|
Enigmatic folkie prefers to paint it black
Ray Lamontagne's songs follow emotional thread
- Ray Lamontagne at The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, Thursday, Nov. 16. Tickets $39.50, $32.50 from Ticketmaster.
Jan-Christian Sorensen
jsorensen@nsnews.com
RAY Lamontagne sounds completely drained, like he's living the narrator's life from Bob Seger's Turn The Page.
From the hotel room of a Comfort Inn somewhere in San Diego, Lamontagne answers the phone with a half-sigh - the same sort of tone one usually reserves for creditors, telemarketers and in-laws.
It's understandable. The 33-year-old singer-songwriter has been touring extensively since his 2004 debut, Trouble, started turning heads.
Only a few days ago he returned from a European jaunt in support of his follow up, Till The Sun Turns Black, which was penned primarily on the road, in the backs of dimly lit buses and cramped, shoebox hotel rooms just like this one.
He's got exactly one day to wind his clock again before he begins a swing through the United States and Canada, playing The Centre in Vancouver on Thursday before continuing east through his New England home. After his last date in Boston on Dec. 18, he'll have a few weeks to decompress before heading back across the pond for another go-round of the U.K.
And to top it all off, he's dealing with a cold.
"I've been touring so much lately and I'm just starting out in the States so I have a good bit to go and then it's back to Europe," he says. "I'll be done in March, I think, and then I'm gonna try to take a break for a bit and just try to get my head back on straight."
I apologize for the intrusion - and it's sincere, not music-critic sycophancy. The enigmatic folkie is an intensely private person, someone who's uncomfortable with the spotlight's glare and even more suspicious of the trappings of fame.
When he's not on the road, he lives a secluded life in a cabin in the remote Western mountains of Maine, hours away from major centres like Augusta and Portland.
"It's right about where things end," Lamontagne says of his splendid isolation.
Like many of the songs off his new album, his seclusion appears to be a measure of self-preservation.
"Some people thrive off social situations. They really feed off that. And then there are other people who just feed off quiet and that's how it is for me," he continues. "That's how I recharge, by spending time alone. After a few weeks of being by myself and being able to do the things I like to do - hiking and reading and just being in quiet, just complete quiet - I feel recharged and ready to interact again."
Lamontagne's discovery has fast become the stuff of music legend: early one winter morning while getting ready to go off to his job at a shoe factory in Lewiston, Maine, Lamontagne heard Stephen Stills' Treetop Flyer on the radio, called in sick and spent the rest of the day looking for Stills' 1991 solo album, Stills Alone. Inspired, he decided to quit his job and started composing and performing his own songs.
Like Trouble, his latest album is an intensely personal, powerful recording. Unlike Trouble, which plucked its feathers from Cupid's wings, Till The Sun Turns Black is a bleak, cathartic affair for Lamontagne, and one he's clearly uncomfortable talking about at length.
In the gulf between albums, Lamontagne and his wife - who have two sons together - split, and the fallout clearly drives the bulk of the subject matter on Till The Sun Turns Black.
The most jagged cut on the album comes from the stark, acoustic echoes of Lesson Learned, as Lamontagne rages about betrayal and infidelity: "Now you act so surprised/To hear what you already knew/And all you really had to do was ask," he writes "I'd have told you straight away all those lies were true/And all that was false was fact..."
Not surprisingly, it's a song that Lamontagne doesn't roll out live very often. It takes a toll just listening to it, never mind living and breathing the words themselves.
"That's a tough one to play," he admits, after taking his time to cherry pick the proper response. "I've performed it live, but it's not something I sing all the time."
And the song immediately following - an instrumental ode with Lamontagne on Spanish guitar, called Truly, Madly, Deeply - is like the sun breaking through grey skies swollen with rain; a respite after the sort of fight that leaves spent lovers with fists clenched and shirts streaked with tears.
"I felt the songs kind of bring you somewhere, and you kind of need a breather after (Lesson Learned)," he says. "By that point in the record it just felt like it needed some space."
The entire album runs the gamut of emotional highs and lows, with strings and horns giving the lyrics and Lamontagne's raspy vocals a deeper resonance.
On songs like Three More Days and Can I Stay, Lamontagne marries lust with longing as he muses about trying to find his way home. On others, like the bitter You Can Bring Me Flowers and the mournful, melancholy Gone Away From Me, he ranges from anger to acceptance.
"I felt there was sort of an emotional thread - at least for me - throughout the record and the songs," says Lamontagne, who again enlisted uber-producer Ethan Johns - the Phil Spector of alt.-country circles - to lend assistance in the studio. "It's a personal album, but I'm just kind of letting people take what they want from it."
A notoriously tough self-critic, Lamontagne says he's proud of the sound both he and Johns were able to mine on Till The Sun Turns Black.
"It was exactly what I wanted to do," he says. "It's nice to be able to create something exactly the way you want, to have it sound just the way you want it to sound. It's nice to be able to do that."
published on 11/10/2006
|
