear Life. It's been in the pipeline, the creative pipeline, quite a while. It's it's it's birth process has been somewhat dislocated by the complications of COVID and all the sort of touring backlog and life backlog that happened. So it's it's it's a massive work because I think I'm trying to sort of clear the decks. So this is sort of chapter one of the stuff that I've been doing for the last few years. It's a record that, I mean, I don't know why some records come out more sort of energized, or I say about these songs that they were born standing up. They've seemed very direct, melodic and and moving out to the listener. So some of my stuff maybe a little bit more introspective or oblique or just slightly more abstracted. This record is not suffering depth wise for its immediacy, but I feel it has this kind of melodic principle and a very direct engagement. It's straight to camera as I would say as well. So I use the kind of short story writer's imaginative trick of using other voices, not just a straight autio but altobiographical approach. I kind of use lots of different angles to get different views of the same mountain. Twenty views of Mount Fuji by Hockasei's it's it's lots of different views of life. Maybe as life starts to progress, as the view begins to change. So that, in an that's what it's all about.

Okay, let's go back. You say it was long time in the development. Is that because of COVID? Be a little more specific, please, yeah.

No. I started the process in twenty nineteen in full knowledge that in March of twenty twenty I was going to be embarking on the White Ladder Anniversary Tour, which was going to take most of twenty twenty out of the equation, So I knew I would be sort of rejoining the album at the end of that, But of course life had other ideas, and we did all the prep and we rehearsals and the production rehearsals, and then the day just before the first show, we locked down and it was a long time before the tour was viable. So it then changed everything and the real star burst of song writing I had written a few songs at the end of twenty nineteen happened at the end of COVID when I've had a zoom call with my managers and agents and we decided that the tour was going to have to go ahead in early twenty twenty two. Because you could no longer hold other dates. It wasn't possible to sort of hedge your bets. You had to either do it or not do it and wait another eighteen months if you weren't going to go. Then there were so many tours in a holding pattern, and that kind of gave me this kind of clarity that I had five months before rehearsal started. During COVID, I, like many creative people, thought I'll go down to my studio in the basement and I'm going to start making music while everyone else is wondering what to do with themselves. But eventually the pressure and the strangeness of this experience bore down on me and it became sort of ridiculously unhealthy actually to indulge my creative principles when there was something much bigger to address, which was life itself. Finally, the horizon had been canceled. What we just had was the day, the time, and the people, and I'd luckily had my family around me. So after a couple of months of writing songs and trying to press record and run in and record things, I just took the pressure off and decided to just exist with my family and partly that fund of experience and actually letting the field go fallow I think had a huge effect, positive effect in terms of the writing and the emotional coherence of what then happened. So some of the lyrics and some of the songs relate directly to that experience, but I think just as a whole. Anyway, I got to the end of twenty one, as I say, and we had this Zoom meeting and it was clear that the tour was going ahead in May or not or not at all. So with this clarity in mind, I just began to work, and I worked in a way I've never worked before. It wasn't that new songs came, which is always something that will happen if you put yourself at the cold face and keep turning up. It was that the song the Half Finished things which I've always got hundreds of the ones I was just picking up, I was just finishing them, and it was an extraordinary experience. I've completed thirty or forty things in the space of a few months, and that's a hell of a pace for me. So it was informed by this whole relationship to not doing it so that the making of this record. So sometimes time can be a collaborator. Putting records out always takes longer than you wanted to. In this case, there was a great, big two year hole in the middle. But in the end it's all been in favor of the music. It's all worked out well.

Okay, So since you decided that working in the studio was counter productive, how did you cope with COVID.

Well, I just I tried to just be I mean, I've been telling myself perhaps somewhat dishonestly. Or did I have the courage to just stop be with my family? The elephant in the room is that I love these guys very much, but it's always work that comes first, and there's always something burning in my imagination that I've got to get to, or there's an event or a tour or a deadline that I'm working towards so they're just accommodated really a lot of the time in my head. Anyway, in amongst all that stuff that I chose, they were getting into their late teens. It was a chance to sort of be together with my wife and my children. I've been saying for years, Jesus, I need to stop touring and just be for a while, And finally I was being made to do it. And of course the first thing I wanted to do was find something else to do, so I kind of it took a while to to see the elephant in the room, which was that God, this stuff really matters. And I think there was something that happened in COVID that was there was many things that happened that were extraordinary. I know it was a horrendous experience on so many levels for so many people. But death in our culture is absent or at least postponed as a reality in most kind of conversations and dialogue. And here we were looking at daily stats and hearing stories and suddenly it was the center of attention. Not only that, but we were robbed of this kind of must do something, the constellations of action. We had to just contemplate the bare realities of changing seasons and the tick of the clock and people being in life and death situations. And it was a very contemplative experience. But anyway, I felt personally very enriched by spending time with my family. We watched films, we played games, we did stuff. It was like a long Christmas holiday for a while.

And have you gotten COVID?

Yeah? I got it in twenty one, and actually I got it in twenty two, just before the tours, so luckily I was nicely immunized before it all kicked off.

And when you actually went on the tour in twenty two, to what degree did you have COVID precautions so that the band or you didn't get sick and you didn't have to cancel deats?

We didn't have any, to be honest, Bob, there was by that point. I mean you were standing in a room of however many thousand people bellowing at you. I don't think on a sort of virus prevention level there was much chance of avoiding things. What happened was that one of the band got COVID during the tour, and it was then passed on to all the other members. Of the band apart from me. So one particular show we had to do with everybody being isolated from everybody else crew band. It was quite crazy, and I was the only person who was actually healthy. So it affected the tour in that way. But in terms of the precautions when you're living on a tour bus together and I mean you're constantly just in these situations, it was it was very difficult. Like a lot of COVID it was good in theory that you can do things, but separation wasn't really possible. So we obviously we did We didn't throw caution to the wind. We were kind of mindful of what the dangers were, but I think at that point people were restless anyway to reconnect. It gave it provided the tour with an incredible burst of energy for us who'd been denied the thing that we do, but also for the crowds to do a feel good thing like that as well. I mean to be gratifying everyone in that fashion. It was just what they wanted and what they needed probably, so it gave this electric electricity to everything, a sort of extra charge. So that was quite remarkable to be a part of.

Let's Go Back you say your work is always number one in your family. We can talk about that generally, like hey, I have to go on the road, But as a practical matter, how does that manifest itself. It's like all of a sudden, you get an idea and you go, I gotta go into my room. I gotta cut it. Or your wife says, hey, you've been working for twenty days straight. You got to stay at dinner. Tell me what it's actually like.

Well, the way I deal with it, Bob, is that I compartmentalize. So I do either of those things. Most of my life is organizational. It's not creative at all. It's very hard to find the time for pure creativity. But when I get into a writing mode and I say to everyone, right, stop emailing me, stop bothering me. I'm going to be writing a record. Now, I'm recording, leave me alone. And then if I get three clear days a week, I think I'm doing well. For it's superb There's so many other things to attend to. So I would normally work like a working day, get up early, get into the studio early. I like the fresh mind of the morning, and I would work through till seven o'clock. Maybe and stop, and that would be my working day. And as I say, Monday to Thursday if I can get that, if I can't, and Tuesday to Thursday, you know, making this record. Sometimes I went away and that was another part of it, to the countryside and would work longer hours. I'd work into the night, and that was actually very beautiful, so still so quiet. Some extraordinary things happened in those spaces. But no, basically I try and just be quite disciplined. So if I have an idea, it generally just has to wait until I have the time to explore it. I mean, now, I've just been writing lyric notes down this afternoon. A few things came into my mind, and then a musical idea came to me while I was practicing. Because I got the tour obviously starting for this new record, I've got to get myself up to speed. So as accidents still happened on the peyboard or on the guitar, and oh, that's interesting, I must remember this. And then a little melody came and I thought, actually that works with this lyric, and blah blah blah, I just have to make a little note of it and come back to it. So it's it's it's it's not possible. It's like I work a sort of milk round and I can get to be a musician, you know when I've finished.

Okay, let's say it's Monday to Thursday and you're working. Can your family interrupt you? Or do you turn off all your devices? And everybody knows David's working, leave them alone?

Now that kids will just interrupt you. They say things like world shattering importance, Like Dad, the Wi Fi isn't working, you know, I mean the world, the world's come to an end. Life being what it is, there's sort of digital hell. We've all been plunged into that. There's enough. There's always something going wrong, So no, there's there's if Amazon aren't tapping on your door or something, there's always some bloody interruption. So no, I think, as I say, broadly speaking, yes, if I said no, I'm in this mode, that they wouldn't come down. I'd be left to my own devices during the day. Now, I don't have a studio at home because I've moved house. So I've got a studio just up the road, a few miles up the road in West London. So when I'm there, I'm there, so that in a way, that's a lot more straightforward. When my studio was in the house, it was deeply problematic, so children would have parties in there and all kinds of things, you know, So it was it was, it was. It was a complex. Having my life squashed together with the house above the studio sounds ideal, but actually it was problematic. So I'm happier with this separation that I have now in some ways.

So why did you move house?

Because kids are sort of getting older and leaving home. And we lived in a nice leafy part of London called Hampstead, and it's all very nice, got lovely schools and beautiful. The heath is what it's famous for, where Keats and Coleridge used to wander and compose their rhymes. But it's really a bit boring. So we've decided to move right into the center of town. So we've kind of we've moved into w one, trying to make our lives a bit more interesting and a bit more cultural cultural, I suppose, like, so you can just walk out and do stuff, go to the shops, restaurants, theaters, galleries. Not that I'm spending all my time doing that, but you certainly can. And I like being just walking distance to everything, whether it's Selfridges or the Tait. I can kind of just basically just wander to it. So that's been the change. I think I wouldn't have enacted that change if we didn't have a second home. We're lucky enough to have the ultimate luxury, which is a country place. I've got a little house up on the coast in Norfolk, right by the beach, so I get all the fresh air and wilderness I can deal with when I'm up there, and then I come back to London and I can live in a different way.

How many kids do you have?

Two? I got two.

Girls in their presently what age.

Twenty two and twenty and are.

They still live in their house? Are they out? Yeah?

Exactly. Well, one of them's kind of half living here, half not living here. But I think it's a lot nicer to live here than it is in her crappy student flat. So the other ones just gone back to university this morning. She's gone back to Glasgow, so she's there during the terms and she comes back for holidays, so they're kind of here some of the time. It's a lot nicer being at home than it is in your little flat, that's for sure.

And you know, there's a TV show in America that you may or may not be familiar with call Family Ties from the eighties nineties where the parents are hippies and Michael J. Fox is very conservative. What are your kids like relative to you and your wife?

Well, I think just the way that they are as they've always been very conversational children, So they're highly articulate and sociable and not intimidated by adults or other people. They will be very chatty people, good, able to speak much better than I am, certainly, So that's sort of what they're like. What are they like politically culturally? Well that they've they're in this touch of a finger generation for everything they want, so they have a different relationship to things. It's interesting. I mean I haven't protected them from what was basically, you know, the open sewer of the internet and social media. They've been a how to ramble because I guess I feel that they need to know how to survive this this world. So they've been left, they've had phones, they've had all this stuff. They've been exposed to god knows what. So but they have this different relationship to music and culture, and obviously there's different political opinions. So identity politics has become such a huge thing. It's something we all disagree about in our family.

So they're there.

They're My youngest is very political. Ye, this not as much, although recent events have made her more so. So it's that they're they're not dissimilar to us. They're just have a different generation and they view certain things very differently. I think when I was growing up, music was it was more than what you listen to, what kind of reflected on you. It was it was actually your identity because choosing what you didn't like was just as profound as what you did. So if you were a mode or a rocker, or if you were a punk, or you were this, if you're you know, if you like talking heads and this and that, but you don't like Joranne Joanna, you were you positioned yourself, glued yourself together. If you discovered Leonard coh and John Martin, Nick Drake, these are the things that became what you were not internally and also sort of your character sort of thing. I think it was more tribal, it was rara, and now it's like everything's available all the time. It's it's not quite the same.

So if your kids turned you on to music or turned you off to music.

Well, of course they listened to all They listened to all kinds of stuff, which to me is it's just lays it on too thick, maybe you know, moaning about this, that or the rest. So but yeah, they've they've turned me on to quite a few things because they have very diverse listening. It they're being they're connecting through I don't know if it's algorithmic, but they're certainly accelerating their their knowledge and contact with music through TV through sort of applied versions of the music. They find it in places and then they pass it around like so they have quite a kind of quite catholic taste in some ways. So yeah, I've picked up on a few tracks which I really really like. So but generally one of the problems is we don't share our listening. In the old days, the parents used to have to watch Top of the Pops with the kids and go, what's this rubbish? You know, the crazy world of Arthur Brown fire. You know, he should he should get a job, you know, like they used to say things like that, and you know, these days, we don't have that common experience. There isn't a thing that everyone does to listen to music, So you get to hear what they're listening to. You just occasionally hear it blasting out of the shower or something, or they've stolen your bow speaker and they've taken over the living room and you get to hear something. But you know, I think I heard they were the other days that they were playing some Velvet Morning by what you McCall it and Nancy Sinatra and what's his name? I thought, well, I said, this is a great track. I said, have you listened to this record? This is a great record. They were like, no, we just know this track. I'm like, well, when you listen to the whole thing?

Okay, To what degree are you a student of the game? To what degree do you know what the ticket prices are? To what degree are you concerned with praises? To what degree do you know the gross? Do you know the cross? Well?

I have I have to. I've been an independent artist for a long time now, so it's touring has become much more expensive and it's very high risk. I mean, you you you spend a lot of money to put a tour on, and this tour I'm about to do for dear Life, it's called the Past and Present Tour. This will be the culmination of many years work. So we're not going to sell a load of vinyl. It's not like the coffers will be full. We've got to go out and talk do these shows for our fans, So it's very important. You know, people will push the ticket price up, push to cover all these cost but that just goes on to the consumer, and I feel very strongly that there's only so far you can take that. So I think for these reasons, if you choose to wash your hands of the sort of the dirty business of selling tickets in the market, then you're in danger of distancing people who haven't got as much money but a big passion for music, and the very people that probably prop you up. So for those reasons, I take all that stuff quite seriously. I'm not sitting in meetings going, hey, we should charge this, but I am paying attention. But yeah, one of the great problems is the sort of the profitability of things. It's become very expensive to tour, and everyone's wages want to go up, and all the rest of it, You've got things like environmental concerns and trying to do things in a different way, which may be more awkward, more expensive, more time consuming. So there's lots of pressures to do things differently, but not much slack in the line financially. So yes, I pay attention. I have my own record label. I notice things, and I've been involved in putting my own music out. Not I mean, I'm not hands on deck or I'm not part of that, but I'll be a part of the conversations. I'll meet the people, and I'll take good note of what happens and what doesn't happen, what gets spent, what doesn't get spent. Of course, because at the moment, I'm spending my own money. I'm spending my own money set up a new record company, and I'm spending my own money making the record and putting it out. So it's a lot of money that this. So this, all of this has an effect on how you think about your ticket prices and everything else. It's it's it's all interconnected, and it's no doubt a more abundant creative space to ignore the whole damn lot and just and live in your own little world, your little creative bubble. But I find that I can't do that really, I'm just drawn to the detail of what's actually happening.

Okay, So if you stop being a musician today, do you have enough money that you could get to the end or is it album to album?

No, I'm comfortably off. I could stop now.

Okay, So you're making this record, you know, the record you made independently, but you've licensed it to other people in different territories.

Correct, Yeah, well this time that's what we've licensed it to secretly distribution this time. So that's that's that's a worldwide deal as far as I'm aware. And was there an advance with that, No, I don't take advances. It's it's just to do with how much, what the marketing spend will be and all those kind of things, and you know, some of the other detail and how long the deal's going to be. So it's a one album deal. That's that's what we've been doing for the last little while.

So do you have a view on streaming?

Yeah, of course, you know, yes, yes, very much so. I I think that the way that our industry works is to hell with it. That's the way. That's the way it goes. With the tech and the power that they you know, they don't worry too much about the people who making the music. That don't worry all. I wouldn't say, really, they've just got to float their brand and get to so and of course it's ended up being a hugely profitable thing for major labels who've stripped out staff and costs and amalgamated and joined and all this enormous back catalog that's just probably playing the minimum, bare minimum to some of these people, and they're getting phenomenal figures streaming all these old songs, so they're not having to do anything, not spending anything, shipping a load of vinyl to Canada. They're just you know, basically just sitting there and this stuff's just pouring in. So it's not recognizing songwriters, producers.

There's just not.

Enough in there. So I think that what we thought in the eighties was that you know, sound was going to get higher and higher quality, and the tech would get higher and higher quality, and you know, but actually what's happened is it went the other way. And hell with quality, it's just about immediacy, which is an interesting thing. So you know if there were higher quality brands, none of them have really succeeded that you could have a really incredible listening experience and maybe spend a bit more money. There might be a little bit more money there for the artists. But and again that would take a load of money to float it, and there's been various people trying to launch various things. So yes, streaming is a wonderful resource for the listener, it's not so rewarding for the struggling artist.

Okay, tell me about the difference between quality and immediacly.

Well as in the actual quality of the audio is very very limited on your basic streaming platform on an MP three, as opposed to listen to a beautiful piece of finyl from an amazing record player and lovely speakers, or then you had the CD and you take it to the next musical clarity level. But what you get is you get to listen to something immediately. Now, just just touch it. It's there, it's yours. You don't have to wait, you don't have to go to the shops. I used to have to save up my dinner money for two weeks if I wanted to buy an album, Basically half to starve meself at school and then get the bus into town fifteen miles and buy the record I wanted, and come back again. And I would on the bus that I would have read the inside cover, the outside cover. I've looked at all the photos. I'd even have taken the vinyl out and looked inside there and read what was scratched onto the center of that. You had a level of sort of involvement that was very, very different.

Okay, you have certain songs on Spotify with triple digit millions. Are you making any money from streaming? Of course there are songs with billions.

Yeah, of course I'm making I'm making good money. I own the Masters, though I'm not in a I'm not in the position that someone else would be, you know, at a major would be in. I own, well, at least I used to own the Masters until I sold them. So I own some of my I own my current music, and the last record I put out is called Skelleig.

I own.

I own that record and this record. That's all part of my new record company, so that those things, when we put them out, the streaming will be it's not getting taken by a record company. And I get my whatever percent. At the end of it, I get whatever that the majority of the money from the streaming. My partners will receive a certain amount of that. So it's it's it. Yes, when you start getting big numbers, it starts to add up, and it's it's a significant thing and.

You're a new work. Will the numbers be significant enough to cover your costs?

HI? Hopefully over time. You know, I have no idea, Bob. And we've spent a bloody arm and a leg making this record. We've got orchestra's horn sections, We've spent bloody months on it, the damn thing, you know, years even so, I don't know. It's going to take a while. It's not just the spend of making the record, as I say, marketing it and all the people I pay who work for me, who run the record label, I mean all their wages, all their salaries. If I take that whole chunk of time, it's going to take a long time. I'd say, be lucky if in ten years I've made a penny out of the damn thing. But you just never know what's going to happen. If you stay in the boat long enough, you might just catch a fish. I maybe some mad TV producers going to go, you know what this new David Gray song? This is it sopranos too, We need this as the title music. It's like you might get a break that you hadn't dreamed of that could transform your fortunes, and suddenly you've got gazillions of streams going on. No, the streaming numbers are utterly unspectacular because in the world of finger touch immediacy, the old are much much slower than the young, and obviously Maya fans are by and large older than some, so you're not dealing with this thing. I'm doing the best I can to notify anyone who might be interested, but it's going to be hard work. I put a record out a couple of years ago called Skellig. This was a very uncommercial record. It's very very personal, very low tempo. But we also because it was COVID, there was no real marketing spend on. Very low amount of money was spent. We could only do so much because we couldn't physically do anything. So we spent a few mony a bit of money and actually it's sort of recouped, so within three years I'm now getting a very small amount of money every month from that record, so it shows that it is possible. The difference there is that the spend wasn't anything like as great either on making or releasing the record. So this time around it will I'd say it's going to take a lot longer. I'd like to think with the kind of immediacy of this music, that it may strike a chord and we get some kind of fire under the whole thing and it starts to move a little bit. But I'm just not in control of all that. All I can do is make it as good as I can make it and put it out there and sing my heart out.

You've worked both in the old era and the transition in the new era. Not that many people have, but they used to say the tour was the advertisement for the album, and now the album is the advertisement for the tour. Today's scattered landscape and different remuneration periodigm does that affect the inspiration and desire to make new records?

No, you know, making records is where it's at. I mean, playing live is where it's at. The two things are to a record as a world, I mean, anyone who's experienced a record as a world gone to the planet Pink Moon, or gone to the planet astral Weeks or Nebraska, you know, free wheeling. Anyone who's been to any of these places and been consumed by the spirit of Eden by Talk Talk kind of Blue by Miles Davis. It doesn't matter. When you've been there, you know what's going on, Marvin Gay. Once you've gone to a planet and like being completely obsessed and absorbed by it, how can you not want to make a record? I mean, a record isn't a song. It's you hang the pictures in the gallery and you take people through, and there's the cadence of each song leads to a kind of cascade of emotion that flows from one to the other and creates an overall effect. So that's still what I believe in. I still believe in the novel. Even though everyone's writing. They're not even writing short stories, they're writing sentence.

Okay, you mentioned a little bit earlier you sold your masters. Traditionally in the music business, people didn't even own their masters. We live in an era where many people are selling their publishing, selling their masters. Let's start with the masters. Did you sell them outright such that you'll never get royalties, or did you sell the ownership and you still have royalties.

It's a complicated question to answer. I didn't sell them through choice. But first of all, I sold my recording masters from White Ladder until Golden the brass Age, so eight albums up until the one before Skelg. So it was because I was at the end of a relationship that had lasted through my entire career, and the only way to get out of it was we owned a record company together, was to sell the record company. Essentially, it's sell the Masters. So that's that was the only way to really make a break. So uh yeah, well, I've maintained a stake in the Masters. I didn't sell it all. I kept a bit, so I still have a vested interest. I got skin in the game, underwhelming skin in the game so far.

So while we're on this tip, did you sell the publishing too?

No, no, no, I haven't sold that. So for the very first time in my life, all my publishing has come back to me and it's now all housed with Chrystalis on a sort of rolling deal, so it's all in the same place for the very first time ever. In fact, so they're sort of administering my publishing for me. No, I haven't sold any publisher.

Without any dire circumstances coming up. Would you ever sell the publishing?

We never say never, but it's unlikely. For one thing. Money is completely overrated, you know, as some kind of great aid in your life towards greater meaning and enjoyments. It can be incredibly helpful when you haven't got enough of it, but that's not the position I'm in. I'm doing perfectly okay, thanks very much. So why would I want to a pay shitloads of tax? By result, it's getting a fuckload of money that I wouldn't know what to do with anyway, And why would I want to fuckload of money that I have no idea what to do with. It's I don't want for anything, I don't need anything. It'd be totally stupid. So those are the reasons that I when money first broke in my life, when things were going well, it was a really complicated thing to negotiate because we started when it just coming in and it didn't stop. After a while, you start just making really bad decisions because nothing has as much meaning, so you can just replace things you don't like or buy something you decide you don't want it, and it's like you're suddenly living an episode of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. So that's something I've been exposed to by my children. It's not one of my personal viewing choices. So yeah, I think that, you know, getting a routload of money is great, but it's just it just ends in a sort of disassociative, disassociative state where you're it distances you from life and meaning and what I'm needing to do things. So in a way, I'm kind of I'm not falsely pressurizing. I'm choosing to be in a more pressurized situation in terms of putting money out and investing in it and having to make a success of things, because it's a more relatable thing and it makes for more sensible views and ideas about what you're doing. So that's the way I choose to do it. As I said that, the classic artist pose would have been, we've received so much money, we don't have to worry about anything. Now we can just dream our dreams. But to me, the dreams are part of this fabric. There's so many compromises making music in a commercial world. Where do you even start it's very, very elaborate, complex, full of compromise. So you I think it's important to understand what it's like for someone spending money to get to your show or to get your CD, just what that means. So I think, because it's still a relatable thing for me putting music out, I consider myself to be more in relation to the listener because I'm in a more reasonable position. So you know, God knows. As I said, I wish something wonderful happened and my fucking songs would go crazy and I can just relax. You know, Wow, this is amazing. It'd be more amazing because the energy it would give everything. It wouldn't be the money. It would be the way the show's go with this crazy energy because people are a new wave of fans would be getting a hold of this stuff. That would be incredible. So it's those are the things that you lost for and being taken seriously, so you know that those are my sort of preoccupations.

Just to go back a point, so how many times have you been married? Just once and you got divorced and that's why you had to sell the catalog?

No, no, no, it was my business partner, not my wife. She's still involved.

So you had when you've been independent in this independent record company, you had a financial partner, Yeah.

My manager, my old manager and I. When White Ladder came along, no one wanted to put it out, so we put it out ourselves. We created a record company and we put it out ourselves, and that's how that that began. That record began in that way. We put it out in Ireland, the only place where we could sell anywhere records to the only place I had a sort of beginning of a sort of commercial viability, sort of cult following. So we put it out there and it just began to sell and then began to sell more and then like hotcakes, and that funded we signed with Ato Dave Matthew's label in the States, and we signed we licensed to Warners in the for the UK and the rest of the world, but we kept Ireland as our own independent thing, and that's how it began. So this relationship was very complex. And then for the next however many albums it followed that we just put them out through this record company and we licensed them to various partners. So yeah, So when that relationship came to an end after thirty years, the easiest thing to do, the only thing to do, was to sell the company in order that everyone could take a little bit away with them.

And why did the relationship come to an end?

Well, look, I don't want to get into all that. That's that's personal.

Okay, So.

These things happen, you know, it's a long time. We've been through an awful lot together. And furthermore, this is someone who without who's belief in me, I would not be sitting in front of you now. The people who invest in you, like emotionally and musically and in other ways when you don't mean anything, those are the people that you value, you know, really ultimately. So when someone makes a choice not based on their own on the profitability of something or whatever or the look that it gives them, then that means a lot. So it's still a very intense relationship, but albeit from a distance at the moment. But yeah, it had run its course and now I'm in a new phase of my life.

Okay. Why was the record company called IHD?

He rob as Robert wanted to call it Hit Records, but when we applied to company's house, they said that's already taken. So he couldn't be bothered to do it. He's just turned changed the letters round, and it was I h T. So that that was the story of why it was I HD.

Okay, let's go back to the present album. You started recording before COVID. Generally speaking, are you always recording or did you say I want to make an album?

No, this was definitely I'm ready to make an album, so i'd I had some ideas live from the whole COVID period, but even before that, I had I had this spark of what the new music might feel like. I'd started to write a couple of songs. So no, I was ready. I mean I was. I was more than ready to make a record. I had no idea how long it was going to take, so no, it was definitely. It wasn't playing around. I mean, at the end of this album cycle, I'll be finishing of this touring cycle, I'll be finishing the rest of the music from the same period off and that will come out as a separate album. But when that is done, I'll be pretty I'll pretty much have cleared the decks. Never entirely, there's always lots of loose ends, songs that I haven't found a place.

For I thought you said it to trilogy.

No, No, it's I'd say this album is a double album in itself, Dear Life. I think if you time it, it's like it's like four sides of vinyl for sure. So it's yeah, so this is a double Then there's another album that's going to come out, which would just be a single album a bit further down the line. So no, I'm always writing, making, thinking, storing as I say, that's the way it works. Now. I have to just make notes and then finally I'll come to a point where I'll start going through some of the most of them will be lost, but I believe this it like you know, it all goes into the earth and comes back out as new plants. I don't think you lose this stuff entirely. I think if there was something good there, you would remember it. So there's always lots of different ideas, lyrics, stories that notes. I mean, the phone is a highly annoying thing to have on you, but also highly convenient. It's got a camera, it's got a recording device, and it's got a little notebook, so it just fits in your pocket and you can do all these things. So I'm constantly notekeeping. Not only that, I mean the inside of my mind is like a giant sort of car, like a giant warehouse full of car parts. I'm always trying to fit something together. Oh, I could use that that wheel would fit on here, or this axle would work there, or you know, that steering wheel would look good in this car. I'm always using one bit and wondering whether I can finish another song with it, or there's just unfinished bits everywhere. So that's just a normal state of things that's constantly ongoing. But when I get into writing, it becomes a little bit more focused and the time opens out and I start to expand these ideas. The difficulty is that when you first have a mood, the mood that envelops you when you come up with a tune and you start to write, you're in a there's a great suggestibility about your state of being at that moment. You're sort of you're under hypnosis in a way. The music starts to hypnotize you. It's very hard to pick up that thread at a later date. Oh yeah, and that's what I Yeah, So it's that's what was unusual about this particular sort of starburst of song writing. At the end of COVID, I was writing new music but also just picking other things up off the shelf and just finishing the songs, but not in a way that you can see the join. It was just oh right, okay, here we go. It was I was like, what was going on?

Okay? So you have these periods where you were saying, I'm writing the album. In between these periods, thoughts are just going through your brain the car parts' occasionally making notes or are you ever writing a complete song just because something comes to you? Oh?

Yeah, I mean those are the best days. Yeah, those are the days you pray for and if you keep working hard enough, it will happen. So yes, occasionally there's a song on this new record called that day must surely come. And I was working on something completely different, and I just made an A chord on the second I had the capo to a chord or B, and I just I made this extension with my pinky that I'd never done before, and I went up, I went under the A two four and then all the way to five, very long extension, and then I moved the bass note with my thumb, and I thought, oh, that's a really nice run of chords. I've never played that before. And then I just began to pick it. And as I picked it, I just read, I sang the first line, and I just stopped what I was doing and I just wrote the song. And in a couple of hours later it was written, and it was in Those experiences are have a mysticism about them, because you become both more entirely yourself, the sort of fertile vistas of experience, and all the loged emotion that you've held is waited to be born into this song. At moments like that, you could just they feel that they've been waiting a long time to be born. This thing begins to emerge, and at the same time, your brain is sending up the sort of editorial drone. You're going up to the top office on the top floor, and you're just making very cool and clear decisions about what you're doing. So you become more objective and more subjective simultaneously, and you begin to work in a very unfussy, un self conscious way. And those are the best songs. Please forgive me that they must surely come from here. You can almost see the sea. These are the ones that just poured out of me in like moments. So that's what that's what I hope for.

Okay, as a writer, but not a writer of songs. I know exactly what you're talking about. And sometimes when it's really working, I might become self conscious and then all of a sudden it veers off. Is that something that resonates? Oh yeah, totally.

As I say, self consciousness is the enemy in life, in music, in making. You know, it's it's it's totally the enemy, very hard to avoid. And you know, I use all kinds of tricks to trick myself out of thinking too much. So for example, when I haven't been making music, writing music, it's it's pressing. I'll be it's pressing on me now because it's been a while since I've been in that position, when I've been exploring and making. So when I get back to it, it'll have been so long it'll be like getting into a cold bath, not just a cold bath, ice cold. I'll be scared of like what it all means. It will all start meaning too much. So these days i'd use little tricks like, for example, rather than I usually work from chords, the rhythm of the cause, the chords, the rhythm of the chords, a sequence of chords, and then the melody that associates. But if I find I work the other way round, and I take a lyric and I try and fit it, fit some music to the lyric, so I feel backwards, or from a poem which I leave taking on this record was a good example of that. I took someone else's words and I sensed there was music in them, and I felt like a water diviner with a stick. I felt blind across the ground, just looking for where it could take me, and I began to make, like a child in a sandpit. I just shaped things, and I didn't get my head up until i'd sort of made something. And when I had made something, I had no idea. I couldn't do like a quality assessment of it because my melodic instincts were disabled, and my sense of meaning and value was also not engaged. So I didn't have that sort of white writer's block preoccupation, this is a piece of shit, Why should it matter? The sort of doubting voices. I try and cheat those doubting voices, and I find that once if I can manage to find a way past them, the guards on the gate. Then once I'm in, I'm in the room of making, and I get back into it. I stopped thinking about it all so much, and it becomes much faster and more immediate. That's not to say everything's great, it's just I find that we've all got that writer's block, that doubting voice, the negative voice that's waiting, and particularly I find after an absence. So I mean, my ultimate existence would be that I would never lose the fluency that I have when I'm in these deep writing sessions. But it's a bit like losing the fluency and my calluses on my fingers from playing on the road. And as a musician, when I'm playing every night, I'll reach I'll attain a physical level of ability and emotional and mental connection that I wouldn't be able to sustain on an average day because I'll be doing two, three, four hours of music every day. So you know, it's different. It's like that with the writing too. You sort of lose your confidence and you start to think about it far too much.

Okay, so you had this time you're with the family with COVID, then you go back to writing. Are you literally saying, okay, I'm sitting here. It's Monday to Thursday. I have to write songs. I'm going to sit here until I finished the songs. Or do you wait for inspiration or do you have tricks to trick yourself into inspiration?

Yeah, as I say, it's like self hypnosis. So I don't sit there waiting for inspiration. I just get on with it. As I say, I've always got a million unfinished things, so I'll just pick one of them up and start working on it. Or I'll think of a little simple idea and I think that could be a simple little song. Maybe I'll just start with that, something achievable, something small, not too demanding, not too ambitious, something intriguing and small. So I'll start humble. And then, as I say, once I've achieved a few things, it's a little easier to get into rhythm. So I mean, those those are my tricks. I mean, I don't think there's any escaping effect. It's it's difficult. Yeah, it's some days you just don't get anywhere. I mean, it's just the way it is. So but I think you just turn up and you start working, and sound can be a great unlocker as well. It's like that you know, there's there's the same old six strings on the same old guitar, but put it through a sort of effect. It's like a Leslie effect or chorus or you know, a new am or you put a capo up high to change the tuning and open tuning. Suddenly, ah, the same old motes remake. They invert chords, and it inverts chords. It changes your relation to the things you already know and charms you back into that sense of mystery that you need to be in. So it's just important to well, anyway, these are the ways I choose to do it. I mean, some people work completely the opposite way. They wait until they're in the mood and then they make music and they don't stop until it's done. Maybe that's the best way to do it.

I don't know.

This is the way that my life is involved because I wanted to be a dad and I wanted to be a husband, and I've got all this music I've already created, and I need to deal with curate my own life to a certain extent, and my own businesses demand a lot of my attention, so I need to be I need to sort of compartmentalize a lot of the time in order to get the space to work properly and over long period. So this is just my means of doing it.

Okay, is your process that you write all the songs and then you record, or do you write and record, write and record.

I just write and record, and in fact, the recording process is the writing process. I have a wonderful producer. We have a very strong relationship and it's very very complimentary. So I'm totally disinhibited these days in terms of writing lyrics, trying things. I don't care. I'm not waiting till I look good and then you can come into the room. It's like you just see it all like I'll pour it all out. Oh that's fucking terrible, like delete, you know. So we we just we work, so I'll stay. I've got this idea. So like on this record, Eyes Made Rain would be a good example, a very simple song. I said, it's like a mantra, eyes Made Rain, My eyes made Rain, My eyes made Rain. And I have this chord sequence, had all the chords worked out, I didn't really have a lyric, and he was like, oh I love this, I love this, let's start putting it down. So I hadn't even started to write the lyric. I had like maybe one or two lines that are going to ghosting in here and there, and so we said, Okay, what's the tempo going to be. Let's decide on a tempo. Okay, let's take a little rhythm so I can play along with it, so we don't want it just to click. Let's get a little rythm. He came up with this really odd rhythm, and actually the arpedu I was playing was the vital link. So I thought, oh, this actually really works. It's like very jazzy, very odd anyway, So then we began to work, and as we shaped the sound of the song and we put these kind of little sample drum parts in and other little sounds that came into it, it began to speak as a piece of music, and I wanted to inhabit the space in a way that would have been perhaps different than what I might have come to as a lyricist if you'd just been and the acoustic guitar and I just toughed it out and finished the lyric on my own. The song became something I was getting inside of as a piece of music. All the different elements, the bass we added the drums, we added the little sounds and subtleties, and the space we put it in. The short reverbs and the different things began to sort of make me feel like I was in a different country. So the lyric became much more impressionistic in a way. I didn't worry too much because I was kind of slotting into us what was basically the finished song. So I hadn't recorded a vocal on it yet. And we got to the end of this few hours of making this track, and I said, right, I guess you know, I need to put some kind of performance on top of this. So if you leave something without a lyric or anything on it, a voice on it, it's less hard to relate to, it's much harder to relate to other So I basically just I sat down and until I had like three verses and a middle section to some kind of degree working, you know, no one could leave. So I just sat there and he just had to wait, and I was just writing and writing and writing and writing until I had something. I was happy enough to go in there and go behind the mic and try and put down so that we had something to relate to. And in fact, what happened was I remember thinking, God, what is this? What I'm even saying? This is all rather vague, but it's sort of It's just remained a bit like that. So I did change a few lines, but essentially I stuck with what I came up with, and that was just we recorded it as I was making it, so and that's pretty much true for I'd say probably most of the tracks on the record have been a bit like that.

I'm fascinated you worked with Marius Defrees, who's a friend of mine, and then you work with his son. How does that happen?

It's such a lovely thing. And I'll tell you what's absolutely beautiful about it is they both have this There's talk about the genes of taste and subtlety. They both have this incredible musicality, this rich and very subtle bordering on classical understanding of music and voicings and orchestration. And Marius is a very different personality to Ben. But yeah, working with Marius was lovely, so much more pressurized situation. He came into a thing where everyone wanted a record with a hit. I've had a couple of big hit records and this was going to be life in slow motion. This was going to be a big deal basically. So working with Ben has been very different, and we've over the course of now three records and a few other side projects, we've developed a wonderful relationship. But they they're both old school. They don't flinch, they don't mess, they don't mess. They there until the until the projects finished. They give you everything that they should give you. There's no none of this kind of you know, I'm tired kind of bollocks you get from some people.

Okay, let's go back though to what you were saying before that you're in your writing phase. At what point do you bring in the producer.

Yeah, I do need some time to myself two to sketch the ideas, to begin to just so early on, though, because I have the sense of trust with Ben that I don't need a finished thing, although it's much nicer to have. I've written the song, come on, let's work on it. I'd normally be more in its infancy. I've got this idea. What do you think of the idea? Let's let's work on it. So very early on these days the producer would come in because, as I said, I've seen many good examples now of how we've got a long way with the song without me having finished the lyric. The lyric writing is what takes time. So but yeah, but when this album and this tour slows down, as I said, I want to finish this other record. But after that, I'll be trying to sort of locate myself, feel where I am, get a sense of the topography, geography of my heart, what's going on inside me, the bedrock of what this music is going to be springing from, what's going to be built upon this next wave of stuff. I've got dreams and ideas already for what that will be. I've already started making notes, but it may be that they never see the light of day. They don't. There's no fruition for all that stuff. It's just a dream. When I actually get there, something might happen and my life might be quite different, and the record might take on a different feel or tone. So but yes, when when I've finished and things slow down and I get some time to myself, I'll get my little studio set up out in the countryside, and I'll spend some time just working on things on my own and and feeling for things Before I involve anybody, but it won't be long before I do.

So. Earlier you also said on this album you have horns and strings. How did you decide to employ those?

Well, just where the music told me they needed to go. I mean, it's it's it's not a given that adding orchestration or horns takes you any further down the track in terms of realizing what a song must be. Quite the contrary. I mean, sometimes some songs sound better just on your own, sometimes better with a drum player, drum drummer, some with a bass player on to some without. So with orchestration, there was a as I say, a melodic strength. There was just some of these songs we're just asking for orchestration there there there they were big melodies. So it's different every time. So and as I say, Ben like his dad, is very very talented at voicings. So for example, using leave taking user bass clarinet introduces the the sort of the horn section. You don't go straight in with a saxophone or a trombone or a trumpet. You you use a bass clarinet to play. I mean, who think of using a bass clarinet. It's a beautiful, beautiful sound, and there's a these little touches of class. We're using obo here and this there, and there's little bits of knowledge and and and they to a much more satisfying end result. So yeah, it's just it's different every record. This time it wanted these. I don't think the next record will probably have an orchestra or horns or anything. I think we might get my friend Caroline to come around with her cello and do a little bit of playing on a couple of things, but it will be more layering some strings into the odd song maybe, But I don't see that the next chapter will have any of that stuff. This time around, it was. It definitely felt right and it sounds wonderful that the session we did for the orchestra was absolutely out of this world.

It's phenomenal forgetting orchestra and other big productions. Your studio in the old home, your studio up the street. Now, can you make the records in these studios or do you have to go to another room to make the records?

No, I can make all the record that. If we wanted a big drum sound, or we want to record horns or strings, we go somewhere else because I haven't got the mics, and I haven't got the mic stands, and I haven't got the space.

Okay, let's go to the previous album you mentioned. It was very made during COVID scaleg I think, and in the old days let's just call it pre internet, last century. If you made an album that was not as successful commercially or critically, he could really negatively impact your career. To what degree is that a factor or is that even not a factor in today's world.

It depends how you set your stall out. I mean, I've seen it have that very negative effect on my own career more than once. So God knows, I've seen this every which way. I've been nowhere, somewhere, somewhere in between, and I've done things I love that didn't really get anywhere with the radio, and then everyone turns around and goes, well, he's only worth this now, so dismiss It's like, yeah, you've got to be very careful. I think. Ultimately, though, you've got to make yourself happy. You've got to do what you want to do. If you want to be in music, if it's your life, then you're going to be there with a passion and a zeal to see it through till the end. Then you've got to set your stall out accordingly. I mean, do you care about the fucking numbers or what? Of course you do. Everyone wants to connect to the listener who doesn't want listeners, But there's more to it than that. It's like what kind of listener and how do they listen and all the rest of it. So there are this Because I've got my own label, I can I guess, to a certain extent, do what I want to do. And this record was a labor of love. And I think this record will still be being listened to when I'm dead. It was a magic experience. But it's never going to unless it gets some kind of sink or film placement that suddenly makes everyone aware of it. It's going to be a very slow word of mouth or word of finger movement that it makes through people's consciousness. It's going to be the sort of thing that's passed around. So you know, I don't know. I did the White Ladder to all. That meant all the promoters and venues suddenly went well, look he sold all these tickets. So now I'm being treated slightly differently because I can prove I can still sell some tickets, So all the things you say about the industry are absolutely true and they haven't changed. I think that when you've made as many records and you've carried on as long as I have, it obviously becomes maybe slightly less significant. If I just followed White Ladder with, you know, some obscure electronic project that was never going to flow anyone's boat, it would have been maybe a really stupid dumb thing to do from a commercial point of view. But if that's what I really felt, I wanted to do it just anyway. It's all down to the individual, and I don't think there's a right and wrong way of doing it. If what you're trying to say is has it changed? Does the industry more forgiving now? I don't think it really is. But I think that it's so much easier to put music out. There's so much going out that it's not such a big, big, big deal. There's a lot of covering fire as people putting shit out all the time, So it's it's it's it's completely naturally saturated in new music, So maybe it's it's just less prominent and less obvious now.

In today's world. I mean you literally have your own label. You're involved. You know, we have a distributor does marketing to what degree? Or you or your team involved in social media direct access to your fans.

Yeah, well, I try and keep the tone. I do all the writing of the copy when it's in first person, they're my posts. And I don't use social media in my life too. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, I don't use any of it. I don't have person not accounts, I don't communicate with anyone through those things. But it's as a means of letting my fans know. Writing something on the blackboard is sort of how I see it. I mean, I don't follow anyone. I don't engage. It just gobbles up your time, mind, everything else. I can't be bothered with any of it. But I see it as a vital tool these days for letting people know what's happening. So, of course the gatekeepers are very much in control of how it all works. That there was a certain innocent period when it sort of went out to everyone. Apparently it doesn't work like that anymore. So you know that it's very carefully managed, in choreographed so yes, but it's a personal things, and it needs to feel authentic. So when I speak one of the things I find rather dull as these things become more important, which is what's happened with Instagram, for example, something I quite liked because you When I started, I was just doing weird photos, which I enjoyed, and writing because there was no limit on the characters, writing a few words or a lot of words about what I was doing or what I was seeing. But of course it becomes like the only show in town in terms of letting everybody know you've got to tour an album of this. So everything now is just basically much more related to your job. So when it started, it was a bit more innocent and fun, and that's not really true anymore. But it's still a vital tool. So I try and make the best of it that I can and give an authentic view into my life, my thoughts and feelings. I don't share photos of food, holidays, children, or opinions on current political situations or war or anything. I keep that to myself. It's not that I'm afraid of voicing those opinions, but I don't foist them on my listeners.

To what degree online are you two way interacting with europeand.

Not at all. I don't follow anyone or any other artists. I don't engage in that way. I just put things on my thing. If I was going to if I was going to interact with a fellow artist, I would send them an email.

Okay, So where did you grow up?

I grew up in Manchester until I was eight, in the North of England, and then my parents moved to a tiny fishing village in the Very West Wales called Solver. So if you've ever read Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, then it was something like that, a sort of enchanted realm of sea and sand and woodland and cliff that I was suddenly thrust into and being a sort of avid nature lover, it was just the most incredible adventure. It sort of seeded my imagination with imagery and thoughts and beauty and I still draw on that fund now.

And what kind of kid? Were you?

Very interested in stuff? Very sporty, loved all sport, loved, playing out, was just out all the time, kind of shy. So when I discovered going on stage, that was like a big moment. I had to be a stand in for the main part in the primary school production Christmas play the main Wizard, the Wizard and the Wizard the Witch. The Wizard was taken ill on day of show, and I had a very good memory. I had a very good memory, so they said they plumped on me, even though I was a year younger than lots of the other children, to be the main part because I'm the only person who might remember all the the different lines. So I learned the Wizard's part, but they didn't have time before we got to the performance to teach me the dances, so I had to improvise my song and dance routine. And let's just say, Bob that I was a big hit with the audience. I was a big hit with the audience. The audience loved me. And as I stood there doing my crazy wizard dancing, singing these little songs, and they gave me rapturous applause. And I remember looking out at them from this stage, which was probably only about six inches high, into the dark all that what felt like a sea of faces, which was probably about sixty people, and thinking, yeah, I get this. I get I'm in a magic world of mate believe, and I'm what I'm giving them. They loved me because I'm doing something freely and giving it to them, and their their joy is in my giving and where some people would have just been inhibited. And I was shy, but I love this and that stayed with me, and I then sort of pursued sort of amateur dramatics. We are probably grand term, but I was in school plays from then on and I got some big roles and I started my own band. So I loved it on the stage. So choosing to do music over art was probably because I liked the fact it brought me into the world and you've got this instant reaction. So I was when I was a teenager. I just became your classic teenager, smoking, drinking and wanting to kiss girls and you know, then wanting to be in a band. And I stopped studying. I stopped paying any attention apart from art and reading a few of the English texts. And they all sort of were tearing their hair out. Probably I can't imagine what it's like for my mum, but she showed incredible patience. So I kind of disconnected from my studies somewhat, and it made a bit of a mockery of my exams at various points, but I kind of got through. I chose the path of least resistance, which was art school.

What did your parents do for a living, Well.

My dad had been a baker in Manchester, in the family in firm, and when they didn't know what they were going to do when they went to well, so my mum was making these quilted clothes using Liberty fabrics and they started a little cottage industry selling these, and then it became successful and they were Liberty in London's biggest sellers. They were for a while, and then they started their own little shop to sell their own clothes, which developed into a craft shop, and then eventually they folded the clothing business and they just had a craft shop and the restaurant down the street where I worked as a washer up for many years made it to waiter.

And do you have any siblings?

Yeah, I got two sisters. I'm the eldest. I got two younger sisters.

So how did you get into music? Yeah?

I always loved it. I mean, my mum was a very good singer. She used to sing in the choir. And I didn't have any elder brothers and sisters to kind of guide me. Into what was cool, just reacted to things. So saw music on the Telly and fell in love with Madness the Specials, sort of whole two tone thing that was nineteen seventy nine, and I was obsessed with that for several years and then became more like an indie thing. And while I was getting into indie music, I kind of got into other things that was something we'd all talk about. You'd watch Telly Don't Look Back was on, like the Da Pennybecker film. I watched that fucking in hell. I already loved Bob Dylan. I discovered him, I thought, well, I started buying Dealing Records and Leonard Cohen Records, Jny Mitchell Records, John Martin Records, and I started to explore Tom Waite's all these things at the same time as listening to the cool pop music of the sort of early to mid eighties. So that's kind of what happened. I just got into it. My dad had an acoustic guitar which he didn't know how to play. I just started using it, and my friend wrote down some chords for me and I started from there.

So how did you decide this is going to be a career? And how did you end up becoming a professional.

Well, I was very lucky. I'm very fortunate. I've always very driven, very self confident, very determined. So I went to art school, I formed a band, made demos and already at that point decided this is the way I'm going to go. And so I was painting and stuff for my degree, but really most of my energy and money as well, I was buying equipment and stuff was going into playing with my band, and we were playing shows in Glasgow, tried Manchester, didn't go so well there Liverpool where I went to art school, so I was gigging and we made a demo at the end of my last year and sent it into the Manchester Evening News. John Slater was an A and R man in Manchester who do a demo review. So he really liked the demo and sent an A and R man like a scout to see us in Liverpool to check us out. He gave us a good review, and he sent a scout and the scout was working for the person who would become my manager, who was just taken on a job at Pollardor to sort of pay a few bills with. So he was working for Polydor and also sort of scouting out talent at the same time time from his own POV and he was given this demo and so my very first demo ended up in the hands of the person who would be my manager. And then Pollodor commissioned a second demo and things began to move forward, and they got a publishing deal with Warner Chapel the following year. Then I moved to London and got a record deal with Virgin So that's sort of how it started. It all happened very quickly. I mean I finished my college and within a year I was in London with a record deal.

So the first three records were let's just say they weren't hit. What was your experience, Yeah, it was well.

I was, first of all, super exciting. I didn't ever have a kind of overview or a plan of how I was going to crack the music industry. I didn't have some hey press guy, this is my take on things. I didn't have any of that shite. I just I just had myself, my heart, my songs. I just wanted to do it. So the whole thing was a crazy learning experience, character building, as they say. So the first album new record label, got to go to America, tour America a couple of times as a support act, play shows of my own in New York and LA and you know, a super super exciting but by record too because I hadn't sold any records, you know, they were And also the guy who signed me, the classic music business thing, he was sacked before the record. He was sacked before the record had even come out, so my champion was gone, and they kind of let me make another record then said your recording budgets over. You just have to put this out as it is, put it out and then drop me. And then I was picked up by a label in America very fortunately about six months later. So this was the story of the first three albums. But the only really significant thing that happened, apart from me learning the hard way, playing fucking horrible shows in all over the fucking world as well as some good ones, was the connection I made with the Irish. They loved my first album, and I got some really good press, and I got some cool radio going on, like late night radio stuff. And when I played my first gig in Ireland at the beginning of nineteen ninety four, it was a sellout and second gig, and I thought, God, I love it here and I just kept going back and I built up this following so they kind of got it. The Irish got it. They got the lyricism, they got the sort of earthiness, the rawness, the simplicity, the singer songwriter in us of what I was doing, which was like not a very cool look at the time, So particularly in the UK, which is the hardest place to break in the world, the most cynical, sort of hard edged place I've ever been to anyway, putting new music out and everything. So that that was the story. That that that that's that's That's pretty much how it went. So it was hard work. I think. By the third record coming out on EMI America, it was a total not a disaster, and they didn't even put it out properly. The whole thing was a joke. They were imploding, They weren't even there was they were they were non functioning as a record company. We went on an absolutely soul destroying tour of the Midwest and that was that, and we had an option to have a second album with them. We chose not to take the advance and just end it. Such was the pitiful state of things. So eventually that led to me making a record in my own bedroom, which was white ladder. But it didn't happen straight away.

Well, well, before you go to the record your own bedroom, you know, you make the first record, you have all the hopes, you have the second record, you know your ain R guy goes. But then you sign with a major label and that implodes. What does this do for your confidence?

Yeah, I mean I was doubtful about whether I wanted to continue, if it was going to continue in this vein. I think it makes you think everyone's good when not when it's not working out. Everyone's got ideas about what you need to do and what you're not doing. So I actually took a beat. It obviously does hurt. I mean, Jesus, my music is made of emotion. Music is made of emotion.

This is.

The deepest part of me. I'm showing everyone there's nowhere to hide. And it was grim. So I thought, christ, I can't do this for a living. I need to find something else to do. If if this is the way it's just going to go. So yeah, it had a huge effect and I wanted to pause from being with my manager. I wanted to pause from everything. I took some time out after the year Ideal, just to reconfigure myself and work out what it was I was doing and why, because it seemed like I didn't know anymore. I'd lost all that youthful momentum and now I was in a completely different reality.

Okay, and what was the next step forward?

Yeah? Well it was this record we made at Homes.

A little bit slower, just just to start. The manager who you had ight with, was that the same manager from day one?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so Rob, Rob Holden, we kind of got back together. I had to say. I took a little hiatus from everything and kind of got back to Oh okay.

Wait, wait you're you You're on your hiatus? What do you living on?

Just very Fortunately, an Irish singer called Mary Black covered some of my songs, albeit without my consent, for her album, some of my new songs. A demo I'd made while I was on EMI had got into the hands of a producer who was a big fan of my music, and she covered a whole load of my stuff. So I had this Suddenly at the MCPS came through from her album being pressed up, and I had a little bit of money to live on. My wife at this point had started working as a solicitor. She was actually the main breadwinner. So that was the reality at the time. It was kind of we were making it up as well.

Go along. How did you meet your wife?

I met her when I moved to London. I got a room in the squat that was her best friend's squat in South London, in the Elephant and Castle, and I then met her. I met her on the day of the general election April the ninth, nineteen ninety two. I called it the death of the British imagination. I stayed up all night to watch the horrifying reality of the Tories getting in yet another time. So and I called it the death of the British imagination. So we had a common ground and that we were utterly disgusted with our conservative country. Little did we know how worse it was going to get. So yeah, we's that was a sort of early bonding thing. So that's when I met a day of the election April the ninth, nineteen ninety two.

Okay, this is when your career is on the up, When your career is on the down, is she supportive? Or is she saying, maybe you need to get a day job. What is her reaction to you, and what's your relationship like.

Yeah, at what stage, like when things weren't going well in my early career.

No, no, after it ended with them, I.

Oh well, I mean it was just.

It.

She was supportive. Yeah, sure, if she could see when she met me, I was this. I was a person. I have a I have a mission. It's not I need to be doing something. It's sort of non negotiable. It's a giant coping strategy. It's not something I have a choice over. I have to make things. So maybe I don't have to make music. Maybe I could make art, but I need to make something. I don't think I'm employable. So so she was supportive. Yeah, Well we didn't get to the point of total meltdown because life rode into the rescue or on a white steed. So a fairy tale ensued, whereby I made a record in my bedroom and okay, we're gonna get anyway.

We're going to get there right now. So you have the money from the Mary Black covers, you say, yeah, you were disconnected from the manager and then the manager reconnected. What happened there.

Yeah, yeah, I just said I need a break because I can't listen to your thoughts about what I need to do. I need to work out for myself what it is I'm doing. I don't need extra advice. I need to just everyone to shut up. I need to go away and do this. I don't know if I want to do it anymore. Let's just take a break. When he said, very reluctantly, he said, okay. So after a break, I sort of fooled around, looked for a few different ways of doing it, scouted about, and then I began to make White Ladder. And once I was making that, it was he that introduced Yestin Poulsen, who was the guy who would become the producer of that record. It was co produced with me and the drama Clune. But yes, it made the massive difference to the sound of it all. He knew what he was doing. So we made this kind of bedroom recording together. So and that was us coming back online. And then, as I say, no one wanted to put the record out. We couldn't get any takers, so we put it out ourselves and is history.

Okay, bye, by way, you're making the record. To what degree is this record informed by your previous three records? And to what degree is this a clean sleep? You know you took some time off. You don't need any more business advice when you start to write and make this record. What is the inspiration and what is different or the same from what you've done previously.

Well, there's so much that was different because it was made in my bedroom, so we didn't have any equipment. We're using a computer and a drum machine and a little you know, zip drive or hard drive or jazz drive and an ADAP to record the actual physical sound if you like. So what it gave me working over sort of drum machine rhythms that was programming in because it gave me a freedom to perform over them. I'd never really used clicks or anything like that. I'd always just wanted to go free, but it actually freed me up. So that was an important creative development. And there was also the sort of intimacy of your own personal space and the times of day when you can just work when there's no one around and there's no sound, and it led to a more intimate relationship with the vocal mic and the guitar mic it just brought me in as opposed to being a sort of arm's length kind of style recording in a big POSH studio which could be a car showroom or something, this was like my own little space. So I think those were important things that that definitely was a significant change. What was in terms of what the record was based on. I have to say bother and I've talked about this ad infinitum, ad nauseum over many many years. I can give you in a nutshell, I think it was definitely a back against the wall. That the principles of how I wrote a song remained the same, but this was a back against the war moment. I'd been through this thing. One thing. I was determined I was going to make a record that from start to finish would be identifiable, coherent, interrelated, and flowing from the first note to the last. That was the objective. We started to use electronic sound. I was itching to get sound into the music, and so it was going to be this kind of hybrid form. And I was also determined to not just give up with everything and blame the music industry, blame journalists, blame whatever the hell I wanted to. I thought, I can do a better record. I haven't made the record I could make. I need to make the best possible record I can. So it's a kind of heart on sleeve record it had. I wasn't shy of melody. I never shy away from melody, but I didn't shy away from melody or open hearted sentiment. So I didn't. I'd recovered enough that I didn't retract into sort of bitterness or hide myself behind some sort of opaque shell. I let everything show. It was a greater act of vulnerability and share, and that was what the record's power was ultimately. But the process, the principle of how I wrote and how I did things, was largely the same as the way I'd always done it. I just did it under different conditions and definitely with a different mindset. And I also involved other people in a way that I never had up until then. I just wrote songs and other people played on them or helped press record while we did that. This was like involving people from the ground up and how it sounded, what it might sound like, how we might make a record, and far from actually diluting the effect of what my music might be, how personal it was, how its identity might be it actually strengthened it because they brought their strengths and wisdom and energy and sense of fun, and it lightened the music and it made it much more effective.

Okay, in the US, living in the West Coast, you know, public radio started to blow Babylon. It looked like an instant's success. But the record had been out for over a year in the UK. Yeah, so you put out the record, you have the best perspective. Was it a constant uphill trend or what was it like when the record came out.

Yeah, it was a lot of hard work, but I mean it was absolutely amazing in Ireland by the end of nineteen nineteen, and we released it in nineteen November ninety eight, was actually released in Ireland on our own label. By the end of December nineteen ninety nine, it was seven times platinum, so we'd also released it in the UK at that stage, but on our own label. So by the time Warners got involved at the beginning of two thousand, I think we made this maybe sold twenty five thousand copies in the UK. In America and ato the record came out, we signed the contract at a big concert in Ireland at the end of nineteen ninety nine and the record came out in early two thousand, so by that point we were almost i'd say, eighteen months into working the record. But what was amazing was it just the record had a magic charm. It just connected connected and people would pass it around and every show we could feel the vibes that we could feel them in Ireland, and by this point we felt we've got something. This record has a magic. We just need to get out behind it and it's going to translate. So that's what it felt.

It was.

The whole ascent to the top was absolutely incredible. It was a thrilling, thrilling two years once we got to the top. So by the sort of towards the end of two thousand, when it had been a you know, a hit in America, hit in the UK, hit in Australia, New Zealand and everything became a bit of a blur. But the climb up was absolutely incredible and the view from the top was unforgettable. From that point it becomes a bit of a blur. The shows get bigger, they're always old out, everyone's your friend, you're having the best time you've ever had. And there you go.

Why ATO as opposed to another label in America? Were there even any other authors?

But we didn't even ask around. I mean it felt like a perfect fit. We already believed in that you didn't need a load of people or a load of money, You just needed the right people working in the right way. So Michael McDonald and Chris Tetseli that was ATO Records. We had no one IHT Records was me and my manager. So it was like, so what Obviously Dave Matthews was a big influential character, a great supporter to have, and not only that, he had fans and people's street teams, people who'd leaflet for you, put the word out for you. We had something concrete. Well, they basically said to me was we'll work your airstaff. And they were good to that. They fucking crucified me. I did six tours on record, so you know, they said, we'll send you out and will they do it the old way? They were old school, but I like the lack of bullshit, so yeah, that's the way it's going to be. So we signed up for that. Years of suffering.

So at this point, twenty five years later, are you sick of White Ladder.

No, but there's certainly been points where I have been No. I think it's great. I mean playing the anniversary tour was an unexpected thrill. I think, coming as it did after the COVID shut down, it gave it this kind of crazy energy. It was a record that really connected with people. People love that record. They feel so strong. I love it. I love it too, but I wanted to distance myself from it when it was all I was was the White Ladder guy, because it becomes suffocating. I'm not I'm an artist. If you listen to my new record, it's as good as White Ladder. I'm not saying it's as perfect as a commercial form, or that it's ever going to get the breaks got That was the right record at the right time, But it's the dip in quality hasn't happened. I'm still going. I'm still pushing, experimenting, reaching out, branching out. So I'm looking for new ground, new ways of saying things, freshening things up. So so it's it's It's a record I'm hugely proud of. I think it's great. I love its economy of means. We didn't have any stuff. So we just it's just very simple really. But what we did, we did well. So you know, if we bring the claps in and please forgive me. You know, I remember the Chemical brother saying to me, yeah, it's amazing you kept the claps back right to the end. I'm like, yeah, because we haven't got it an we haven't gotten it enough to bring in put the claps in. It's like so it was. It was an exercise in minimalism, which to a certain extent is still the way that I think about making music. If the vocal or the main rhythm instrument and the rhythm or if that can uphold the song for a long period of time, then you can bring other things in and really make an effect.

Okay, forgetting the anniversary tour, to what degree are you feeling an obligation to play songs from White Ladder on a tour?

Well, I mean the way I have subdivided my touring now is that like on this tour, I've told people you can expect to hear the songs you love to hear. They'll be mixed in with new songs, and not just songs from White Ladder, but songs from all those old albums. This is going to be a really, really deep dive, and you also hear a few unexpected cover versions. It's going to be a highly energized tapestry of stuff. But you'll definitely hear sail Away Babylon, Please Forgive Me, etc. The one I Love You Know, Blah blah blah. You'll hear these songs. I'm not pretending. But on other when I toured Skeleg, I said to the audience, you're only gonna hear Skeleg. If you buy tickets for this concert, you're not going to hear anything except this. And when I did the Century Ends tour, the tour of my first album first two albums earlier last year, I said the same thing, that I'm just going to play the two first albums and that's all I'm playing. And it's very, very liberating, and I enjoyed them absolutely enormously those tours because I was not obliged to play anything, and I think it's a much more simple way of dividing Otherwise. Basically, every tour is a negotiation with the audience to get them to listen to something they're not maybe as familiar with, and that's if you cut your cloth too much in their favor. Excuse me, cut the cloth too much in their favor. You'll end up resenting them and not wanting to do it. I think I'd just be bored if I just felt I had to play those songs all the time. So for me, it's it's it's it's a constant negotiation. But I love those songs, so in this context, I'm going to enjoy playing them. They're going to be part of a much beer a picture.

Okay, when you did Skellig and you did the first two albums live, Todd Rungren has gone out many iterations and he's done the same things and I'm gonna play X. But there's still people who come thinking they're gonna hear the so called hits. When you said, because you know, we live in a world it's hard to get the message out and people are fit when you said I'm only going to do this stuff, did you find that that was the audience you got or do you still get people saying I want to hear White Ladder.

There was a few heckles. What you're really dealing with there is secondary ticketing, so people reselling their tickets and they'll just say David Gray tickets tonight, you know, and that they won't have all the info in it, that of what it is, and that's what happens. None of the fans who bought tickets will be in any doubt as to what's about to happen. But you get the odd person who's out with their girlfriend or you know, their mates, and they say, oh, let's go and see Davi Grant and then they want to hear Babylon. It's like you know with Babylon, So that happens every now and again. Yeah, you can't stamp that, but it actually worked for the rest of the time. The skellic thing that that happened didn't happen at all. I mean people were completely in on it. I didn't get any heckles.

Okay, you have this huge success with White Ladder, you go to pick another record. To what degree do you feel the pressure and to what degree do you say I should replicate the previous formula, make it in my bedroom of this stripe, although now I have all the money to do it the old way. What was it like.

Or just to return to the theme of self consciousness, we'd gone from very innocently making something for nothing, having no idea that it was going to succeed whatsoever. That would have been a preposterous thought to suddenly being in the reverse. You know, we were underdogs. We became fain it, and we had a huge budget and a load of people chomping at the bit to sell millions of these things. Not only that, I you know, we just had a child and that was a kind of traumatic experience that went horribly wrong. My father had just died, So I came back from tour. I had a dead father and a new baby and wife who'd been very ill, and that was my reality. I was also suddenly famous. I had money starting to come into my whole life felt like it belonged to somebody else. So it was. It was. It was tricky, you know, to find a way to connect to the music without thinking about it too much. So certainly for at least one record a new day at midnight, I think it was impossible to feel normal about anything or find a comfortable way of doing things. Everything was odd. So and I'm not the kind of guy who like, you know, hey, yeah, check out my new ferrari and my girlfriend. You know, I'm drinking the best tequila man can buy you know, whatever, you know, Let's have fun, Let's make a record, Let's go to the Bahamas. I'm not that person. I take it all very seriously and too seriously sometimes maybe so I was wearing it and trying to wear it in a way. Anyway. It was surrendous. I didn't enjoy that period. I was suffering. It was a bit like being John Malkovich. I was sort of looking at someone else's eyes, so but trying my best to connect and do the things. And there was a lot of pain in there, and there's a lot of weirdness because I just suddenly was in this other reality. But I think by the time of life in slow Motion the next record, I took some time to rEFInd my way into music and that rescued me. So we made a huge amount of music. I bought a studio and we just basically embedded ourselves there. The band are on retainers at this point, and we just recorded and recorded and recorded and had a way of a time just coming up with things and using a big studio. So that's basically, in a nutshell, how it sort of evolved from that white ladder moment of innocence through the sort of completely debilitating fame and oddness and self consciousness to refinding my way back to music and honesty and naturalness. It took a few years, to say the least, and I think it took a lot longer than that for me to come to terms with what had happened.

If I said to you, I want you to write a hit song, would you say, I don't know what a hit song is. I don't want to write a hit song. I could write what I think is a hit, but I'm not sure. Or do you just say I just do what I do? Who the hell knows?

Yeah, I don't genuinely don't really know what a hit song is, and I don't even know what a hit looks like anymore from my point of view. So you know, I've got probably the most commercial song I've written in many years, in plus and minus on the new record, which has received a certain amount of airplay over here. I have no idea how it's doing in America, but that's as close as I'm going to get to a single. I don't go seeking them. But if something comes along and I think, oh this, you know, this is like a three minute pop song, It's not that I throw it out. I won't neglect it. I'll try and make it work. I love three minute pop songs, so you know, the point is having some depth to everything. It's just it's not enough just to satisfy. I don't know. Commercial lusts for success and numbers. That's not what motivates me. But when we were making White Ladder, I was also involved in a movie called This Year's Love and the director was a big fan, and he said, Dave, you know, i'd like you to write the title song of the film. And I said, but that's not really what I do. I mean, I said, if I just write what occurs to me, I don't look for a project or like. But then I went away and I thought, Jesus, I'm in the complete commercial wilderness. This is a guy who's making a movie. He's a big fan. He's asked me to write, so why don't I at least try? And I went home and I literally wrote This Year's Love that afternoon, and I sent him a cassette of it and said, this is what I've written. What do you think? He said, I love it. In the end, the movie came out. V two bought the movie rights and the song was removed from the movie. It was only played on a transistor radio in the back of a scene. But that's another story. But you know, and that's ended up being my most streamed song, So it's it's I don't necessarily fear doing something with a commercial sort of reason behind it. If only life was so predictable that there was sort of some kind of integrity ometer that you could apply to things. I don't believe in that fantasy stuff. I think that life's generally are compromise and lots of different things. But I think it's more the way that you make something and what you give to it, how you bring this brushstrokes to life that really matters. So yes, if you asked me to write a song, it'd have to depend who you were and what the context was. I'd probably ignore you, but it's possible I would take you seriously.

At this point in time, you have the best viewpoint. You know, Where can you tour? Where are you successful? Obviously Ireland is a hotbed to what do we the UK, the US, the continent, anywhere else where are your fans?

Yeah, they're all over the place, and obviously mainly English speaking countries, Ireland, UK, Canada, America, North America, you know, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. But you know, there were certain points where I did have fans. I can see on the streaming numbers when streaming started that, Wow, there's a lot of people listening in Santiago, Chile, and there's quite a lot of people listening in Mexico City, and there's people listening here and there and everywhere. And I've obviously got fans in Germany. The problem is when you engineer a tour, you're looking at your best markets and do the best show for those markets. And then if you basically go and tour around Southern Europe, as much as it will be beautiful and the food will be great, you know, you canie a shitload of money because you're not selling enough tickets there to sustain the crew, the band and all the stuff you've got with you. So it's like you just need to cut your class accordingly. So I think if I do another acoustic tour, I'm going to try and get to some of the places I've never been, you know, like South America and Central America and the places I haven't been for a long time, like the southern Europe, Italy, Spain, et cetera. Paris, places like that will playing smaller venues and it won't be such a big deal. So you know, that's that's what my fan base looks like. It's all over the world, but it's mainly in those English speaking countries.

Okay, you talk about playing some covers on this tour. You know you have a White Ladder live album where you cover some Bowie songs Tainted Love. You know, how did you choose those and what kind of covers might someone expect.

I wouldn't want to talk about it because it's going to be a surprise so in terms of what we're going to do next, but it was a huge pleasure to play the well. Obviously, say Hello Wave Goodbye is a soft cell song. So on the White Ladder tour, I got Mark Alman to come out and sing with me, and we surprised him by having prepared a version of Tainted Love. I think it was absolutely horrified, to be honest, but he's a good sport and he stepped up and he did it and the crowd went absolutely crazy. So we kind of fired off the back of that. Say Hello Wave Goodbye would end the White Ladder set, we'd come back out and do Tainted Love, another Soft Cell song or famous made famous by soft Cell. It's not written by them, of course. And then the Bowie story was part of the history of White Ladder and the very this big long story about my dad being sick and us playing at Glastonbury and meeting Bowie, and I tell the story, and then we play life on Mars into Oh you pretty things. I mean, those songs were amazing. Just getting to play those songs was so exciting. People were just blown away by that, you know, to hear someone really do a good version of that. So yeah, that's in terms of if I was going to record a cover and use it on a record, that would be a much more delicate matter. But live, I'm just what I want to do on this tour is use covers to bring the energy up without having to play a Babylon card or a big song card, so to unexpectedly surprise people and just suddenly disarm them. So that I'm buying space really for the intimacy I need for some of the more low key stuff. So I'm going to use short bursts of very famous songs to energize people and hopefully thought provoked them a little bit.

Now you mentioned the Chemical Brothers, you mentioned Mark Alman. Are you someone who knows everybody in the rock and roll high school or use somebody as more isolated.

Totally isolated? Yeah, totally said. I don't know anyone.

I don't.

The celebrity village was a mystery to me. I couldn't really make head nor tail of what the ground rules were supposed to be. So whatever it is the gift of getting to, you know, make making people feel at ease, I don't seem to have it in that capacity. So my friendship group is basically the people I make music with, put music out with, and the people I knew before I became famous. It's my wife's friends who are very dear friends of mine. That's those are the people I see. I don't have famous friends, per se. I know a few people, of course, you know, Jesus, there's a lot of nice people out there that I've met and sort of become friendly with, But that's not my gig. Now I'm much more isolated, I think, unhealthily so. In some ways I feel that that the artists need the community of artists to support them and with whatever it is. I don't know why I've evolved a certain ways. It's complicated without getting to some kind of deep Freudian shit. I think that that's just the way I am.

And you know there's that blind in the Joe Walls song. You know, everybody's so different and I haven't changed. To what degree do people treat you differently now that you're famous or you know, your recognizable character? To what degree is that inhibiting?

Yeah? I think it's died down to such an extent that it's not really a big deal. Two things have happened. I mean, you know, I've got used to it. And also people don't give a shit about me anymore, you know, So it's it's might I live a completely pretty normal life. I don't I go out, I wander around. I can go to a restaurant without everyone standing and looking at me. You know. I was in a I know Ricky Gervais from he's a fellow resident in Hampstead where I used to live. I used to see him out and about, and of course he's always got the shades on. And I remember being in the pub and we were just sitting there as a family having lunch and he came in with his wife. It was obviously an impromptu thing. Place was packed, and they kind of went, oh my god, we better sort Ricky at, We better sort Ricky at. And they gave him this. It was like right in the middle, and everyone was just looking at him, and I just felt so uncomfortable for him, and he just got up and left. After a certain amount of time, they started placing an order and he went and they just went. And I thought, yeah, my god, you know, what's it like being whatever you think of these people, Harry and Megan or Brad Pitt or something. You walk into a room and everybody it's like it's all about you. Jesus. Sounds horrendous. So yeah, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff. I don't got no high grade sort of scrutiny going on. Of course, I live a life that's in the public eye. Occasionally get stupid stories in the press or whatever. It's the usual carry on, but it's not something that inhibits my life. I do exactly what I want to go to the beach when I'm up in Norfolk, I go for swear, I do whatever I want to go to the pub for a pint. I don't give a shit. I just do what I want to do. I go to you know, it doesn't there's there's nothing happening. I don't see what's happening behind me. I might be walking down the high street and they go, oh, I was David gra Occasionally someone will bellow, some drunk will bellow out to me, but you know, it's pretty low key.

Now.

I'm not very I'm not really very famous anymore.

Well, that may be your perspective that a lot of us feel differently. In any event, David, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me in my audience. You've made a lot of very perceptive, insightful comments certainly rooted me. So I want to thank you again and wish you luck with a new album.

Thank you very much, Bob. And this is maybe the longest interview I've ever done. I had no idea it was going to be so epic. If Concord was still running, someone could have flown to New York in the time we've had this. Yeah, I wish you all the best, happy and healthy New Year, Bobs. And if you're in Los Angeles, Yeah, I hope that the fire the fire has died down real soon, so I'm sorry for you all the suffering that's over there, and let's talk.

The winds died down in any event. Next time, this is Bob left Sex

The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

Bob Lefsetz is the author of “The Lefsetz Letter.” Listen to his new podcast where he'll address the 
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