Ray LaMontagne

The smoky-throated troubadour talks us through a rich, rootsy back catalogue

Album by album with the US troubadour: “I wanted to be a timber framer…”

MoST songwriters are delighted to leave the drudgery of their day jobs behind for a rootless life on the road; Ray LaMontagne, though, is clearly cut from a different cloth.

“It was extremely hard,” he says from his Massachusetts farmhouse. “I was making real in-roads at home with a timber framer, and that’s really what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a timber framer. Being a singer-songwriter wasn’t any aspiration of mine in the least.”

Despite his reluctance, the power of LaMontagne’s earthy voice and affecting songs quickly propelled him into the life of a Grammy-winning musician on a major label. Those first few records didn’t leave LaMontagne fulfilled, though, but as he takes Uncut through his seven albums to date, he explains that a spiritual change earlier this decade left him at peace for the first time with mixing performing, songwriting and a normal family life. “Now I love to write songs, I love to play live,” he explains. “It’s all changed.”

Rather than timber-framing, LaMontagne now uses his hands in his own smithy, processing metal for his old motorbikes and cars, or in his analogue studio. “It’s probably good for my brain,” he says, discussing the studio, “to force myself to learn things that I’m not interested in!” TOM PINNOCK

TROUBLE RCA, 2004 The intimate, compelling debut – created originally as a set of songwriting demos

Jamie Ceretta at Hollywood Records, a Disney company, had heard some demos of mine and invited me to come out to LA to play for his boss – I felt a little uneasy about the label, to say the least, but shortly after that Jamie went to Chrysalis Publishing, and he invited me to come and meet his new boss, Kenny MacPherson, and play some songs for him. The idea was that I would write songs, and they could shop them to other artists to sing. That was the premise I was working under, and I was as comfortable as I could be as a 27-year-old father of two! It was through Kenny that I met Ethan Johns. They had given us a small working budget to record some demos, so we went to the Alley, a rehearsal space in North Hollywood, and we recorded the 10 songs I had at the time in about two weeks. We weren’t expecting it to be a record, so we were just whipping through them. We spent most of the time listening to Ethan talk about himself [laughs], which he is very good at. We turned the demos in to Kenny, then I went back to Maine – I had a small cabin I had built there on a piece of property, and me, my wife and two boys lived there off the grid. I just went back to my day job – I was working with two carpenters at the time, seven days a week. Several months later, Chrysalis invited me to come back out again, and the whole tone of the relationship had changed – they thought my voice and the songs were inseparable, so then the conversation changed to: “I think this is a record, and you should think about getting out there and singing them yourself…” The demos Ethan and I had made ended up being the record.

TILL THE SUN TURNS BLACK RCA, 2006

The lusher follow-up, made under difficult circumstances I had two young boys, both under the age of five, and suddenly I’m gone touring. Just being in a room with people made me uncomfortable, never mind being on stage singing. It was a strange division within myself, where one side of myself viscerally felt like I needed to face the fear, and the other side was saying, “What am I doing here, with my life? I should be home, I should be working. This isn’t where I should be.” It was hard, and it was very hard for my wife as well – my God, she was in the middle of the woods with no running water, no electricity, in a cabin with two babies, completely by herself, for months at a time. It was one of the hardest periods of our lives together, for sure. It really challenged us in our relationship – I’ve known my wife since I was eight years old, she was my first real girlfriend at 16. We were best friends. But I was a carpenter, I wasn’t a touring musician, that’s not who she married. We were both pretty ragged by the time I made that second album. We added on strings and horns and things – maybe too much, looking back. It felt like we spent too much time on this record, but again, a lot of it was just listening to Ethan talk! He could talk a day away. But looking back, again, it also set a tone for the relationship between myself and RCA, that has kind of allowed me to continue to make the records I wanna make. We really don’t even discuss it – I just make records and turn them in. They give me lots of room. For all Ethan’s foibles, he really kept the label pressure completely out of sight. It wasn’t until many years later that I realised he was being battered by the label, that the second record wasn’t what they wanted. I owe him a lot for that.

GOSSIP IN THE GRAIN RCA, 2008 Johns and LaMontagne head to Real World Studios, near Bath, to make this more soulful, light-hearted LP

After the second album, I took a good year off to really try to heal my relationship with my wife, and for us to pull back and rebuild that foundation that was starting to crack a little bit. That was the priority. I didn’t care if I ever made another record, frankly; I just wanted to fix what was nearly broken, and so I didn’t think about music at all for a year, a year-and-a-half. We were rebuilding an old farmhouse, and through the rebuilding of the farmhouse I felt like we rebuilt our relationship as well. By the time I made Gossip In The Grain, we were on a good footing, and that was the most important change for me at that time. Making that record, I remember there was a lot of tension between Ethan and I – I had terrible

flu too, and we just worked through it. But I think the relationship between Ethan and I was getting tiresome: there’s a part of Ethan that is really big-hearted and sensitive and caring, a really decent human being deep in there, but the gatekeeper to all of that was very childish and bullying and egotistical. It became very difficult, and I became very tired of having to deal with that gatekeeper. We got some real special, magical moments out of it, though, but that was kind of the end for us working together. I think we had both had enough. I’ll never forget that take of “Sarah” – we always recorded everything live, including the vocals. We were always striving to get ‘the take’, and that was one of those moments. For me, the songs on this record that I love are “Gossip In The Grain” itself and “Winter Birds”. They are the songs that I really feel came the most naturally to me, and the ones that I used to really push against for some reason. My own voice was starting to come out a bit more by this point, though, but I was working against myself a lot – I was always swimming upstream.

RAY LAMONTAGNE AND THE PARIAH DOGS GOD WILLIN’ & THE CREEK DON’T RISE RCA, 2010

A rootsy, relaxed fourth, produced by Ray himself, which bagged a Grammy award We had moved from Maine, where we were really very isolated, to a lovely old farm in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, which is right around the Five College area, so there’s lots going on, lots of artists and craftsmen. We just fell in love with this farmhouse. We recorded God

Willin’ here, and I remember it being a nice time – I was still trying to figure things out within myself and my relationship to music, but I remember it being a very comfortable session. Jennifer [Condos, bass] and Jay

[Bellerose, drums] – lovely human beings too. We had toured together for a few cycles by that point, and they were real troopers because I was notoriously unhappy on the road, and they were very patient and supportive. But after that, when that record was released and we toured it, I hit the wall, for sure. Things were going very well, we were selling lots of tickets, but something inside of me just wasn’t working any more. Every night was a battle, and I felt emotionally and physically empty. At one point, we played in Chicago at this beautiful amphitheatre, and I went backstage with my manager afterwards and I fell to pieces – just collapsed and wept and wept and wept. “I’m finished, I’m done, I can’t do it…” I came home, I put all my guitars away. I fell off the map for a couple of years; I didn’t listen to music, I didn’t even think about music, and tried to live an everyday life. Then Sarah and the boys and I went up to Maine to the ocean for a week, and I remember sitting on the beach watching the boys playing, and they were so beautiful and happy, and I just felt like it all came to me at that moment. I just thought, ‘Everything’s so good…’ [But] the driving force of my career has always come from that negative voice saying, “You’re not good enough, nobody will like you, the songs aren’t good enough…” And of course that would light a fire in me, and I would say to that voice, “You fucking watch me.” But all it was doing was eating me up, so I couldn’t use that for fuel any more. When we came home, I remember listening to Loaded by The Velvet Underground, and just thinking, ‘That’s why I love music.’ I started to play the guitar and think about songs again, and that’s when I wrote that batch of songs for Supernova. And that’s when everything changed for me.

“I went backstage, collapsed and wept and wept. ‘I’m finished, I can’t do it…’ I fell off the map for a couple of years”

SUPERNOVA RCA, 2014

LaMontagne enlists Dan Auerbach to produce this uptempo set A massive spiritual thing had happened, and all of these songs were written from a place of playfulness, of joy, that child part of me feeling very safe just writing songs for the fun of writing songs. Dan Auerbach? Let me put it this way, I don’t know Dan and I don’t think he wanted us to get to know each other. We had had a few good conversations over the years, and with this batch of tunes it felt like the right thing to do. I sent him demos, we were definitely on the same page. When I got to the studio, I felt like he was very guarded, the most guarded person I think I’ve ever met in my life. In the two weeks we worked together, he made eye contact with me maybe twice – I’m not exaggerating. It was very strange, it was a strange session, the energy was weird. I’m the type of person who, in the studio, likes to work until it’s done. I don’t like to take days off, I’ve never partied or drank; I just want to get in, focus on songs, get them done and go home. It was a different approach than Dan had. I think we got good work out of it, I was happy with what we accomplished. But I left thinking that I didn’t know Dan and he didn’t know me, and that’s how he wants it to stay. That was the relationship… there wasn’t one! I’m not slagging him, just, for one reason or another, that’s how it transpired. [But] I felt very good, and centred, and healthy and happy… and we put the record out, and oh man, my fans did not like the record. That’s all I was hearing: “This isn’t Ray…” The irony of it is that this is more me than ever!

Supernova, that is so much more of an honest representation of the kind of song I like to write than anything I had written before. There were little glimpses in the old records.

OUROBOROS RCA, 2016

A two-part song-cycle; My Morning Jacket’s Jim James produces Jim is just a lovely guy. I had a batch of songs I was working on, and you get to a point where you’re wrestling them and trying to get some kind of clarity, and an overall theme. There was a moment there where I really was unsure what was happening – I had a lot of bits and pieces of melodies and things, but there was no clarity yet. But it became clear in a dream – I work on songs in a very concentrated time, and when it comes time for me to make a record, I feel it’s time and I work on songs every day, all day, and I just stay in my study and I pace and I play my guitar and I work on little bits and pieces. I keep it fun, keep jumping from one piece of melody to another and make a little progress, but I do it constantly until the batch is complete. As I’m sleeping, these melodies are going round and round, and you can’t turn it off – that happens every time. But this particular time, I had this dream where all the pieces of the songs were floating above my desk, a bit like coloured puzzle pieces, and they landed on my desk, I assembled them, and I remember waking up and thinking, ‘Ah, it’s not a batch of songs, it doesn’t wanna be that, it wants to be one circular thing!’ Then I began to see the themes and I began to understand what the whole thing meant. We recorded the record in 10 days, and then spent a couple of days after that tweaking the mix. I was getting more and more into electric guitar, and the group of guys that Jim introduced me to there – Kevin Ratterman at La La Land is just a lovely human being. Everybody was so wonderful and supportive, and the communication is very open, more so than I’d really experienced. Everything was open for discussion, and everyone’s ideas were valued equally. There was no fear that you were going to upset someone’s ego. It was very playful, and that really made the record what it is. I’m so proud of that album – I think I’m most proud of this out of anything I’ve done. A lot of that has to do with the musicians in the room and the energy that was there; it was so positive from start to finish.

PART OF THE LIGHT RCA, 2018

Recorded at LaMontagne’s new home studio, this touches on psychedelia, classic rock and soul There wasn’t really a plan for this album, other than the usual process, which is that I start to assemble the songs and see what songs want to be finished. I built a proper studio here at home, which is something I’d been resisting for years because I’m not in any way a gear-head. But I bit the bullet and built a studio here with proper gear and a board, all analogue. So that was really freeing. Once the songs came, it was just about choosing the players. I knew I wanted Seth [Kaufman] to come out – he played on the last album and he’s a lovely human being, and I wanted Kevin to come out for his energy, and I just surrounded myself with people that I wanted to be around, like Carl [Broemel] and Bo [Koster] from My Morning Jacket. The Jacket boys and I had toured Ouroboros together, and that was a really amazing tour for me, a real high-point in my career. “To The Sea” set the tone for this record. It’s my favourite on this album, for sure. If I had my way that would be the single release! I’m still wrapping my head around the album. There were a few moments during playback where I felt like my voice is becoming more of an instrument, that I’m really starting to figure it out. I’m not turned on by singers, in the way that our culture loves over-singing voices – I always feel like less is more, and I’m always attracted to the voice that is not like anything else. I just want my voice to be part of the track, but unobtrusive; I don’t want it to be the focal point. We used a really quirky old mic on this and Ouroboros, that has a very dark, smoky vibe to it. It’s an old RCA mic, but I’m not gonna tell you what it is, because I want to keep it secret. You lose a bit of clarity, but gain from it this smoky veil, like when you’re watching an old movie rather than these high-definition things – this beautiful veil.

Part Of The Light is out on May 18 on RCA

“I had this dream where all the pieces of the songs were floating above my desk, like puzzle pieces”