New Hampshire-native-turned-roving-troubadour Ray LaMontagne has to be at least intermittently entertained by the ironies that punctuate his biography. For instance, the odds have to be fairly long that LaMontagne’s singer/songwriter path would begin with hearing Stephen Stills’ “Treetop Flyer” in 1999 and lead to working with Stills’ daughter Jennifer on his 2004 debut full-length, Trouble.
That kind of inevitability seems to mark every touchstone in LaMontagne’s extremely potent career.
After a childhood that saw him, his mother and five siblings move from New England to Utah, and that included a less than spectacular academic career, LaMontagne relocated back to the Northeast after high school to work in a shoe factory in Maine. His clock radio discovery of one of Stills’ most famous tracks prompted him to quit his job and begin performing and independently releasing his songs around his Maine environs. LaMontagne quickly went from opening for Jonathan Edwards and John Gorka to securing a publishing deal, recording Trouble, scoring an RCA contract and selling a half million copies of the aforementioned album globally.
Television and film have also been important resources for LaMontagne, as songs from all of his albums — Trouble, 2006’s Till the Sun Turns Black, 2008’s Gossip in the Grain, 2010’s God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise, 2014’s Supernova and this year’s spectacular Ouroboros — have benefitted from exposure on screens both large and small. LaMontagne’s last three albums have notched some of his most potent achievements: The self-released God Willin’ earned LaMontagne his first Grammy win (for Best Contemporary Folk Album); the Dan Auerbach-produced Supernova hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Rock and Folk album charts and No. 3 on the overall album chart; and the Jim James-helmed Ouroboros made it into the Top 15 of the Billboard 200, largely on the laconic sting of successful single “Hey, No Pressure.”
The surprise in LaMontagne’s career hasn’t necessarily been the number of times he’s been compared to giants like Van Morrison, Otis Redding, Tim Buckley and Nick Drake — it’s the consistently effortless way he’s lived up to those comparisons.
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This article appears in Jun 8-15, 2016.
