Midway through David Gray’s sold-out performance at Radio City Music Hall, a first row Wall Street yuppie raises his plastic Budweiser bottle to the British singer, who had just launched into "Sail Away." The song’s introductory chords had excised a delighted squeal from the man’s wife wholly indicative — in tenor, pitch, and self-control — of the teeny bopper outfit she had stretched around her fifty-something figure for the exotic occasion of attending a “rock and roll show."

The man, like the great percentage of the audience, was a middle-aged executive who’d come to lounge in Radio City’s plush seats and sing his head off not only to "Sail Away," but to all the tunes on White Ladder, the elegantly fog-swept, self-financed record that brought Gray into the pop limelight in 2000.

That year, one of the cool things to do was to listen to David Gray. Dave Matthews said so, therefore it must have been. Presumably, the ramifications have pissed Gray off. "Babylon" blared out hulky SUVs blowing fossil fuels into the atmosphere, damaging the Ozone, and increasing the threat of global warming — cars driven by the trophy wives of wealthy bankers working hard making millions of dollars and exploiting third world countries. Apparently, the wounds have not yet healed.

“Hospital Food.” Gray has explained about the song on his recently released Life In Slow Motion, “is what we eat everyday. You get a lot of shit thrown on your plate and you eat it.” This gesture, this yuppie, could in some light easily be construed as another pill for Gray to swallow, easily consumable, benign in nature, and thus easily ignored or reciprocated in some superficial manner — a nod, a grin, perhaps a wink of the eye.

As it happens, though, David Gray is David Gray, and what he says instead is something along the lines of this: “ Yeah, it’s that one. I know there are a lot of wealthy bankers in the room tonight, taking a break from earning millions of dollars exploiting third world countries. So yeah, cheers. Enjoy your Budweiser.”

It should be said that there are, in fact, some hardcore David Gray fans in the building. There are, indeed, hardcore David Gray fans, a pleasant bunch who make one uneasy for the same reason that all people who treat slow songs like they’re fast songs make one uneasy: because they sing with such weird desperation and martyred expressions of existential panic.

One such fan slides into the unoccupied seat on my right midway through the set, an awkward teenager with a red spiral notebook for setlist information and a sign which reads “David, please play ‘Shine,’” who sings every song with pinpoint precision and tries desperately to convince us all to dance without drawing attention to the fact that he’s usurped the seat. Armed now with this decidedly non-commercial compatriot, we watch as the fun continues.

“You’re all such a bunch of Americans,” Gray says smiling, the last chords of his first set fading out. “Thank you and good night.” Off microphone he adds, “You bullshit motherfuckers.”

Most of this, particularly given the fact that it is delivered in a cool British accent, can come off as provocative, almost (_yes_) charming, if you can remember that Gray, in fact, is the man who crafted the beautifully downcast, begrudgingly optimistic body of his lyrical work.

Like Dylan, the quintessentially American songwriter who happens to be his idol, Gray’s almost hilarious lack of diplomacy seems to not only bolster his charm as a songwriter, but moreover, be the very foundation on which his songwriting is built. He picked up the guitar at 16 after hearing a Dylan record, and his first song was called “World of Lies.”

Like any staunch romantic easily wounded, Gray is utterly and helplessly committed to every role he decides to assume in his songs: the wounded lover, the tattered, sex-deprived ne’er-do-well, the disillusioned youth, the wino Shakespearean fool muttering “drunken gibberish, falling in and out of bars,” and, of course — like any good Dylan disciple — the passive-aggressive demagogue claiming he isn’t a demagogue, the man at war with apathy, but more viscerally at war with the great population of people he encounters who don’t feel things with the same degree of emotional intensity that he does.

In other words, Gray is an idealist and, as such, is constantly disappointed. The fact that these two truths are so plainly evident in his songwriting only serves in lending a level of endearment to the fact that he can be kind of a reactionary prick. What suave person, after all, could have written as ragged and beautiful a song about begging for sex as Gray nailed with “Debauchery” on his debut album A Century Ends, a portrait — in his own words — of"a kid howling at the moon"?

Tonight, Gray is playing his oldest role, the disarming rabble-rouser. “I feel like a monkey in a cage,” my friend says. She is a big Radiohead fan, and prone to this type of imagery. “Should we leave?”

I tell her to look at the funny side of it, that we love Radiohead and should be less sensitive to these types of things.

“David Gray is not Thom Yorke,” she says.

I tell her to pretend he’s George Michael. That works. Gray’s anti-American rant has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We laugh at ourselves, monkeys in cages on antibiotics, as Yorke would say, but also at Gray, the man who is playing music for the monkeys, chastising them, and pocketing their bananas. But it’s more than that, really.

Gray has aroused in me something awful, something I hadn’t felt since reading Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train when I was 16. Yow! I am, as Gray pointed out, an American and I am not easily offended. But patriotism, I suppose, is what he has made me feel. And feeling patriotic makes me feel Republican, and feeling Republican makes me feel a vast kind of self-loathing usually reserved for those exiting strip clubs at seven in the morning and vomiting in an alleyway trash can — which, as it happens, is imagery which wouldn’t be entirely out of place in a David Gray song. Bollocks! I think. What a vicious cycle! It’s right devious it is. Could he have planned it? And to be speaking in a British accent this way, internally and such.

He unleashes a diatribe, plays a haunting, romantic ballad which is at once tender and infuriated, and then unleashes another. It’s impressive.

The gangly kid with the “Shine” sign continues to sing as emphatically as before, but his face is plagued with a self-doubt that’s turned his expression slightly green. In the meantime, Gray plays a phenomenal show.

Gray is, in the end, a live performer, even if music isn’t the kind which tends to incites wide-scale freak-outs. Perhaps at Webster Hall, but not at Radio City, where one has a wide berth to stretch his arms, down his beers, and, for that matter, be held accountable for his dancing.

He plays his music with commitment, investment, and at times an almost insecure desperation, has a stunningly powerful, room-filling voice, a talented band, and is armed with an arsenal of beautiful songs whose emotional composite, in the end- whether he is conscious of this or not, speak specifically to the American experience, because most are tales of the idealist gone awry- battered, heartbroken, perhaps even a bit immoral, but maintaining the ultimate defiance of hope, and disgusted at himself because of it. Though the narrative changes- and, at times, as in Life In Slow Motion– dissolves into imagery, it’s not difficult to locate its protagonist, even when he isn’t present. He’s someone along the same lines of the archetypal “worried man” Marcus rooted out of The Band’s catalogue, save for the fact that Gray’s worried man has been disillusioned for so long that he’s found a kind of solace in it, a warm dark room dimly lit by the low flame of that hope, and, as a result, there’s a sweetness to his particular brand of melancholy. Ultimately, this is the appeal of Gray’s music, and, perhaps why those of us conscious enough tonight to realize we’re being insulted forgive him his offences. Gray thinks he knows his own protagonist, but in reality, he has no idea, because after all, he’s British. Ah, irony, unifying nations worldwide sincewell the beginning of nations. It’s what’s for dinner.

Bleakness wraps around the warm centers of his songs as thick, enveloping mist, and Life in Slow Motion follows suit, straying from personal narrative to hang imagery delicately from the branches of arrangements far more ornate than his previous work- a half-cycle away from a debut album which honed its sonic lens on a 16 year old malcontent playing his guitar in a closet. “The One I Love” is as pretty a song about bleeding to death as you’re ever likely to hear. “Lately”- an elegantly downtrodden piano ballad- is all coffee, cigarettes and 5 o clock shadow, swaying with the mystic soulfulness of an Astral Weeks outtake. “Aint No Love” crams his sprawling, prosy verses into musical pinholes, filtering the ramblings into one sweeping seven word chorus that takes all the time it needs, framing Gray’s lilting vocals within an ethereal choir. It’s one of the few moments on the record where the grandness pays dividends. For the first time in his career Gray sought an outside producer, and opted for Marius Devries-widely known for the grand, densely layered approach he employed in his work with Rufus Wainrght, Bjork, and David Bowie. “More is more is kind of his philosophy”, Gray admits, “mine has been the opposite, so it made for an interesting meeting”, and indeed, some of his touches seem more appropriate for an album of Christmas jingles, impeding on the authenticity of Gray’s songs. His heaviest touches, at the very least- the sweeping string sections, the strange chimes, the “na na na” section in “Disappearing World”- are the album’s most artificial. Yet, fortunately, the most valuable aspect Gray has retained from his Dylan infatuation is his sense of simplicity. He has a keen sense of melody, of sparseness, understands emotional immediacy of voice, and, like Dylan, his songs are so sturdy that they manage to withstand even his own molestation, weathering the imposition with the same sense of stubborn solidarity that Gray has withstood his grudging success in the universe of adult pop

For his encore tonight, Gray performs “Baltimore” — a song, he tells us “about a city going nowhere… like another city.” He also, somewhat ironically, orchestrates a sing-along version of “Babylon,” White Ladder’s most popular number. We sing.

“Rubbish!” Gray quips, laughing. “Pathetic!”

(“Bastard!”, my friend whispers in my ear.)

I arrive home at 12:30 and promptly write a caustic, typo-ridden e-mail to Gray’s label and publicist, both good-natured American folk who don’t deserve to be chastised. I too am a disappointed idealist, and can be a reactionary prick. I threaten to revoke the interview which, being American, I instead lazily concede to you here, because I like Gray and think he’s funny:

B: Were you conscious of leaving more narrative distance in this album than you have in the past, in terms of concentrating on imagery rather than story?

D: Well, I’m trying to connect with the listener at all times, but yes, to a certain extent. I employed sort of a film technique a lot on this record. That kind of came about by accident when I started working on the music for a film. That was how I got back into the writing process. I kind of read bits of the characters and wrote quite a lot of songs and carried on from there. It seemed to fit my purposes at this particular juncture.

I thought the last record I made was about as autobiographical as it can get. This time I was looking for a different way to get to the good stuff. So, I didn’t stick to it religiously, and I didn’t really do it as a deliberate thing, but I found myself working from the imagined perspective quite a lot — there’s a thin line between the sort of personal nature of songwriting and storytelling.

When you write you songs, from supposedly your perspective or from someone else’s, it’s always an act of imagination. You’re dipping into the same pool of imagery and memory and emotion. Whichever way you look at it, it’s all you in a sense, but this time there is a bit more of a distance between me and the listener perhaps than in some other records.

B: Where did "Ain’t No Love" come from? What was the process of writing that song?

D: That song is one that I wrote for the film. And the first song that I wrote for the film, was “From Here I Can Almost See the Sea” and within the next day or two I sat down and I wrote “Ain’t No Love.” They both just came along alarmingly quickly. It was quite giant to begin with. I had many, many verses, but only two of the original ones so far have been included. I also had tons of tons of backing vocal ideas for it.

So I suddenly started getting these kind of Brian Wilson-esque concepts of how I might develop it into a piece of music, I stripped out a lot of the words, and it just kind of disappeared into a work of backing vocals, and various instruments and various melody lines. That’s how it began as a song and eventually that didn’t yield as much fruit as I was hoping, so I kind of reeled that idea in, and then decided that it needed a last verse to close it. I sort of scratched my head a bit, then suddenly I remembered an image that I had tried to use in lots of songs of seeing rain drops drop, and that was the beginning of that, and the rest of it fell into place. And there it was.

B: Did you find these songs to be particularly malleable, in terms of being able to be presented as very grand and sweeping or in a very intimate context as well?

D: Yeah, I think they are quite versatile. They’ve got to stand up as songs at the end of the day. Some of them are very hard to present in a simple one man on guitar or piano kind of way. “Now and Always,” for example, is impossible to do that way because you need at least three components to work. It’s something latent within the ideas. I just set these big arrangements when “Slow Motion” was written, that’s another song that came out of nowhere that came really quickly, five lines in it or something. Not much of a jingle is it? “The One I Love," on the other hand, I could sense there were many possibilities to develop an arrangement for that song.

B: You’ve spoken about a continuity between the characters of “Alibi” and “Babylon”

D: Why am I drawing myself back to “Babylon”? (Laughs) What a fool. It’s a matter of 15 years in the music industry.

B: How do you see that character? How much of yourself do you see in that particular guy?

D: YeahWell, with "Babylon," the image and all.there’s probably a fair amount of me in that song. The point of it kind of was to sum up the position I was in at that particular point. Overcoming all the shit through the music, getting free of all that, and letting go of all the bad things that have happened and moving on.

But, there’s something about the imagery in “Alibi” that seems akin to that song. It’s got a nighttime sort of neon litI’m not clear what that song is about, but I see it through a pair of eyes that’s kinda stumbling around SoHo at about three o’clock in the morning when people are vomiting and drunk and generally in some kind of terrible way. Dresses and hairdos that looked quite impressive about six hours earlier have sort of unraveled.

It sort of shocks me a little bit, like a camera stumbling through the city after hours, and in that sense I can see it through a separate pair of eyes but more lightly and innocently than “Babylon” that you basically kept playing for the last ten years, and end up here in a place where you’re kidding yourself — you need an “Alibi” as to what the fuck you’re doing with your life and your fucking body.

B: You spoke before about juxtaposing a kind of downtrodden theme with lightness. Both those characters really seem to, as you say, be these tattered people but there is a basic optimism there as well. Do you consider yourself to be an optimist at heart?

D: I don’t like pretending that things are going to be alright, and I don’t like the culture of fake literal bullshit that good over bad will eventually prevail, I think that’s sort of nonsense. So, if you start there your worldview is limited in terms of positivity, but I just think it’s best to be realistic about the situation, whatever it is. I’m optimistic on a personal scale, but in terms of mankind, I couldn’t say that I’m greatly optimistic for all of the species.

I think that we are very bad advisors, very short sighted. We’re not governed by overriding compassionate principles, we are basically survivors and we are governed by needs of the little tiny choices that we make over the days, weeks, hours, years that we thought were sort of sensible personal decisions only in keeping with the way that our society works, which is part of this rising mass of ideas, and as a species we work in a sort of hand-to-mouth way.

What do we need now? What will make us feel good now? What do we need to turn this corner? Try to make the most of the problems you see in front of you, and try to change the little things that do make a difference. Bother to write that song, bother to write that letter, or make that phone call, or help that person across the road. And here making a difference, I think that it’s just hard to remember that cause today we are being swamped with a world view that is of absolutely no use to our daily lives whatsoever. Am I cheering you up yet?

B: No, not really, but I can’t say I disagree. On a somewhat lighter note, what was the motivation to move to an outside producer on this particular album, and also, what was the experience like working in a grand, full-scale studio as opposed to some of the roomier places you’ve recorded your other albums?

D: I was really ready for a change, and I knew from the last record we made that I really wanted to do things differently this time. And it was going to involve somebody. We needed somebody to change the dynamic, the way that we worked, and also I had stopped seeing outside the thread. I had started to embrace the medium and I needed people to help me get more edge.

People who had expertise like Marius [de Vries, producer] with arranging, orchestrating, and basically constructing things… I need their skill, and good judgment. I’m not the strength and focus and the producer type.

B: Both when you finish writing a song, or when you are listening to music from an appreciative prespective, what makes it stand up in your mind, or what makes it stick?

D: It’s got to be a good melody, something to trigger the imagination, both sonically and melodically. It has to take you somewhere and has to have a mystery about it. I mean, if you just listen to different music loudly you can hear a good tune when you hear one. I guess it comes down to the rhythm and the melody, that it’s a musical science, the science of music really that makes it a good song.

In terms of the writing of it, I can never go whole heart if the lyrics aren’t very good. A lot of people when they listen to music don’t really pay too much attention to the lyrics. They start listening from the rhythm up where I listen from the lyric down, so for me it would have toall good songs have an air of mystery about them cause there is an innocence to the way they were written which keeps them fresh.

B: At what point did you realize music was something you could create yourself?

D: As soon as I heard Bob Dylan doing it when I was about 13. From the point when I began to pick up the guitar I’d always enjoyed writing words — it was just a matter of putting the two together and I arrogantly assumed it would be a piece of cake, I never gave it a moment’s thought that I wouldn’t be able to write songs. But I guess it was when I put my first band together in Liverpool that I started to believe that there was something going on, people liked what we did — there was a reaction and from that point I thought, yeah, this is working.