He recently returned to his family in Wales from a video shoot in Los Angeles when he learned his father had fallen ill. The European trek was due to start at the end of February, and a spokesman said the dates will be rescheduled later in the year.

Gray returns to North America for his biggest tour yet on this side of the Pond. The 33-date run will see the much-lauded singer/songwriter and his band stopping in major venues, including Radio City Music Hall in New York City and the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. Gray is scheduled to perform two nights in San Francisco and Seattle.

This will be his fourth North American tour and the road work has definitely paid off. Gray’s last outing saw him play fewer dates and smaller venues. However, most of those shows sold out and helped generate a big buzz for the artist.

“I think Americans are skeptical of British bands who become hip and successful in the U.K. and think they’ve just got to zip over and do a couple of shows in San Francisco, L.A., New York and Chicago, and they’ll have cracked it over here. It doesn’t work like that,” Gray told Pollstar after he had a few of those sold-out shows under his belt last fall.

“No matter how good your record is, how hip it is, you’ve really got to come here and … shake hands, kiss babies … so I regard this as unfinished business.”

Since then his White Ladder album, which debuted in the States last spring, has gone platinum and a new single, “Please Forgive Me,” will be released to coincide with the tour.

White Ladder was first released in November 1998 in Ireland, and sparked an Irish love affair with the artist. The David Gray phenomenon eventually spread to the U.K., and then to the U.S. and Canada.

Although he has been touring the album for almost two years, his enthusiasm for playing live is undiminished and he knows there’s some milage left on White Ladder. “Obviously, under normal circumstances, I would never want to work a record this long,” he said. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”