Ray LaMontagne • Music • Ray LaMontagne - Till The Sun Turns Black CD

Click here to see a track listing for Till The Sun Turns Black and learn more about Ray LaMontagne’s songwriting approach on the album.

For LaMontagne, songwriting does not exist as a task that one completes irrespective of whatever else goes on in the life of the songwriter: Instead, the work takes shape and flight as the result of what happens to the songwriter. "Songs come from different places," LaMontagne says. "Some are like exercises. They could be very good songs. But others come from more purely emotional places."

It was that last kind of song that compelled LaMontagne when he began to assemble what has emerged as Till the Sun Turns Black, his new album. Before beginning sessions at upstate New York's Allaire Studios, working again with the noted producer and musician Ethan Johns, LaMontagne examined the songs he had written, songs that his follow-up might contain. Many were effective, fluent, and fine; others seemed something more than any of those things to LaMontagne; these were songs that, as he puts it, "ate away" at him.

On the eleven songs that comprise Till the Sun Turns Black, all of this is audible -- the demand for meaningfulness, the requirement of emotional relevancy, the struggle of working through material in the form of songs that refuse, until properly recorded, to leave the artist alone. The music, horn-warmed soul classicism that turns decisively yet inevitably into broader expanses of sound, extends with heart and skill the vintage U.S R&B and Americana folk-country that made LaMontagne famous on Trouble.

Track List:
1. Be Here Now
2. Empty
3. Barfly
4. Three More Days
5. Can I Stay
6. You Can Bring Me Flowers
7. Gone Away From Me
8. Lesson Learned
9. Truly, Madly, Deeply
10. Till The Sun Turns Black
11. Within You