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LaMontagne shines through bashfulness

Katjusa Cisar  —  10/04/2008 1:14 pm

Ray LaMontagne is a very reclusive and unassuming man. He rarely grants interviews, won't talk about his personal life and is sometimes so hobbled by shyness that he performs in the dark.

But Friday night at the Wisconsin Union Theatre, LaMontagne's bolder side shone through. He charmed the sold-out crowd with bashful stories in between bittersweet songs that ranged from soaring folk rock to hushed, tortured love songs. As the evening wore on, he became increasingly comfortable in front of the audience, even saying with slight exasperation at one point, "I can't see the fret board." His spotlight immediately got brighter.

He kicked off the show with "You Are the Best Thing," the new single off his album, "Gossip in the Grain," which comes out October 14. It's his second album since the 2004 debut, "Trouble," which catapulted the unlikely musician into relative popularity. A former shoe factory worker, he didn't take up music until his mid-twenties. The story goes that a song by Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young inspired him early one morning to immediately quit the shoe factory and take up a guitar.

Three songs in, LaMontagne and the four-piece band had warmed up and were playing an electrifying rendition of "Empty," accompanied by the searing, slow burn of Eric Heywood's pedal steel guitar.

Sometimes, LaMontagne eases into that surfer-turned-troubadour sound of Jack Johnson. But beyond the superficial likeness, they split ways most obviously when it comes to tone. LaMontagne's lyrics are dark, and he has a way of slicing into you and singing with such heart-on-his-sleeves passion that you'd swear he had slipped inside your own life.

His raspy voice is deceptively simple and non-showy because he controls his breath with a force that's as fine as it is powerful. He doesn't let it soar free too often, but when he does (like on "Trouble") it evokes a physical reaction -- as if you could reach up and hold onto it.

That kind of intensity can get emotionally exhausting and claustrophobic at times, especially during the handful of songs he performed solo. When the band walked back onstage to perform "Amy" with him, it was like the rush of fresh air you get lifting the drapes and opening the windows after a long night of insomnia-driven angst or sad dreams.

While he and the band (especially the hip-swiveling bassist Jennifer Condos) occasionally rocked out, LaMontagne performed mostly love-weary ballads, most memorably "Roses and Cigarettes."

After two encores that included songs off his first two albums ("Shelter, "Three More Days" and "Jolene"), he ended quietly on a new song with just one other band member onstage.

Amidst the heartache, he still found little moments of humor between the songs. Looking down at his shoes and realizing his laces were undone, he joked about tripping on the laces and falling. "It's better to tie your shoes before you sing a ballad," he said, kneeling down to fix his shoe.

A woman in the audience yelled out, "Better to be a shoe-lacer than a shoe-maker!"

The audience reaction might have petrified even the most outgoing of people, but LaMontagne took it all in good humor. For a crowd of folk fans, it got pretty wild. The entire evening was punctuated by female screams ("I love you, Ray!") and male shout-outs ("Ray, I want to have your children!"). One woman near the front wailed, "Ray, you make my heart melt!"

He responded dryly, "You'd better do something about that," then paused, adding sincerely, "That's very sweet of you."

Still, remnants of his spotlight-avoiding personality came through: He performed in a semi circle with the band, standing not in the middle but on the end at the right side of the stage.

After a particularly lively flurry of yells, he launched into a story about a fan ("some gal") at one of his shows who first threw an apple at him, then her boot, and then herself.

Of all the attention, he said, "I try not to take it personally, but it kind of freaks me out."

Opener Leona Naess shared the stage with LaMontagne on a couple of his songs. They also share the same awkward-adorable stage presence.

Naess' first words to the crowd, after her first song, were: "Madison, Wisconsin. You guys have lots of cheese." A small cheer went up in the crowd. A weird pause followed and she started the next song. Later, she lamely asked, "So, are you all in college here?" (The 'no' yells outnumbered the 'yes' yells.)

She mumbled and covered her face as she told everyone to buy her CD, then quickly apologized: "That's torture for me. I'm in the wrong business."

That's a pretty weak sense of showmanship coming from Diana Ross' stepdaughter (yes, Naess'father Arne, a Norwegian mountaineer and business man, married Ross back in the '80s).

But CD-hawking abilities aside, Naess has beautiful bell-like voice that drapes itself around her band's spare but rich backing. Her voice lacks variation, but when she clasps her hands together and mournfully sings, "I'm not a soul where blossoms grow," it's captivating.

By 10 p.m., she'd already blogged on her Myspace page about the Madison gig. In all lowercase, she wrote apologetically about how little she knew about Madison except cheese and college football: "i am not insulting you but rather showing my ignorance. i know nothing. a friend of mine once kissed a boy from Madison Wisconsin. she later changed her number to get rid of him. that was him, not his place or origin." And later wrote, "i have spent most of my time in Madison in room backstage. not really seeing the place, is it? but it seems nice. the show was good."

Katjusa Cisar  —  10/04/2008 1:14 pm