Video premiere: David Gray's 'Back in the World'

As he prepared to make his new album, David Gray knew he needed a new start.

"I was at the end of myself," says the British singer-songwriter. "I realized I had to die and be reborn."

Gray's new single Back in the World, the video for which is premiering at USA TODAY, represents that new awakening.

"A key theme in the record is being present in the moment and the joyousness of being alive and making music," Gray says. "In order to write a song like that, you have to have not been feeling like that for a long time. It felt like a good opening statement."

The multiple-exposure Back in the World video was directed by Big TV's Monty Whitebloom. "The idea was to double-expose the thing," Gray says, "partly based on the images that I take, often, and put on my Instagram page. It's the world literally being, through double exposure, being inside of me, and I'm a silhouette singing the song. All of this imagery is flowing through me — traffic, trees, rivers."

Back in the World leads Gray's upcoming album Mutineers, out June 17. The title, he says, is about "tearing up the thing that I had.

"I was the captain of the ship, but I was also the mutinous crew. I had to throw myself overboard to make this record."

Gray sees the album, his first for Kobalt Label Services, as a turning point in his career: "If I look at my career, from where I started to just before White Ladder is one period. Then from White Ladder onward would be another. But when I came off the road in 2011, 2012, I felt like I was at the end of something. I knew all the things I didn't want, I just didn't know what I wanted. I was thirsty for something new. I was bored with myself, bored with my thoughts, even."

Working with Lamb's Andy Barlow as producer, Gray slowly found his way to a new sound. "It was a rare old tussle at times, but we continued to choose ways that were uncertain for me."

Some of that uncertainty involved the way Gray approached songwriting. "Rather than work with melody and chords then find the lyrics to go on top, I began to work backwards, with my own written words back into music," he says. "That doesn't sound very profound, but, for me, it was like wearing those prism glasses where everything's upside down and it's hard to take a step without feeling like you're going to fall over.

I sort of lost my bearings, but it made interesting things happen to my songwriting instincts. After a few successes, I began to see that choosing the not known over the known was a key to making progress. That principle continued in earnest in the studio, where my producer was encouraged to take me out of my comfort zone and help me make a record I hadn't made before.

"What you hear on the record is the moment of discovery. I was reaching and finding, and that was the moment we were taking the photograph."