Ray LaMontagne, Finding His Place

July 21, 2024

True story: Shy, reclusive fellow living in a one-room apartment is awakened one morning long before dawn's early light by his clock radio blaring Stephen Stills's "Treetop Flyer." The song so transfixes him that he skips work that day -- the assembly line at the local shoe factory rolls on without him -- to hunt the song and the album that contains it (1991's "Stills Alone"). Soon after, he trades in his vintage VW bus for a vintage Martin acoustic guitar, and, after a lengthy rummage in the attics and basements of American music, he emerges -- seemingly from nowhere and literally out of the deep, dark woods of Maine -- to find great acclaim for his 2004 soul-folk debut, "Trouble."

According to singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne, that 4 a.m. Lewiston epiphany has "taken on a life of its own -- it's my 'history.' "

History is not something LaMontagne, 33, feels particularly driven to discuss, at least not until it gets to the good part. After all, the early part includes an impoverished childhood with a single mother who had six children with various fathers and pursued a nomadic lifestyle across the country. Not surprisingly, by his late teens LaMontagne was himself something of a drifter, eventually settling in Maine and working as a carpenter before landing at the shoe factory. It was, he has said repeatedly, a dark time in his life.

But in the Stills of that night, LaMontagne found something lost years before. Or abandoned: His father, who'd taken off when LaMontagne was 5, was a musician, and the son had no desire to follow in his footsteps. Yet "as a young person, before I turned 10 or 11, I was drawn to instruments, whether it was piano or drums or whatever," LaMontagne recalled recently from a tour stop in support of his new album, "Till the Sun Turns Black" (he'll be at the 9:30 club Monday; the concert will be streamed live on NPR starting about 9 p.m. and archived for on-demand listening at http://www.npr.org/music). "But then, for one reason or another, it just kind of fell away to other things. I just didn't find much that I really connected to."

The family's itinerant lifestyle surely had something to do with that, and you get the feeling LaMontagne is a naturally introspective soul who prefers to keep his own company because it's the only one he has always been able to count on. "Treetop Flyer" transformed LaMontagne from a passive personality to a passionate explorer at vinyl-only Enterprise Records in nearby Portland, "a little hole-in-the-wall record store that was always playing something really interesting in the shop, and it felt like a yard sale."

"I lived for the chance to get back there and dig through the stacks, find something new, something that I hadn't heard -- whether it was another Stephen Stills record or Bob Dylan, Neil Young or the Band, Sonny Boy Williamson, Nina Simone, just a gazillion people, Etta James, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Leadbelly. I loved everything, and I lived for that time after work, putting on a record and having a sandwich or macaroni and cheese, whatever I could pull together at that time, and just listening to those records."

All that listening, six years' worth, would gradually lead to a second epiphany: "I felt like there was this little voice in the back of my head saying, 'I think there's something in there.' "

By then, he was married (he has two young children) and living in a small, isolated, self-built cabin with no electricity or running water. Writing his own music may have been a necessity, but, LaMontagne says, "I knew it was the next step; writing songs became a passion and I just kept doing it, and then it got to the point where I thought, 'I've got 15, 20, 25 songs, maybe I should try to play them for people and see what happens.' "

That step, he admits, "was tough and really frightening," particularly for someone who seldom even spoke to people and now had to sing to them. LaMontagne started in small coffee shops, "anywhere they let you play for 30 minutes and you get free coffee or free brownies -- or both!" he said. "And nobody wants you to be there -- I can see that looking back. If I want a cup of coffee and to read the paper, the last thing I want is to hear some [expletive] singer-songwriter sitting by the table singing some really sincere [expletive] to me."

So, if you were in Maine in the late '90s and stopped in some small town for a cup of coffee, that lanky, shaggy, denim-clad troubadour with the hushed sandpaper vocals, supple guitar strokes and melancholy songs of love, loss, desperation and redemption was in all likelihood Ray LaMontagne, or as the first two of three privately produced albums advertised, Raycharles LaMontagne (his given name, not a tribute).

"You have to believe in yourself before anybody else believes in you," he says of the albums that started others believing in him and eventually led to a publishing deal and a contract with RCA Records that assured him an uncommon degree of creative control. "Trouble," featuring mostly re-recorded versions of his last demo album, "Introducing Ray LaMontagne," was made in Los Angeles with producer/musician Ethan Johns (the Jayhawks, Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon).

By then, LaMontagne says, "I really felt like I was starting to home in on my own voice, and not just my singing voice -- I feel like I found that really quickly. You only have what you have -- your range, your natural tone, whatever -- and I found that pretty quickly. I'd always enjoyed writing, not songwriting, but short stories and this and that, journal writing. I'm an avid reader as well. Putting the two things together was tricky, but at the same time, in a weird way, it felt really natural. By the time 'Trouble' came around, I felt confident in music for myself, not necessarily what other people's opinions of it would be."

The singer says he and Johns had "a very frank conversation" about the album's prospects: "It was probably going to be really hard for me to find an audience. But I made it this far, and I'm just going to keep on plugging away, and hopefully sometime I'll be able to fill up Largo in L.A. and little places around the country that can get about 150 people. That was the goal, maybe sell 40 [to] 50 thousand records, and be happy with that. It felt like it was a realistic first goal, and I felt like I could achieve that."

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In fact, critics fell in love with "Trouble" -- the most frequent, and not far off base, comparisons were to Nick Drake, John Martyn, a "backwoods Van Morrison," Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and both Tim and Jeff Buckley; adult alternative stations and satellite radio embraced the album as well. LaMontagne's live shows, as emotionally exposed as the album, turned clubs into sanctuaries: In April, GQ listed "The Seduction of a Ray LaMontagne Concert" as one of the 25 sexiest places on the planet.

"That's funny," says the Great Seducer.

"Trouble" ended up selling more than 400,000 copies worldwide, fueled by the ecstatic title track in which LaMontagne soulfully insists, "Trouble been dogging my soul since the day I was born . . . / worry just will not seem to leave my mind alone . . . [but] I've been saved by a woman." A lot of folks heard the song for the first time in March, when eventual winner Taylor Hicks performed it on "American Idol." That show's first winner, Kelly Clarkson, sang another of the album highlights, "Shelter," on MTV during a Hurricane Katrina benefit and regularly includes it in her concerts. LaMontagne songs also have been used on such television series as "Rescue Me" and "ER."

"I really enjoy it when someone else sings one of my songs, whether it's Kelly Clarkson or someone in a bar," he admits. "Several times I've been in pubs around the country after shows and just happened to walk in on someone singing one of my songs, and, to me, that's the best. It means that something is working."

According to LaMontagne, such soulfulness was there "even on the first demos I made. It's just the way I sing. In order to get a note out, I have to dig deep, and I mean that on an emotional level. To physically sing, I have to get somewhere deep before I can do it. I can't dial it in is what I'm trying to say. It's just impossible, and I think that's what has translated live. I'm not saying this comparing me to anybody else, but I think I'm particularly good at it, for myself, for my own music."

The "Trouble" album mostly featured LaMontagne's vocals and acoustic guitar, subtly augmented by Johns's drum, bass, electric guitar and piano, as well as a string quintet on several tracks. "Till the Sun Turns Black" expands that chamber pop approach with the Stax-style soul belter "Three More Days" (with John Medeski on Wurlitzer) and the slinky, jazz-flavored "You Can Bring Me Flowers."

That LaMontagne's marriage reportedly crumbled between albums is evident in the dark, brooding lyrics of new songs such as "Lesson Learned," "Gone Away From Me" and "Empty" ("I never learned to count my blessings / I choose instead to dwell in my disasters"), somewhat tempered by more optimistic tracks "Be Here Now" and "Can I Stay." The songbook gets reenergized through what LaMontagne calls "a fantastic band": bassist Jen Condos, drummer Jay Belicose and guitarist Eric Heywood.

And the solitary man who lives in a secluded cabin in a remote area of Maine and has in the past performed in darkness, or with his back to the audience, seems comfortable on stage, even willing to express himself, should the occasion arise. That notion that he is antisocial is, LaMontagne insists, "a misconception."

"I don't say much on stage because I don't feel like I have to. I don't say much in my social life, either, unless I feel I have something to say. I think that makes people uncomfortable sometimes, but audiences have come to understand that. And if there's a night where we're all feeling really good and a little bit of chatting happens, hey, that's fun, too. But for me, it's just about the music."

Ray LaMontagne Monday at the 9:30 club

Unexpected "Crazy"-ness: LaMontagne has come up with perhaps the most splendid cover of Gnarls Barkley's ubiquitous "Crazy," an acoustic version commissioned by a British radio program. "I only sang the song once," he says, "but I felt at that moment that I could put myself into it." Widely available on the Internet, it comes as close as anyone has to matching Cee-Lo's masterful original.

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