‘White Ladder’ (1998) was recorded in David Gray’s London flat. Self-financed and self-released, it initially failed to make any impression and sunk like a stone. In today’s music industry, that cares so much for instant success and so little for genuine quality and emotion, that would have been that. This gem of an album would have been lost…
But, after its re-release…slowly…the majesty of the songs and the vulnerability of their delivery started to find an audience. I, for one.
It made such an impression that, the album now, twenty years later, provides something of a musical ladder back to my own past.
Today ‘White Ladder’ is considered a seminal album of English folk singer-songwriting, influencing a generation of artists. For instance, I can see much of Gray’s raw emotion in the young Ben Howard (see a fantastic performance of ‘End of the Affair’ on Jools Holland). But this letter belongs to David Gray and the album that contains so many memories for me.
