Ray LaMontagne - Trouble Video

Ray LaMontagne
Trouble
Video

'Trouble', the title track from Ray LaMontagne's debut album, will be released on July 24. Trouble the album, originally available through The Echo Label, was produced by Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams, Kings Of Leon) and has already sold almost 40,000 copies in the UK and 350,000 in the US. Trouble is currently Album Of The Week on Radio 2 (w/c 26.06.06).

One of six siblings born to various fathers, LaMontagne spent his childhood being moved around by his resourceful mother to wherever she could put a roof over their heads; from friends' backyards to the backs of cars, and even once to a chicken coop. After scraping through high school he drifted into a job at a shoe factory in Maine, a particularly bleak time when he went without seeing daylight for months. His epiphany came when, woken as usual at 4am by his clock radio, he heard Stephen Stills' 'Tree Top Flyer', and was immediately shaken from his deep ennui. "I knew I wanted to sing, which was really crazy, because I never even talked to anybody," Ray remembers. LaMontagne never went back to work.

Spending his days listening to Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Otis Redding, he taught himself to sing, and recorded his first demo in the summer of 1999. After several gigs at a local theatre supporting touring folk acts, LaMontagne struck up an e-mail friendship with a fan who asked if he could send a demo to a friend in the music business: the friend was Jamie Cerreta of Chrysalis Music Publishing, who quickly signed LaMontagne and took the unusual gamble of making the album themselves and finding a label to release it later.

Trouble was recorded in just two weeks at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and produced by Johns, the son of legendary Rolling Stones and Eagles producer Glyn Johns. Most of the songs were recorded live, with LaMontagne playing guitar and singing and Johns later laying down the drum, bass and piano parts; delivering perfectly the natural, intense immediacy of the songs that is so striking when LaMontagne performs live.