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| Featured Artist Link REALLYMUSICRADIO presentsRay LaMontagne"I was horrible in school," LaMontagne remembers. "They didn't know what to do with me. I'd just draw or write stories. I had a really tough time, but I squeaked by. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I just stopped going all together; I'd just go into the woods. That was really hard on my mother. I got in fights all the time; Trouble found me. I was just a misfit, an oddball. Those years were tough. By the time I reached my senior year, I knew I wanted to graduate. So I went to school during the day and at night for a year and barely got through high school." He left his family right after graduation, with no idea what he wanted to do. Four years later, while working long hours in a Lewiston, Maine, shoe factory, he experienced an epiphany—one that shook him out of his deep ennui. "This was a particularly dark and weird time for me," he recounts. "I never saw the light of day for months. One morning, after I'd worked there for about a year, I had my clock set for 4 a.m., like always, and I woke up to this amazing sound coming from the clock radio. It was Stephen Stills, doing a song called 'Tree Top Flyer.' I just sat up in bed and listened. Something about that song just hit me. I did not go to work that day; I went to record stores and sought that album out. It was called Stills Alone. I listened to it, and I was transformed. It killed me…it was huge. You don't know how those things happen. I just knew: 'This is what I'm gonna do.' That morning really changed everything—my whole life. "So I quit my job. I knew I wanted to sing, which was really crazy, because I never even talked to anybody. I just had this feeling that it was somewhere inside me, and I had to find it and let it out. So I learned the songs on that record and started listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash, then I discovered Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Ray Charles, Otis Redding. I would spend hours just listening to records. Later, I got very intense about singing; I would just sing and sing, and hurt and hurt, because I knew I wasn't doing it right. Over a period of years I taught myself to sing from the gut and not from the nose." |
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