Ray LaMontagne Long Way Home LP

TAS Rated 4/5 Music, 4/5 Sonics in the November 2024 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Ray LaMontagne—the celebrated Grammy® award-winning singer-songwriter—has confirmed the next chapter of his career with a 2024 studio album, Long Way Home. LaMontagne has spent the past two decades carving a singular space for himself in modern music. In a career that has seen overflowing critical acclaim, he's opted out of the spotlight and its accompanying celebrity in the remote hills of Western Massachusetts. The New York Times accounts, "Visiting Ray LaMontagne is like going back to another century." His signature voice, described by Rolling Stone as an "impeccably weathered tenor croon," continues to serve as a conduit for era-defining melodies and songwriting. Across eight studio albums, LaMontagne has let his songs and story speak for themselves, ringing a deep chord in the American subconscious. As has come to be expected through his extensive and awarded discography, LaMontagne delivers yet again on record nine with a cohesive, impressive effort.

The core of Long Way Home reverberates deep into LaMontagne's youth—at 21 years old, in a small club in Minneapolis, he recalls seeing Townes Van Zandt perform live. A line from "To Live Is to Fly" has stuck with him ever since; Van Zandt sang, "Where you been is good and gone, all you keep is the getting there."

LaMontagne reflects, "Thirty years later it occurs to me that every song on Long Way Home is in one way or another honoring the journey. The languorous days of youth and innocence. The countless battles of adulthood, some won, more often lost. It's been a long hard road, and I wouldn't change a minute. It took me nine songs to express what Townes managed to say in one line. I guess I still got a lot to learn."

Produced in tandem with Seth Kauffman (Floating Action, Angel Olsen, Lana Del Ray), Long Way Home's nine moving tracks recall the folk-rock explosion of the early seventies, while aptly sitting among the modern Americana revival that LaMontagne was integral in fueling. Recorded over the course of a few weeks in his home studio, LaMontagne tapped both longtime and new collaborators across the record—The Secret Sisters provide backing vocals on the first three tracks, while the album was engineered and mixed by the team of LaMontagne, Kauffman, and Ariel Bernstein.

From the cover's woodcut-etched print of a musician plucking a stringed instrument to its spare production and intimate songwriting, Ray LaMontagne's new album is one of his best collections since his 2004 debut, Trouble. Let's face it: LaMontagne's evocative voice, full of woodsmoke, autumn, and grainy amber, always delivers on its soulful promise.