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Young voice, old sounds
Ray LaMontagne channels the greats
BY MIKAEL WOOD

On record, Ray LaMontagne sounds about 300 years old, his parched, supple voice booming across the acoustic guitars and lightly brushed drums that fill Trouble (RCA), his fine debut. He sings about the same sort of emotional turmoil that thousands of his kind have before — "Trouble been doggin’ my soul since the day I was born," goes the opening, title track — but his voice, so shaded with meaning and hurt, gives that turmoil an almost philosophical edge. Like Al Green and Van Morrison before him, he embodies the pain in his songs so completely that he ends up transcending it right before your ears.

So it’s a little surprising when LaMontagne picks up the phone at his home in Maine and says "Hello" in a quiet voice that seems as if it couldn’t transcend a call-waiting beep. Here the singer sounds about 15 years old. The truth lies somewhere in between: LaMontagne, who plays the Paradise this Saturday, is a thirtysomething singer-songwriter who not long ago was working in a Lewiston shoe factory. One day, he decided to pursue music instead. Through a series of fortunate events, a demo ended up with a rep from a music-publishing company, and it signed the singer to a deal.

"About six months into signing with Chrysalis, they began talking about maybe making some quality demos of the new songs I’d been writing," he explains. "So that’s how I met Ethan." Ethan is producer Ethan Johns, the son of famed Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns and the guy partly responsible for the dusty warmth of Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, as well as records by Kings of Leon and Ben Kweller. "Ethan’s attitude once we had met and talked was, ‘Why make demos when we can use this time to make a proper record and worry about finding a home for it later?’ "

Shortly thereafter, that’s what they did over four weeks at Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles. Johns and LaMontagne spent two weeks "going through the material that I’d written and getting a plan of what songs were gonna be on the record and how we would arrange them. And then we spent seven days in the studio recording the record and another four or five days mixing and mastering and that kind of thing."

Trouble reflects that casual approach; much like Heartbreaker, it makes songs you know have been written with care and purpose sound as if they’d been made up on the spot in front of a single microphone. And the old-soul weariness of LaMontagne’s writing is well served by the freshness of the sound he and Johns got together. "You will shelter me, my love," he sings in "Shelter," "and I will shelter you." It’s a simple sentiment presented so simply, with just the slightest murmur from a five-piece string section, that it feels like a revelation.

"I did the same thing I always did," LaMontagne explains of the differences between recording Trouble and the homemade CDs he used to sell at shows in Maine. "That was something Ethan and I talked about in the beginning, the way he liked to work and the way I liked to work. Which was just, record it live; don’t separate anything or record a guitar track and then a vocal over it and all that baloney. And work with tape, rather than DAT or whatever that computer stuff is."

"To me, an artist’s ability to convey an emotion is the most beautiful gift," Johns says in RCA’s press material. "And I think people tend to get really caught up in the technical aspects of making things perfect, and they lose the immediacy of the intent."

"If it gets over three takes, then you start to spiral," LaMontagne agrees. "So we tried to get it in the first couple takes." He chuckles almost imperceptibly. "All except one, and I won’t tell you which. One of them was just days’ worth of struggle, Ethan and I fuming at each other, him walking one way and me walking the other, then coming back in an hour and saying, ‘Okay, we’ll try again.’ "

That low-pressure approach even extended to LaMontagne’s environment while he was in Los Angeles, the geographical and cultural opposite of Maine, and a world away from his wife and two children. "LA’s weird, but I had been there several times over the course of a year before that, so I was a little familiar with it. And another thing is that I always stay in the same room in the same hotel every time I go there, so that helps to be familiar with your surroundings a little bit." Which hotel? "It’s actually the Best Western on Franklin, right above the 101," he laughs. "When I’m there, that’s my home away from home."

Ray LaMontagne appears this Saturday, January 15, at the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, with Willy Mason; call (617) 228-6000.


Issue Date: January 14 - 20, 2005
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