Less black in Gray album

David Gray is embracing the lighter side of life.

It's been a time of painful change for singer, writes Paula Yeoman.

David Gray is embracing the lighter side of life. David Gray couldn't be happier with his new album, Mutineers. You can hear it in his voice. The British singer-songwriter has never been afraid to say exactly what he thinks, so he's hardly going to start waxing lyrical for no reason at this stage in his 20-odd-year career.

"There's a frisson to this record; a crackle of excitement. The songs have an authority about them, an immediacy and a rightness. So, yeah, it has ticked all my boxes. I haven't had such a good reaction from friends and family in many a long year, so it's getting a big thumbs-up from the Gray camp, too."

When the singer talks about change, he's referring to the optimism that runs through Mutineers. Fans who have followed his work before he climbed that great White Ladder to success and scored one of Britain's biggest-selling albums of the 2000s will know his tendency towards the melancholy. So they'll also know it's a big deal for Gray to be looking on the bright side of life.

"I was just at the end, not just of a record cycle with Draw the Line and Foundling, but at the end of an era. I felt like I'd exhausted my ideas and myself in the process," he says candidly.

"I knew I couldn't carry on with that. I was bored of feeling jaded and didn't just want to write a few sombre songs with some dingy lyrics, I wanted to say 'hallelujah'."

To do that Gray says he had to "let the wrecking ball in to knock everything down" and was very clear with his producer Andy Barlow that he didn't want to make a carbon-copy "David Gray" record. That sounds simple on paper, but Gray admits it was a difficult, sometimes painful, process.

"With that extreme vulnerability that comes with opening yourself up to such sweeping change; in that moment of surrender, there's great power to reconnect," he says.

"But there is just something extra in this [Mutineers] because I was throwing myself wide open to things and ideas. And it hurt."

David Gray's Mutineers is out now.