We’ve been fans of David Gray since 1998 when his White Ladder album was first released. It became one of the best-selling British albums of recent decades, and established him as an arena-filling artist. He’s just announced the release of his new album, Dear Life, on January 17, 2025 and shared the first single, “Plus & Minus.” The song deals with a fractured relationship and is a duet with fellow British singer-songwriter Talia Rae.
“Some unfinished songs just refuse to do the polite thing and go away,” Gray shared about the new song. “And that’s certainly true of this one, which had me going round in circles for nearly 20 years to the point where it almost drove me crazy. ‘Plus & Minus’ is based in part on a chord sequence that was born way back in 2004, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it has taken all those long, intervening years to fully resolve it. It’s an unusual sort of song for me to write in that it’s an out-and-out three minute pop song.”
“In a slightly ‘Babylon’ style, it revolves around the same idea three times. In ‘Babylon’, we had Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Here we have ‘You know the way desire is … You know the way the light is … You know the way that time is.’ I could see that from the word go. It’s so full of hooks both lyrically and melodically that it needed a tight arrangement to really optimise their value. This took a LOT of work to get right, but we got there in the end…even if the end was 20 years on from the beginning!”
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