Troubled Troubadour Ain’t the Blogging Type
By Andrew Clayman
Published in Knoxville Voice, November 2006
On the popular title track from his 2004 debut Trouble, singer/songwriter Ray LaMontagne proclaimed himself “saved by a woman” in a gruff but tender tenor, inspiring many critics to rank him among America’s finest new voices. Two years later, the reclusive, bearded New Englander sounds as if he’s had his heart broken by the same dame that saved him— and he’s made an even better album to deal with it.
“Core emotions,” LaMontagne explains via phone from Vancouver— the latest tour stop in support of his sophomore effort, Till the Sun Turns Black. “Core emotions are really where songs come from, for me anyway. Whether you’re reacting to someone else’s experience or you’re reacting to your own experience, that’s where they come from.”
Till the Sun Turns Black is the album LaMontagne needed to make in the wake of his first CD’s surprising mainstream success— which reached somewhat embarrassing heights this year when that prematurely grey-haired guy on American Idol gave “Trouble” the karaoke treatment. When it came time to return to the studio, the suits at Sony and RCA predictably encouraged LaMontagne to stick with what had worked the first time, but the levelheaded thirty-two year-old wisely avoided any notion of a formulaic follow-up.
“It was challenging in that I respect the fellas at RCA,” he says, his voice never straying from library volume. “That’s why I signed with them. So you have to take their input seriously and respect where they’re coming from. I mean, their job is a tough job. They have to sell records in a world that doesn’t really want to buy records anymore. I understand that. But for me, making a record is like making a painting. You don’t sit there and work on a painting with people looking over your shoulder telling you what colors to use. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Running with the painting analogy, Till the Sun Turns Black leaves out a lot of the happy little trees that dotted the landscape of Trouble. This time around, LaMontagne cuts deeper below the surface, swapping out old song titles like “Hold You In My Arms” and “Forever My Friend” for the far bleaker “Gone Away From Me,” “Lesson Learned,” and “Empty.” Similarly, the musical accompaniment is darker, more expansive, and a lot stringier than its predecessor, sparking as many comparisons to Nick Drake and Tim Buckley as the oft-mentioned Van Morrison (we’ll get to him later). Not merely mining the past, however, LaMontagne has also taken a considerable step closer to some of his own troubadourish contemporaries, including fellow beard-wearer Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Canadian folkster Ron Sexsmith.
“There was some discontent I was feeling with my first record,” he admits. “I knew that, the next time around, I wanted to try and do something that had a very different feel to it.”
As a part of that process, LaMontagne focused on establishing an absorbing, unifying mood—something present in many of the albums he had admired most throughout his own life.
“Veedon Fleece, for instance,” he says, naming the initially panned 1974 Van Morrison album that has since been hailed as a work of genius. “When I heard that record for the first time, I was just blown away by it. It just struck me as being one complete, beautiful piece of work.”
Though LaMontagne gladly acknowledges an admiration for much of Morrison’s music, he hedges at the rampant comparisons between himself and the Irish legend— most of which stem from their similarly husky, soul inspired singing styles.
“Van Morrison is a very, very, very different beast from me,” he reiterates, clearly wishing to dispel a particularly annoying myth. “I don’t aspire to be Van Morrison. I know that’s been written about quite a bit, but it’s really just an untruth.”
For an artist in the early stages of his success, LaMontagne seems quite sure of exactly what he is and is not, even if the media has had its problems figuring that out.
“It’s just impossible for people to know me,” he laments. “I have very few friends who really know me. So it’s frustrating when someone’s first impression of you, from a paper or magazine or whatever, comes from reading something that’s completely off the mark. But I guess it’s really out of my control, ultimately.” There is a brief pause. “Unless I started a blog. Which I’m not about to do.” LaMontagne chuckles as he says this, and it’s good to hear.
His obvious frustration is mostly a result of the media’s tendency to pigeonhole him or assign him a sort of personal folklore to fill in the gaps he isn’t willing to share—such as any details on his private life. Most stories about LaMontagne have focused on his days at a shoe factory in Maine, where, legend has it, he had an epiphany to become a musician after hearing Stephen Stills’ “Treetop Flyer” on the radio. It’s not a made-up story, but in repetition, it tends to paint the man more as an archetypal balladeer than a unique musician.
Even so, LaMontagne knows his best course of action is to avoid the distractions of success and focus on what got him there.
“Any level of success I’ve had, I have had because of my own hard work,” he says, with no hint of egotism. “There’s no money spent on promotion for my records, because it just doesn’t fit that format. So any level of success I’ve had is earned. For me, I feel like I got this far by writing the songs I wanted to write and by following my own instincts. So I’ll just continue to do that.”
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