Mainer’s album earning high musical praise

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One morning, a decade ago, Ray LaMontagne woke up to his destiny.

LaMontagne, a singer-songwriter who spent part of his childhood in Maine, and until recently called the state home, is the odds-on favorite to be the Next Big Thing.

His debut album “Trouble,” released in September, has earned accolades from the likes of Rolling Stone and Esquire magazines and from singer-songwriter Elton John.

But in the early 1990s, at the age of 21, LaMontagne was in, by his own description, a dark place. He was working in a Lewiston shoe factory, rising at 4:30 a.m. each day and returning home in the dark.

It was not a life he embraced with gusto.

One morning, the clock radio came on and the song “Treetop Flyer” by Stephen Stills was playing. The sound of a masterful musician, expressing himself with a voice and an acoustic guitar, so moved LaMontagne that he bagged work that day and headed for a record store to track down the album.

He found it and then discovered the mother lode of singer-songwriters, records by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and The Band. Although he is a shy, introverted person, LaMontagne found himself drawn to performing and then to writing his own songs.

“They were terrible,” the 31-year-old songwriter recalled in a recent telephone interview. “I’d been playing a little bit, but I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.”

But the song writing got better and in 1999 he recorded 10 demo songs. That collection earned him a regular gig opening for folkies including Jonathan Edwards and John Gorka in a Lewiston area club.

When he sold his VW bus to buy a Martin acoustic guitar, LaMontagne knew he was committing to following his vision.

“It was a really sweet Volkswagen I’d customized with my uncle,” he said. “It was a thing of beauty.”

LaMontagne then started getting e-mail from a fan who invited him to perform at his company cookout in Portland. Among the guests were then-Gov. Angus King and Jamie Ceretta, a representative of Chrysalis Music Publishing. King gave LaMontagne tickets to a Willie Nelson concert and Ceretta gave him a ticket to fly to Los Angeles to record his first album.

He was paired with producer and musician Ethan Johns, the son of famed producer Glyn Johns who worked with the Rolling Stones and the Eagles.

“He’s got all his Dad’s old equipment,” LaMontagne said, and the album was recorded direct to tape, the old-fashioned way.

“Technology gets in the way,” he said, and it’s hard to argue with that view on hearing the uncluttered, warm, earthy sound achieved on “Trouble.” The record features acoustic guitar, bass and drums, with a backing vocal here and there and a string section that provides little flourishes on a few tracks, reminiscent of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.”

And then there’s the voice.

It’s sandpaper raspy, but so much so that it’s actually smooth as it slides up to hit the high notes. LaMontagne’s singing style ranges from full-tilt, Joe Cocker-like wailing to soft, soulful whispering. It would not be an exaggeration to say he could pick up a verse in the middle of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” without jarring a listener’s ears.

Some of the songs, such as the title track, are carried by the strength of his voice. Others show clever wordplay, such as “When you kissed my lips, with my mouth so full of questions,” from “Hold You In My Arms.”

“I’ve sort of figured out my natural tone,” LaMontagne said of his voice. “I know my limitations and my palette.”

A bidding war ensued for the completed album, and LaMontagne signed with RCA.

But the dark places of his past still seem to haunt him.

Biographical materials provided by his management state that LaMontagne, his wife and their two sons live in the Farmington area. After living in a remote cabin, the couple moved to a house in town so the children could be better cared for when LaMontagne was on the road.

Arrangements for a telephone interview at the Wilton home number were changed at the last moment to a cell phone number. Asked about his current life, LaMontagne confessed to having no place to call home. Pressed about his wife and children, he sadly said, “I’m kind of in limbo at the moment, my friend.”

LaMontagne had a childhood that was no picnic. His mother was a runaway who ended up bearing six children by various men. His own father was not in the picture.

“I’m just now sort of getting to know him,” he said. His father was a musician “of a sort,” playing blues harmonica in Nashville.

On her own, LaMontagne’s mother found shelter where she could – in cars, in tents, in a New Hampshire chicken coop and in a cinder block shell on a Tennessee horse ranch.

“It was all kinds of weird situations,” he said.

“Our life was so… it was always up in the air. There was no continuity. We weren’t grounded in any way,” he continued. “I was very, very lost as a young person. I was very self-destructive.”

By the time he reached high school, LaMontagne stopped attending classes and instead wandered the Maine woods. But as a senior going to school day and night he managed to graduate. The shoe factory seemed to be his future until the morning when Stephen Stills woke him from the clock radio.

Soft-spoken, as he spoke about his childhood, he talked – or rather didn’t talk – about his current family situation. He became animated when the conversation turned back to music.

His quest to absorb the best of what has come before continues. After reading all the comparisons of his sound to Van Morrison, LaMontagne decided to investigate the Irish soul singer, whom he had never heard. After devouring “Moondance” – “every song is a classic” – Morrison’s “Veedon Fleece” is his current favorite.

It’s not a stretch to think one of LaMontagne’s records may someday be keeping that kind of company.

“Trouble” made a lot of “best of 2004” lists and earned kudos from Rolling Stone, which wrote that LaMontagne’s voice sounded like “church, Van Morrison and dusty porches.”

Of that voice, Esquire wrote that it “carries the solemnity of a man with hellhounds on his trail.” The songs, the magazine continued, “are grand mansions built on crumbling foundations, haunting tunes that document the propensity for real love and deep depression to tap the same tear ducts.”

The magazine predicted that LaMontagne “seems poised to touch so many more of us. He’ll be a superstar all right …”

And then, just a few weeks ago, no less a rock luminary than Elton John said “Trouble” was “one of the best albums you’ll ever hear.”

Asked to account for the way his music is connecting with people, he said “I have no idea.”

But LaMontagne does seem to be onto something when he explained that melody, lyrics and voice are the hooks to catch an ear.

“I always thought if you can get them on all three points,” he said, “you’ll get them.”

A follow-up album is scheduled to be recorded in the fall, LaMontagne said, with Ethan Johns again at the helm.

“I’ve got another eight or 10 or so [songs],” he said. “I think this next record’s going to be a blast.”

LaMontagne has hired a bass player to accompany him on tour and Johns will play drums.

“I’m excited,” he said.

But the prospect of being a big star does not interest him.

“I’d rather be one of these independent guys,” he says. “I’m hoping for moderate success.”

That may not be LaMontagne’s destiny.

Tom Groening can be reached at 338-3034 and groening@midcoast.com.