Track Listing

1. Trouble
2. Shelter
3. Hold You In My Arms
4. Narrow Escape
5. Burn
6. Forever My Friend
7. Hannah
8. How Come
9. Jolene
10. All The Wild Horses

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #298 in Music
• Brand: RCA
• Released on: 2004-09-14
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Amazon.com
Some singer/songwriters (think Paul Westerberg and Elliott Smith) develop their world-weariness through the unforgiving trials of passing years and the heart-breaking grind of the music business. Others (Van Morrison, Neil Young) seem to have sprung from out of nowhere with the fully formed soul of a life well-lived. Ray LaMontagne belongs with the latter. On this, his debut, LaMontagne has crafted a handful of quietly devastating meditations on life and love--and delivered them with a raspy vocal all his own. The simple, mournful lyrics of "Burn," "Shelter" and the title track recall a Hank Williams ballad, and the reserved production by alt-country/americana genius Ethan Johns (the Jayhawks, Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon) make this a great disc for smoky Saturday nights, and rainy Sunday mornings. --Ben Heege

Rolling Stone, 7/30/04
Hot Songwriter: Ray LaMontagne. Meet the backwoods Van Morrison

His sandpaper croon sounds like church, Van Morrison and dusty porches.

About the Artist
From Rolling Stone (7/30/04):

Many years ago, before he had learned to sing, written a song or had become the object of a major-label bidding war, Ray LaMontagne was, as usual, awakened at 4:30 a.m. by his clock radio. It was playing a song that changed his life: Stephen Stills' "Treetop Flyer." That day, LaMontagne blew off his job at a Lewiston, Maine, shoe factory to hunt down the 1991 album Stills Alone. "I was in a very dark place and very self-destructive and very close to killing myself in various ways," says the thirty-one-year-old folk singer. After he found the Stills record, he started digging into Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ray Charles. "It was like I found a religion," he says. "I realized that you could take all this stuff that's making you miserable and turn it into something beautiful."

"When I started singing," he says, "it was weird, because I was an introverted person. At first I just whispered." LaMontagne recently left the rural-Maine log cabin he built and had lived in with his wife and two kids for the past five years. "Life is changing," he says with disarming understatement.