If somebody told you that Ray LaMontagne’s debut album had been made in the early 1970s, and left mouldering in a record company vault until being rediscovered more than 30 years later, we would claim Trouble as a long-lost classic. To discover that it was recorded in 2004 is a small miracle.
Basking in the warm glow of singer-songwriting’s golden age and steeped in such classic influences as Van Morrison, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, Trouble makes you wonder how anyone in this day and age can write songs so gloriously uncontaminated by the past three decades of popular music.
Born in 1973 and based in deepest rural Maine, LaMontagne admits to feeling like a man born out of his time. “Music since the early 1970s seems like a wasteland to me,” he says. His moment of epiphany came in the mid-1990s when he was woken at 4am to work the early shift at the local mill by his radio-alarm playing a Stephen Stills song. From there he traced it back to CSN, the Band and Bob Dylan , and discovered that the music that spoke most powerfully to him had all been made before he was born. “Once I started digging into it, then it seemed to me that was a high-water mark.”
By the late 1990s he had started writing his own songs and discovered he had an extraordinary voice, with a thrilling blue-eyed soul echo of Sam Cooke and even Ray Charles. His first tentative live performances came in 1999, but he continued to work full-time as a carpenter until recently. Now he’s crafted one of the most potent debut albums of the year.
It’s easy to play spot the influences. The title track is a kissing cousin to Van Morrison’s And it Stoned Me. Shelter bears the bruised imprint of Harvest-era Neil Young. Narrow Escape has the easy lilt of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding/Basement Tapes period. Yet LaMontagne never descends into pastiche, for the virtues of simple melodies married to intelligent lyrics sung with unaffected passion are timeless.
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If you want a contemporary comparison, the closest is Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker and it’s probably no coincidence that both that record and LaMontagne’s Trouble were produced by Ethan Johns, whose father Glyn helmed 1970s classics for the likes of Steve Miller and the Eagles.
Norah Jones has shown that there is a huge market for real music unpolluted by technological trickery and fickle fashionability. If there’s any justice, LaMontagne is set to follow in her illustrious footsteps.
Trouble is out on Echo on Monday