Ray LaMontagne: Trouble [LIULA]

Why you'll love it

This 20th anniversary edition is newly remastered on 180g vinyl, in an embossed gatefold jacket with a printed inner sleeve. Trouble sold 239,000 copies in the US and kept finding new listeners for years through TV and film.

This edition

• 20th anniversary edition
• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Printed inner sleeve
• Lyrics included
• Poster included

About the album

Ray LaMontagne was working in a shoe factory in Maine when he heard a Stephen Stills song on the radio and decided to quit. A few years later he walked into a studio with producer Ethan Johns, who played nearly everything that isn't Ray: drums, bass, piano, harmonium, extra guitars and the string arrangements.

The result is a warm, worn-in folk soul record built around that cracked, smoky voice. The title track stomps and claps, "Shelter" and "Hold You in My Arms" are slow burners, and "Jolene" (his own song, not the Dolly Parton one) has become a standard, later covered by the Zac Brown Band. Sara Watkins adds fiddle to "Hannah" and "Jolene," and Jen Stills sings on "Narrow Escape."

"How Come" turned up in The Devil Wears Prada, "Hold You in My Arms" in Grey's Anatomy, and the album climbed into the UK top five in 2006, two years after it first came out. Twenty years on, it still sounds like a man with a guitar on a porch, which is exactly the sort of evening we've been trying to schedule since 2004.

Also at Kops: more Ray LaMontagne on vinyl · browse Singer-Songwriter

Tracklist

Listen

On Liula Records (originally RCA) (cat# LIULA-0066-1), a reissue of the 2004 album.