Ray Lamontagne has lived a poetic life. The singer-songwriter, whose natural phrasing and easy voice have drawn comparisons to Van Morrison, has experienced both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the vague and the absolute, the sedentary and the active.
The culmination of his experiences is “Trouble,” his graceful debut full-length CD released last year, and the live performances – including his Monday night gig at the Fillmore – that have dominated his schedule for more than a year.
But Lamontagne’s musical backstory starts long before “Trouble.” In fact, it starts long before he ever even sang a single word.
If Lamontagne moves on to create a legacy, he’ll always have what will become known as “the Stephen Stills moment.” Four years after barely graduating high school he was working an intense schedule at a Lewiston, Maine, shoe factory. One morning his alarm went off at 4 a.m., as usual. It was early, but the music coming from the clock-radio had Lamontagne at full attention.
This random song had an otherworldly effect on him. He sat straight up in bed, and when Stephen Stills’ “Tree Top Flyer” had run its course, he knew he wasn’t going to work that day. Instead Lamontagne opted for the record store, where he bought “Stills Alone” and listened to it repeatedly and realized that, “This is what I’m gonna do.”
“That record in particular just opened the door just a little bit for me,” Lamontagne said earlier this week from the East Coast. “And I had to go backward from there, so the record store seemed a logical place to start. Once I got in there and got all the music Stephen Stills had recorded and all the Crosby, Stills and Nash records, it was overwhelming.
“Each week I’d get a new record and listen to them after work over and over and over again. It was a magical time for me. It’s not the same now as it was then. It was a good four or five years that will never be repeated. I was just by myself. It was very personal, and it wasn’t intentional.”
Lamontagne knew he’d hit something, but he didn’t pounce on the new-found inspiration. He took his time. He’d never sung or played an instrument before the Stephen Stills moment, and he didn’t sing for another four years after the early morning radio run-in. But eventually he knew it was time.
“At one point, I started to mess around on the guitar, and I just loved it,” the New Hampshire-born singer said. “There was a small voice in the back of my head saying that I had a voice too, as a songwriter and singer, somewhere deep in there. And I kept it to myself. For a long time.”
Lamontagne never played cover songs, making his life in the coffeehouse circuit “a gradual, torturous process,” he said.
“Oftentimes I didn’t feel like I had revealed anything,” he said. “I didn’t feel right.”
But then, an epiphany. Like a poet conquering his block, Lamontagne found his voice.
“And that became a whole other journey,” he said.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
