David Gray at State Theatre (03 Feb 2025)
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Based on the crowd’s reaction inside the State Theatre, you would have never guessed it was a cold, Monday night in downtown Minneapolis. I guess David Gray has an effect on people.
Sierra Spirit opened the evening with a seven-song set. She is on her maiden voyage, opening the North American leg of Gray’s Past & Present tour. We got a chance to talk with her before her first show in Boston and she was pretty excited to play venues and visit cities she had been to before.
Spirit opened with “ghost” from her debut EP, coin toss, with a beautiful, airy voice backed by an electric guitar and heartbreaking lyrics dealing with painful themes.
Spirit grew up just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the songs on her EP are about growing up in that region as a member of the Otoe-Missouria tribe and the Keetoowah Band of Cherokees. As she told The Luna Collective: “I have a story to tell for these moments in my life and it’s a timeline for me being very honest about the plight of being an Indigenous person.”
“I have a question,” Spirit said to the crowd after “televangelic”. “Do you like Radiohead?” Which led to a plaintive, soulful cover of “Creep”. And then “American Pie” a cheery, first single from her next project, which is currently in the works.
The crowd was lively and welcoming to Spirit, and by the time David Gray took the stage, they had grown ecstatic, greeting him with a standing ovation and launching cat calls from the balcony.
Gray’s Past and Present tour is exactly that as he visited songs from his prior albums while supporting his latest, Dear Life.
Gray began his career as a traditional folk musician, but hit the musical jackpot when he added an electric sound to his fourth album, White Ladder, an album that is currently the 11th best-selling album since 2000 in the United Kingdom. Even more astonishing is the fact that he has the best-selling album in Ireland, ahead of native sons U2 and Christy Moore.
More than anything the Irish love a good story and that’s what Gray provides. In fact, one of his favorite activities is reading short stories with Raymond Carver and Alice Munro as his favorite. He even lifted Dear Life from a collection of Munro’s short stories. Maybe that’s how one can come up with lyrics like:
Lost chances, cold storms
Proppin' mountains up on matchsticks
Draggin' baskets full of bones
This is from “Nightblindness”, which he played along with the hits that brought fans to their feet for impromptu singalongs. He also did a rousing rendition of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” as well a fan favorite “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”, a Soft Cell cover that had lyrics from Morrison’s “Madame George” sprinkled in. (Gray is a big fan of Astral Weeks.)
Gray did not speak much between songs for he wanted to get in as much music as he could in the allotted time. He did set aside a moment to highlight two songs: “Last Boat to America” from A New Day at Midnight which is a tribute to his father and his passing and how the moment doesn’t fully hit you until much later; and “Sunlight on Water” a song from Dear Life, which was inspired on his first trip to the English coast after COVID restrictions were lifted. It’s a beautiful song that conveys what it must feel like to be in such an expanse after extended confinement. But there was a glitch, and they had to restart the song to which Gray joked, “You’re on the beach at Norfolk. This isn’t Netflix!”
Sierra Spirit
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David Gray at State Theatre (03 Feb 2025)
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dave ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ twitter.com |
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