It’s pronounced LA-mon-tain. You know this by now. You know a lot of things about Ray LaMontagne, the singer/songwriter with the backwoods soul and the raspy tenor, because such brilliant artisans, one way or another, find ways to rise above the pack. And the sensitive male singer/songwriter genre is one crowded pack, desperately in need of distinctiveness.
Luckily for Ray, he’s not heart-on-sleeve sensitive – he’s downright pained a lot of the time, and never less than riveting. You know, you’ve heard the voice and felt the songs. He hooked you with Trouble, his 2004 debut, purely with gravitas.
Not to mention a certain unpretentious humility.
“I’ve been surprised all along,” he declares. “I was surprised to be signed three years ago—that was a huge step for me. I was surprised to make a record before we even had a record deal—we felt really proud of it. I was surprised to get as much interest as we got; to find guys at RCA whom I have a lot of faith in. I feel like they’re very supportive and are a really good time. I’m just surprised that all of the shows over the past year have grown so steadily. I’m very pleased.”
Ray’s epiphany story is pretty well known by now: New Hampshire-born, he was working in a Lewiston, ME, shoe factory and living in a log cabin for a time with his wife and children. One morning he awoke to the strains of Stephen Stills’ “Treetop Flyer,” from Stills’ 1991 album “Stills Alone”–largely forgotten, but an obscure gem and a piece of buried rock treasure for rarities seekers.
From his songwriting efforts emerged Trouble, LaMontagne’s 2004 debut for RCA. Tender, but not really sweet, and fierce, but not destructive, songs like the hellish “Burn,” the heartaching “Jolene” and “Hannah” and the redemptive “Shelter” are models of quiet devastation—which is a hideously overused term for forced pity in the case of most artists, but for Ray is a glove fit.
LaMontagne has been on tour with little rest since Trouble’s buzz began to swell. He confesses that the touring life, despite its necessity in getting the word out, just isn’t for him. What’s been hardest, he said, is learning how to feed off an audience and yolk the energy being propelled back at him by willing crowd members. Just like the Stills epiphany catalyzed his own songwriting drive, it was a particular, watershed performance that he said epitomizes how he’s evolved as a live performer.
It happened this year, at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. It was LaMontagne’s second time there, and was indeed one of the best-reviewed sets of the entire festival.
“I really was having a rough day that day. I was in a very dark mood, in a very dark place, and I just didn’t want to expose it that day,” he recalled. “Honestly, before I got on stage it was bad, but after the first line of the first song, there were an estimated 6,000 or 7,000 people who just lost their minds. I don’t know what it was, but three or four songs in I just really felt loved—an amazing love from them. Just that many people, it was a very powerful moment and the energy was full circle like it should be, but is very rarely.”
“I don’t play a lot of festivals—I can count them on one hand,” he continues. “But Bonnaroo, really, it’s a standout and I don’t really know why that is. I definitely haven’t been as well received in other places. The constant touring has built this—it’s modest, and I’m at a modest place, but I’m pleased with it. The touring and the people.”
LaMontagne’s responses are measured; quietly intoned as if philosophical extrapolations. His rasp comes through in talking as much as in his songs, and speaking to the press and being asked to be a mind guide might not be his first choice, but he’s up for a good chat and some quiet, contemplative words. Those words seem tentative, and his sentences are short and self-affirming. The overall exudation is someone who is aware of his gifts and enamored of his craft, but still slightly wide-eyed and a little unsettled—startled, even–by all the praise and the attendant demands of being a buzzed-about musician.
“Learning to draw from the audience was a big lesson to learn,” he explained. “I would exhaust myself emotionally after two to four shows, and just wouldn’t do what the hell to do because I was so exhausted. Learning to draw from them and what they gave me…well, I was very antisocial for a very long time. I still battle with it sometimes. I’m getting much better.”
Adjusting to an irregular sleeping and eating schedule, and really, having no set schedule at all, was a “huge adjustment,” he said. Getting used to performing initially weighed on him, and his natural introversion.
“I take as much time as I can get for myself,” he says. “I need a half hour [before a show], just to be completely alone and breathe and tell myself it’s going to be alright. I’m just learning to warm up my voice, which is something I’ve never done, and I’m trying to take it a little easier on myself. I had a week of awful shows very early on last year when I blew my voice out, but after that, I think I’ve got it figured out.”
On tour, the Trouble songs have come to life, and LaMontagne reports positively on their development. He’s lacing his sets with newer compositions, now, confident in the Trouble tracks’ longevity.
“They were all so new,” he said. “But now they roam, and they’ve all evolved.”
“I still go back and forth with those things,” he says of the arrangements and setlists he uses. “It depends on how often I’ve been somewhere—how often I’ve tried A, B, or C. I’m just trying to keep it interesting for us and the audience, and it gets difficult, because you’re trying to play these songs from the record because people want to hear them, but you also want to move on desperately to new stuff.”
For strings of dates on his past two tours, LaMontagne added a string section to back him and touring bassist Chris Thomas. Several of the Trouble cuts incorporate strings, so bringing a whole section along some nights allows the full arrangements to be played, fleshing out the songs and revealing their full effects. Strings can be overpowering—an unfortunate overindulgence sometimes that corrupts and sentimentalizes instead of enhances—but they fit Ray because his voice is almost a counterweight: rough-edged, thus providing a shivering effect.
“When I can afford it, I like to do it. It’s usually when we’re in a town that has a string section that’s available,” LaMontagne explained. “The guys on the management side try to find working session players. When we’re in Austin, for example, we get [common David Byrne collaborators] the Tosca Strings. When we’re in L.A., we get the group from the record, who have traveled with us for a little bit.”
He doesn’t take easily to cover songs, though there’s much to suggest he’d be a protean interpreter were the opportunity to arise. It’s not his style, though.
“We threw in a Kinks tune, ‘So Tired,’ which we played a little differently,” LaMontagne said. “I don’t know, that was it. I few shows we tried that, and I got kind of bored. I didn’t and I don’t do it too much. I have the songs I love to sing, so I guess I just leave them alone.”
Ethan and I actually demoed a record last August, now I’ve got a whole new batch of things to get down, one more playful and one more painful.
LaMontagne remains on tour—he’s about to begin a spate of dates in Australia, and then head to the United Kingdom—and that’s where he’ll stay for the rest of the year. His next U.S. tour, which will feature him only, guitar and voice in hand, begins on November 30 in Portsmouth, NH.
At press time, a brief East Coast and Midwest jaunt sees LaMontagne holding court in such auspicious venues as Atlanta’s Tabernacle, Boston’s Berklee Performance Center, Minneapolis’ Pantages Theater, and New York’s Town Hall. Washington state-bred singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile, a devotee of Patsy Cline and a stylistic cousin to the melancholy folk of Leonard Cohen, is tapped as the opening act.
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“I’m looking at a record release for April,” LaMontagne said. “It might be a double album—one more playful, and one more painful. Which would please me, but the way certain aspects of the business are, well, it doesn’t often benefit an artist to do a double album. I don’t really know why that is, but you still have to make it work on a business level.”
“They just come when they want to come,” he says of his songs. “I just grab ‘em whenever they come around.”
In the meantime, LaMontagne says, he’ll take the great nights where he can get them, and not let the ravages of touring wear him down.
“It’s a very difficult lifestyle,” he confesses. “I think it’s because I’m a hardworking person, especially with my own project, and very focused on just how I’m surviving with the task at hand. It’s hard.”
“But then you have a night like Bonnaroo—or a night we had in Philadelphia a little while ago in a beautiful theater—that was just magical. Everything clicks, everything’s right, the audience is right, the room is right, the songs are right. It’s just amazing. It doesn’t happen every night, and those [nights] are what you’re there for.”
