GO TELL IT ON, LAMONTAGNE

alking into the Lodge, a rooftop Manhattan bar that looks like Grizzly Adams’ log cabin re-imagined on Etsy, Ray LaMontagne’s eyes widen. “Wow,” he says quietly. “This looks just like my home.” Hardly an exclamation of Kanye West proportions, but from this notoriously retiring singer-songwriter even a low-key revelation is akin to him shouting “I am a golden god” from a hotel balcony. The Lodge is part of the fictional McKittrick Hotel, supposedly locked up and forgotten a week after opening in 1939, but in reality a Chelsea warehouse dressed down to the shabby chic nines as the set for interactive theatre piece Sleep No More. LaMontagne is here for the live debut of his sixth album, Ouroboros, in front of 250 people in a downstairs bar. He’s clearly jittery. “I really hate shows where you can see the audience’s eyes,” he says in his church mouse voice. “I prefer the big shows where there’s 30 metres between you and the crowd.” The sentiment’s not surprising coming from a man once given to performing with the lights off because he couldn’t bear to be on stage. This, however, is Ray LaMontagne 2.0,

Wwilling to sit with MOJO for an hour-and-a-half when he usually curtails interviews after 15 minutes, the Ray who has gone from intense singer-songwriter on 2004 debut album Trouble to Ouroboros’s neo-prog rocker. Along the way he’s explored blue-eyed Stax (see You Are The Best Thing from 2008’s Gossip In The Grain), dirt-under-the-fingernails Americana on Grammy-winning God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise, and the light psychedelia of 2014’s Supernova. Ouroboros leaps through the portal opened by Supernova, but where the latter wafted along with a hint of The Zombies’ Odessey And Oracle, the new album reaches for the full Dark Side Of The Moon. Slightly dismissive but not entirely displeased with the comparison, what he and the album’s producer, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, were specifically reaching for was the feel of Talk Talk’s epic Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock albums. It’s a reach he concedes his fans may struggle to initially appreciate. “Like those albums this isn’t about songs or singles,” he says. “This is a long story arc where patience is the most important thing.” He’s not alone in hoping that his audience will take the leap with Ouroboros. As one of his team admits, Supernova created not so much a backlash among his fans as “hesitancy”. That he’s not touring the album until June is partly due to the commitments of his backing band, My Morning Jacket minus James, and also to allow fans to bed in with the album. Not that anyone’s panicking too much. LaMontagne’s team have been marching to the singer’s erratic, headstrong drum for over a decade. Childhood saw the young Ray criss-crossing the country with his mother and five half-siblings, and he now covets stability above all else. “People just thought we were trailer trash,” he says. “It was hard and really scary.” Married for six years and with two young sons before he scored his RCA contract, he earned a reputation in some quarters as difficult. “I wasn’t a kid, I was a grown-up with real responsibilities and I had no problem saying no,” he says. No surprise, then, that LaMontagne measures his success differently to other people. An early school-leaver, he eked out a living as a carpenter and married his childhood sweetheart Sarah Sousa, now a successful poet.

Playing a secret New York gig, Maine introvert Ray talks opening up, being a blacksmith and mysticism.