The shoe-factory worker who woke up to Stephen Stills

The story begins with an alarm clock. Ray LaMontagne was working in a shoe factory in Lewiston, Maine, when the radio woke him with Stephen Stills's “Treetop Flyer”. He decided that morning to leave the job and make music. He was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1973, one of six children raised by a single mother, and as a young teenager in Utah he cared more about drawing Dungeons & Dragons images than about schoolwork.

He began performing in 1999 while holding down a part-time job as a tutor, and that summer he recorded a ten-song demo that was sent to local venues, including Maine's Oddfellow Theater, which hired him as an opening act for John Gorka and Jonathan Edwards. A business executive, Ron Clayton, discovered him at a festival in Maine and introduced him to Chrysalis Music Publishing. In 2004 he recorded Trouble with the producer Ethan Johns, an album sold to RCA in the US and Echo in the UK that went on to sell more than 250,000 copies in America and 500,000 worldwide.

Television took to the songs quickly. “Trouble” turned up in the series Alias and in a Travelers Insurance commercial, “Jolene” played over the credits of the 2010 film The Town, and “Be Here Now” was heard in 27 Dresses and a string of TV dramas. His second album, Till the Sun Turns Black, arrived in 2006 with horns and strings and reached number 28 on the Billboard 200; he performed on The Tonight Show that year, and Rachael Yamagata sang on “Barfly”.

The third album, Gossip in the Grain, came out on RCA in 2008 and debuted at number three on the Billboard charts. Johns was again the producer, and LaMontagne's touring band, with Jennifer Condos on bass and Eric Heywood on guitar, helped to shape the sound. Critics have compared his music with Otis Redding, Van Morrison, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley and The Band, a list that tells you where this singer's voice sits.