Why songwriting makes David Gray emotional and other stories from his back catalog

In every musician's career, there are the songs that stand out among the rest. Perhaps it's a song that changed everything for them, the song they grew to love, or the song that was the hardest to write.

Those are the songs we want to learn more about on Backtracking, a new World Cafe feature. The premise is simple: We'll give artists a long list of prompts they can choose from. Then, they'll look back through their catalog and pick the song that fits best. They'll tell us the stories behind them and perform them live.

In our latest installment, David Gray joins us to talk about the song he has a complicated relationship with, the song that makes him cry, and why he loves songwriting so much.

"One of the wonderful things about it is how surprising it can be, when you find what's inside you that you didn't know was there," he says.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.