Here’s one from the spring that never got published:
One of my students brought in the Ray Lamontagne CD “Till the Sun Turns Black” recently. We listened to excerpts of Be Here Now, Empty, and Three More Days. Via a music blog, I listened to Be Here Now several times, almost obsessively, and have since purchased the entire CD. It’s a fantastic piece of music, and it has appeared on the ABC show The Nine, (season 1, episode 6, “Take Me Instead”). In hopes of avoiding a large-scale deconstruction of this song, let me just ask this question: What does this song have to do with Bhagavan Das?
In the first verse, acknowledging the fact that I have merely perused Das’s Be Here Now, I can see it:
- Don’t let your mind get weary and confused
Your will be still, don’t try
Don’t let your heart get heavy child
Inside you there’s a strength that lies
I also wonder, though, do these lyrics resonate with Lamontagne’s audience (the slacker generation?) because of messages like “don’t try?” Missing the point, of course, but the lyric’s placement, at the end of the phrase, as a sort of response to the call of the first line, well it elevates “don’t try” to a comment nearly of its own. Lamontagne’s annunciation is not exactly the clearest, so the flip side of this is that “don’t try” is only barely audible.
Here’s the Das link, I think:
- Don’t let your soul get lonely child
It’s only time, it will go by
Don’t look for love in faces, places
It’s in you, that’s where you’ll find kindness
During the chorus of the song, something is mixed into the background. It sounds like NASA communications, but it also reminds me of a bootleg performance of Das chanting I stumbled across a few years ago. Yes, that’s an odd mixture, but it’s the truth.
But then the slacker generation comes back, not a matter of faith but a matter of trust:
- Don’t lose your faith in me
And I will try not to lose faith in you
Don’t put your trust in walls
‘Cause walls will only crush you when they fall
This is truly a beautiful piece of music. No, this post isn’t detailed enough to examine the relationship between Lamontagne and Das, and a full-fledged deconstruction this is not. What actually matters is how beautiful the music is.
The Magic
I find this piece of music deeply moving. It is powerful but quiet; it is “mystical” without putting me on the defensive; it is “introspective” without being cheesy or revealing too much. The pacing of this song is slow enough to let it breathe, but moves along – it does not stagnate. The production reveals the beautiful, bringing us close enough to the sound to hear Lamontagne’s breath, and the overall sound of the recording is clear. The arrangement shows respect for the tradition (verse, verse, chorus, verse chorus), but the inclusion of extra sound (the “NASA” sounds of the chorus) is, well at the very least, contemporary.
The Stats
Today, Lamontagne has just over 116K friends on MySpace (up by 14K since I first wrote this in April), and hey, they actually seem like real people not just a bunch of spam. The CD, “Till the Sun Turns Black,” sold 28,000 copies in its first week.
The Info
Artist: Ray Lamontagne
Album: Till the Sun Turns Black
Label: RCA Records
Publisher:
Release Date: August 29, 2006
Copyright Date:
Artist URL: http://www.raylamontagne.com
Artist MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/raylamontagne
Artist WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_LaMontagne
On Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Till-Sun-Turns-Black-LaMontagne/dp/B000GPIPVU