The first time I heard Ray LaMontagne’s voice, I was in my Subaru at a stop sign just past my house in Newmarket. My friend Cathy had been telling me about this amazing singer, this Ray LaMontagne guy, and how he was going to be huge.

“He’s from Lewiston, Maine,” she said. “Lewiston?!” I thought. I have family in Lewiston. The blue collar town is not exactly the musical mecca of the world. But on that day, just as I was about to turn off Bay Road onto Route 108, this voice came from my radio—my God, what a soulful, otherworldly sound. It was LaMontagne singing the title track from his debut album, “Trouble.” I’ll never forget it. Cathy was right.

Before he was Ray LaMontagne the musical phenomenon, LaMontagne was just another local musician working the greater Portland, Maine, music scene by night  and a shitty job by day. For him, it was that damn clock radio, the same one waking up half the world for work, that changed everything. One morning, Stephen Stills’ “Tree Top Flyer” woke him up, and LaMontagne credits that moment for changing his life forever. It’s a long way from the shoe factory job he later quit to performances on Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo or The Music Hall in Portsmouth, where the rootsy singer-songwriter will play a sold-out solo show on Wednesday, Nov. 30.

A few people were lucky enough to be a proverbial fly-on-the-wall when it was all coming together for Ray.

Former Rustic Overtones drummer Tony McNaboe is one such “fly.” He isn’t likely to forget the first time he heard Lamontagne’s voice, either. It was a few years before the world knew of the future star, and McNaboe had been booked to do a session with him at Big Sound Studio in Westbrook, Maine. Unfortunately for McNaboe, he had just spent the entire night at a Dunkin Donuts on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass., after locking his keys in the car.

“It took something like eight and a half hours for AAA to come and get the keys out of the car. The session was at 11 a.m.,” McNaboe recalls. “We got in the car and drove straight to the studio. I walked in, feeling irritable. I hadn’t slept. I just wanted to do the session and go home and get some sleep.”
As Fast As bassist Pat Hodgkins, Jeremiah Freed guitarist Nick Goodale and McNaboe had all been booked to back LaMontagne. They each introduced themselves to the now notoriously shy singer and gathered around him to hear, for the first time, the songs they would be recording that day.

LaMontagne sat on a stool and started to sing a still-unreleased song called “Country Girl.”  McNaboe’s day, and career, took a turn for the better.

“By the time he was through with the first chorus, with the whole way I was feeling, I had to pull my hat down and sit down because I had started to cry. I thought, ‘Wow this is amazing. Then he played me ‘Shelter’ (a song that eventually made the ‘Trouble’ CD), and when he got to that chorus, it literally almost knocked me over.”

“I was like holy shit, I can’t believe this guy is from, like—Lewiston!” McNaboe continues. “And all of a sudden he was like, here. It’s like he was from a different time.”

McNaboe eventually landed a permanent drum gig with LaMontagne, and has been with him on tour around the world thanks to that magical “hired gun” studio job in Westbrook. It’s an experience that McNaboe relishes after slugging it out in a van with legendary Portland rockers Rustic Overtones for the better part of a decade.

“It was fun to watch it from the outside, after doing what (Rustic Overtones) had been doing for so long,” says McNaboe of LaMontagne’s success in the industry. “Just to see what happens what someone actually does get out of here. Then to be pulled along afterwards?” McNaboe gives a grateful sigh. He says they hope to start recording the next record early next year.

Thirty-something recording engineer/producer Jonathan Wyman of Portland eventually recorded the session McNaboe and Co. put to tape. “The first time I heard Ray, I wasn’t doing the session,” he says. “I was puttering away in the control room, catching up on some stuff and I heard him. It was one of those rare moments where within a matter of a few notes, you know you’re in the presence of something rare and special.”

Bassist Pat “Hache” Hodgkins got a last-minute call to fill in on the morning of the session. It seems the bass player they had lined up couldn’t make it. Hodgkins is happy he got the call.
“It was one of those sessions you walk away from and you think, ‘I hope that goes well (for him)’ because he deserves it,” Hodgkins says. Obviously things worked out. “It was magic,” he said, “ His voice is very dynamic. It’s very soft one minute, it’s a growl the next. It’s very impassioned. You cant fake that kind of sincerity.”

“I had never met him or heard of him prior to that (session),” McNaboe said, “I remember leaving there with a rough mix and going over to a friend’s house and saying, ‘man you’ve gotta hear this, you’ve gotta hear what we did.’ I was a fan from the first day.”

It’s fun to imagine LaMontagne earning his fans like this, moment by moment, person by person, across the country. Better yet to to re-live it if you’re one of the lucky ones with tickets to Wednesday’s show at The Music Hall.