"I want more of this. It's great. It brings a complete new set of possibilities," Gray told the News at the time.

Now that the bigger, bolder, more lush Life in Slow Motion is in stores and on the radio with the hit The One I Love, Gray laughs about his quote.

"It's good that you archive me because I didn't know I'd said that," he says from the countryside in England, where he had taken a break to celebrate his wife's 40th birthday (this interview was conducted last October before Gray had to postpone his concert).

But that was the intent, he agrees, and he followed through. The 2002 album A New Day at Midnight was rushed in the wake of the success of the home-recorded, multiplatinum White Ladder from three years earlier.

"While we were finishing it off I knew we hadn't gone far enough," Gray says. "It was written in the script that we'd stumble at that time. I don't know why. I think I was frustrated that we hadn't tried anything really different."

Gray, who is at the Lecture Hall at the Convention Center Monday night, famously recorded his albums at home without a producer.

It was a formula that worked, with the single Babylon launching White Ladder and bringing him international stardom.

"Whatever we did after White Ladder was going to be a nightmare. The psychology of the whole thing was just insane. Whether you decided to try to follow up your success or do something different, it was always going to be tough," he says.

This time around, "I knew we had to change our formula. You can't do the same trick again and again," Gray says. His lifelong disdain for the recording studio started to change.

"When I began making music I was threatened by the studio and by the idea of producers. I thought it was an alien environment and someone else would add their take to it and it would take something away rather than give something to it," Gray says.

Having the success he'd had, combined with learning more of how a studio works, suddenly gave Gray the urge to embrace the things he had previously dreaded.

"I really needed someone to challenge the way I was working. I suddenly see the whole thing the other way around - the studio is an incredible tool that I can't get enough of and I see a producer as someone who brings something to the party that you don't already have," Gray says.

To that end, he hooked up with producer Marius DeVries. DeVries had previously lent a hand on one track, Sail Away, on White Ladder, but it was hearing DeVries' work on Rufus Wainwright's Want One that hooked Gray.

"Wainwright's record was the key. The first track was one of the most audacious things I'd heard in a long time," Gray says. DeVries "is very versatile. He can do pop. He can do orchestration. He's got a lot of strings to his bow."

He also felt musically mature enough to handle doing more grand production and arrangements.

"You have to express what you've been given. And I've been given an opportunity - money, time, whatever, people - I needed to do something on a scale that made sense with what had happened to me. It's not a gratuitous attempt to be big."

Life in Slow Motion is a study in contrasts, with radical musical differences from song to song, including the Springsteen-like single The One I Love.

"The record hangs together convincingly for all the variety within it," Gray says.

It also marks a new manner of writing for him, as some songs, including From Here You Can Almost See the Sea, written through the eyes of a female.

"I found it very liberating to work that way," Gray says. "The previous record was so from the heart in places that I needed to find a more circuitous route to be comfortable with it."

He contributed that song and another to the film A Way of Life, a bleak look at life and poverty in Wales.

"The moment I read the script I connected with the place. I knew this utter lack of options and desperation of this post-industrial hell. It was set in Wales, where I spent a good portion of my life," he says.

Despite that, there's a streak of perseverance and faith that runs through Gray's work, from the early Hold On to Nothing to hits like Babylon and The One I Love.

"I guess that's how I feel. My world-weariness deepens by the hour, by the day, by the year, by every tedious political speech I listened to. But there's an optimistic thing in just making a song and singing it," he says.

"Yeah, I think that great things can happen out of the blue. I mean look what happened to White Ladder. That was astonishing. Nobody would have dared even imagine it. We really did start from nothing with that. I find it hard to glue my optimism together in some politically connected type of way. I find the left as frustrating as the right and that leaves you very few places to go.

"You discard the things that are unreliable or pie in the sky and try to make something worthwhile out of what you have left. That's definitely a theme that runs through my stuff all the time."

Mark Brown is the popular music critic. brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2674