RAY LAMONTAGNE “I’d rather sing than talk”
Brilliant but painfully shy singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne talks to Neil McCormick “I’m just trying to figure it out, like everybody,” says Ray LaMontagne softly, talking to the floor. “How to get through every day, how to have a healthy life, mentally, emotionally, how to be a good person, how to learn to give love in order to feel love. I’m trying to learn how to be happy. It hasn’t been an easy thing and I still haven’t got it. But I’m trying, I’m really trying.” Of all the artists I have ever watched or met, I have never come across anyone so ill-suited to the profession as Ray LaMontagne. He shuffles into the interview, eyes downcast, fiddling with his beard, and speaks so softly I fear the microphone won’t pick it up. “I’d much rather be playing songs than talking to people,” he says. It’s not an entirely convincing claim, because if anything his on-stage demeanour is even worse. With the knee-twisting posture of a nervous child, he looks as if he might expire with embarrassment. He sings beautiful songs of love and loss in a warm musical idiom of acoustic country soul, his voice ranging from a pained mumble to a soulful roar, like a cross between
John Martyn and Otis Redding. Ray LaMontagne at the Barbican, review 16 Feb 2009 Find creative inspiration at Brooklyn Art Library Barnebys It’s this quality of over-sensitivity that makes the American singersongwriter so special, conveying the impression that music is a matter of life and death to him. “You wouldn’t believe it if I went up there and faked it,” he says, “and I can’t, it’s impossible; I just fall into that place as soon as the melody starts. I think that’s why people have kept coming back, because it’s not dialled in. It’s an intense form of self-expression.” LaMontagne’s first album, Trouble, has been a slow-burning UK success, accruing sales of more than half a million since its release in 2004. Now he’s promoting his second album, Till The Sun Turns Black, though he is unlikely to be found listening to it himself. “I can’t get excited by my own music. It’s impossible. My voice sucks. I don’t like the tone.” LaMontagne hails from a poor, itinerant background, and has spoken before of an abusive father, resourceful mother, many
step-siblings, school bullying and sharing temporary living quarters with chickens. He discovered an affinity for music late (“Growing up, we didn’t own a stereo,” he says) and describes writing songs as a kind of compulsion. “I can’t make it happen - they come on their own terms.” It was the same compulsion that drove him to begin performing live in his mid-twenties. “A lot of gigs were in coffee shops, any place that would just let you play for doughnuts. It was awful. Most of the time no one wants to hear you, they want you to go away. I’d put the guitar down for months, and then I’d be drawn back to it and I’d go out again and it would be horrible, I’d feel depressed, dejected, but I guess my skin just kept getting a little thicker.” There is a meditative aspect to the new album, framed as it is by two zen-like mantras of self-acceptance, Be Here Now and Within You. “Sometimes I feel I’m just talking to myself. I’m not really trying to spread any kind of wisdom. We all have that inner voice that is wise, even if we don’t always follow it. It’s that voice I’m trying to listen to.” Yet the middle of the album is altogether thornier emotional territory, and includes, in Lesson Learned, one of the toughest songs about a disintegrating relationship you will ever hear. “The album moves inward,” is all LaMontagne (married with
children) chooses to reveal. “I know what I was going through when I wrote those songs and I can see myself shutting down and withdrawing.” On the desolate Empty, he sings: “Will I always feel this way? So empty, so estranged.” “I had a particularly deep depression. I had to work through it. Sometimes the last thing I want to do is get up and play, just the last thing, but it’s work and you have to work. I have bills to pay just like everybody.” LaMontagne discusses his career in the unromantic terms of making a living. He has a poor man’s genuine appreciation for the bottom line. Music has given him opportunities beyond anything he might have expected from his trade of carpentry, to which he seems more temperamentally inclined. He built a cabin in the New England wilderness, which he says he is “still picking away at”, along with a slow conversion of a run-down farmhouse. Yet often it is the hardest path that is the most rewarding. “At 33, I’m starting to feel OK, I am who I am and I can sort of see my life rolling out before me and I think I’m starting to figure it out in a way. I’m not a religious person but maybe it’s that creative God, whatever, pushing you in the right direction. This is gonna hurt,” (he laughs softly), “but you’re gonna be better for it.”
“I’d feel depressed, dejected, but I guess my skin just kept getting a little thicker.” ‘Till the Sun Turns Black’ (14th Floor) is out now.