RAY LAMONTAGNE Ten years ago Ray LaMontagne released his first album, TROUBLE, the gold-certified start to a fiercely ambitious, Grammy Award-winning, critically praised career that's encompassed three more albums, several EPs, a slew of soundtrack compilations and arresting live performances fronting a variety of ensembles. "It certainly feels like some time has passed," LaMontagne says now. "But I have to say, boy, time flies..." And LaMontagne is still having fun all these years later -- and with his fifth album, SUPERNOVA, maybe more fun than ever. "Fun is a trite word. I kind of hate to use it -- but at the same time, I don't know how else to say it," LaMontagne says of the 10-song set, which was produced by the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach and recorded at his Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. "It was just an enjoyable process. These songs reflect just my joy of songwriting, what I enjoy about writing songs. they feel free to me. I didn't have to go searching around through cupboards to find the missing pieces; all the puzzle bits would just sort of burst to life in front of me. I just grabbed them and pieced them together and then would be surprised at what was in front of me -- like, 'Wow, that's cool!' "It's an experience unlike any other I've had making a record." SUPERNOVA indeed bursts with a spirited bonhomme and a rocking, technicolor-tinged energy that's different from its four predecessors. The title track and first single is a grooving, Nuggets-style burst of neo-psychedelia in which LaMontagne's high register sounds hoarse with pleasure over the explosive power of love. "She's the One" is a bold, punchy, swirling rocker, while "Lavender," "Julia" and "Smashing" are soaked in lava lamp melodies and day-glo grooves. LaMontagne and the crack band Auerbach assembled for the SUPERNOVA lay back into rustic, rootsy territory during "Ojai" and "Drive-in Movies," while "Airwaves" rides a light samba rhythm and "No Other Way" is a love ballad replete with trippy images. And "Pick Up a Gun" is SUPERNOVA's noir epic, from its martial cadence to its airy ambience and lush keyboard textures. "I know I was hearing certain different instrumentation -- a sharper sound, a broader sound," explains LaMontagne, who for the first time ever put together detailed, fully-rendered demos to give Auerbach "a sort of road map" of what he was after. "I sent him a note about the vocals, especially; 'You're going to hear my voice in a different place here.' Usually its' very round, very full, very up-front, and I wanted to sort of put them in a little bit of a different place this time and make them more a part of the overall sonic palette and not quite so in your ear as they've been in the past. I wanted my voice to be equally within the palette of colors and not be the focus." LaMontagne did not come to this new place easily, however. Coming off the success of 2010's GOD WILLIN' & THE CREEK DON'T RISE, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album ("Beg Steal or Borrow" was also nominated for Song of the Year), LaMontagne returned to his home in the foothills of the Berkshires mountain range in western Massachusetts ready to get to work on what would come next. His work ethic had been honed since his earliest days as a songwriter -- getting up each morning, breaking for lunch and dinner, working into the evenings. "I would force myself to finish the things I started," LaMontagne reveals. But things didn't quite pan out as they had before. "I had a batch of songs that wasn't calling at me strongly enough," LaMontagne relates. "It was all good stuff. I felt like everything had potential. There were good melodies. But they weren't calling for my attention that strongly, so I just kept putting them down and not finishing them." This, not surprisingly, was troubling, so LaMontagne reached out to Elvis Costello, a friend and personal hero, for some counsel. "He sent me back a really lovely letter that said, 'There have been times I've felt the same way, too,' and he just sort of said, 'You're the only Ray LaMontagne there is, so just trust that voice,' and that was really enough." LaMontagne followed that by digging into Costello's music -- specifically his second album, THIS YEAR'S MODEL -- for a crash course in what his mentor was talking about. "That record is just unapologetic. It's so...Elvis, y'know. He's just so unapologetically himself, and there was something about that that really struck me, and it was like a light bulb came on, like, 'Oh yeah, that's it! You've just got to be yourself.' "I think that was sort of a turning point. I just kind of turned off the inner critic and got out of my own way and started making music." LaMontagne began breaking some of his established rules, too. Rather than slavishly finishing off whatever he started, he allowed himself to be open to the muses that took him on tangents or in entirely new directions. "In the past I would push them aside and say, 'I don't have time to listen to you right now' and keep working on what I had going," LaMontagne says. "This time I said, 'Y'know, I'm going to follow you. I'm going to take today and just see where this goes' -- and there's 'Supernova,' bang! A new song. A new idea. "The whole record was written that way. It was playful and really wonderful. It felt the way it feels in the beginning, when you're first writing songs. They're not precious in any way. It's just a joyful, emotional truth, not like anything that's being dredged up. I just ran with it, man. It was a great feeling." And after crafting the first nine songs, "She's the One" came to LaMontagne in a half-day burst to finish off the album. "The whole thing came fully formed, like a gift," he notes. "Whatever song God is out there who'd been busting my ass for a year trying to pull songs together and hammer things out, that one was just a little present -- 'Here, just have this one for free.' " LaMontagne says he's "never gone into the studio feeling as good about a batch of songs as I did with these," and his enthusiasm was matched by Auerbach, who played guitar as well as produced, and the core band that included drummer Richard Swift, bassist Dave Roe, keyboardist Leon Michaels and multi-instrumentalist Seth Kaufman and Russ Pahl. "It was really a very quick learning curve," LaMontagne recalls. "I hadn't met any of these guys before and didn't know anything about them, so it took a little bit to get comfortable. But they were all really, really, really smart and everyone had ideas and was enthusiastic, and what really pleased me and kind of surprised me a little bit was how excited they were about the songs. They were really excited. They thought they were interesting, which made me feel even better about them." LaMontagne is now looking forward to giving SUPERNOVA's songs an airing on stage. He's put together a new band, and he anticipates a new wrinkle for his performances as well. "They give me a chance to play more electric guitar, which I love to do," LaMontagne says. "But I've always had such good players on stage, and so many of my songs are keyed into what I'm doing on the acoustic guitar. So I'm really looking forward to being able to set the acoustic down for half the set, finally. That will be a nice feeling." PAOLO NUTINI Just one listen to Paolo Nutini’s magnificent third long-player Caustic Love reveals exactly why it was worth the wait. It’s been five years since the towering success of its 2009 predecessor, Sunny Side Up, which like the 27-year-old Paisley-born singer’s 2006 debut These Days, sold a staggering 1.5 million copies in the UK alone. Described by Q magazine as “a truly excellent modern soul album”, it’s a record that acknowledges the classic music of the past while fixing its eyes firmly on the future. There may be echoes of some of soul music’s greats within the grooves of Caustic Love – Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, among others – but taken as a whole it’s a masterful creation which proves Paolo to be very much his own man. To reach this point, though, Nutini had to return to his roots. After a long period on the road and in the spotlight, the singer travelled home to Scotland to gather his thoughts and plot his next move, while enjoying a long-deserved period of downtime and rest. “I wanted to spend a bit of time at home,” he says. “Just to reconnect with my family and friends. It only takes going home for a little while to put things in perspective.” It was time well spent. In Scotland, Nutini refreshed his head by indulging his passion for photography, while enjoying new extra-curricular pursuits including carpentry and outdoors survivalism. “I learned how to carve things out of wood and fix things,” he explains. “Learned some nature survival stuff. Then I spent a bit of time wandering and retracing some of my footsteps to places I’d been on tour. Except I had the time to enjoy them and explore a bit.” Even in relaxation mode, though, Nutini’s thoughts were filled with music, as the songs for what would become Caustic Love began to float into his mind. “I’ve been writing songs the whole time,” he stresses. “It wasn’t as if there was a ‘stop’ button on making music. There was a hunger for me to expand my knowledge of the production of music. I wanted to practice and explore and enhance my skills. For me, it’s all about progressing.” Preliminary sessions for Caustic Love took place in Glasgow, in a former police training facility in the city’s The Gorbals. “It’s a building that’s owned by my friend’s father,” Paolo explains. “There were old jail cells and shooting ranges underground. We just wandered around and set up and recorded.” Joining him on this adventure were his co-producers for the album, Dani Castelar (Snow Patrol, R.E.M.) and Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry). “Leo’s a great guitarist,” says Nutini. “He was a big part of certain songs’ conception. Dani’s the glue. He made it happen.” As recording progressed, Nutini and crew travelled further afield to work in a variety of different locations, including Dublin, Valencia and Los Angeles. Along the way, other key contributors added their colours to Caustic Love, namely Rollo Armstrong (Faithless), Barrie Cadogan (Primal Scream), Tchad Blake (Elvis Costello), revered bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, The Who), legendary American drummer James Gadson (Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye) and Janelle Monáe, who added a stirring rap to the slinky funk of Fashion. In their own ways, each city and player leant something different to the resulting record. “That’s been the thing we tried to do,” says Paolo. “To fuse the experience of where you are with what you’re doing and who you’re with. You’ve got to catch things as they come.” Caustic Love is an album of unforgettable songs and choice grooves, topped with Nutini’s gutsy voice, which just gets better and better with time and singles him out as arguably the best singer of his generation. This was proven by the live video (filmed at Abbey Road Studios) of the slow-burning, passionate politico-soul of ‘Iron Sky’, which scored almost two million plays on YouTube before the album’s release. After watching the clip, singer Adele took to Twitter to proclaim it “one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life”. “It’s one of the tracks that’s got a more social and political undertone,” says Paolo. “It’s a way to say how I feel about certain aspects of society.” One of the inspirations behind this facet of the album was Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 futuristic film, Metropolis. “It’s the idea that the machine is taking over,” says the singer. “You get it sometimes when you use the auto-checkout in shops. You go to give the guy the money behind the counter and they point you in the direction of the robot version. Then I’m nodding towards how I feel about the amount of money that gets ploughed into war. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in a faceless, oppressive society and you’re trying to find the way out and the way forward. The waters are so muddied in front of everybody’s eyes.” Another classic film proved to be a massive inspiration, providing the moment in ‘Iron Sky’ that makes the pulse race, namely the speech (“You are not machines! You are not cattle!”) taken from Charlie Chaplin’s brave Hitler-lampooning The Great Dictator, made in 1940 during the Second World War. After hearing the track, the film legend’s estate cleared the sample for Nutini to use. “I got to put Charlie Chaplin’s name on the songwriting credits,” points out an elated Nutini. “Great stuff. It was just like, Wow.” Elsewhere, the naggingly addictive worshipping love song ‘Scream (Funk My Life Up)’ is, says Paolo, “an homage to somebody that’s flipped it all upside down for you and caught you off guard.” Meanwhile, soaring breakup ballad ‘One Day’, says the singer, was birthed by the thought that “it’s not always a rejection to walk the other way”, and in the similarly-themed ‘Let Me Down Easy’, Nutini duets with US soul singer Bettye Lavette in a sample from her 1969 hit of the same name. Piece by piece, Caustic Love amounts to an album that will surely be viewed as a modern classic, right down to its open-ended title, for which the singer says there are many meanings. “It can sum up all the different kinds of love,” he explains. “The unrequited love, the new love, the lost love. It’s about that intensity. The warm acid rain that can cleanse you of all your pretences. It strips you and then you’re vulnerable, but to the good stuff as well. The beauty and the passion and the comfort. Then if it takes the other turning it can corrode the comforts and leave you vulnerable to the jealousies.” As the latest thrilling chapter in the story of Paolo Nutini, these thirteen tracks spotlight the singer’s stunning musical development. “It’s been very experimental and creative,” he concludes. “It’s not been confined. There’s certain pressures and expectations that go on, and really, you do what you do. You’ve got to have something that you want to say and you’ve got to do it with conviction. With music, you realise just how lucky you are to have this great thing in your life.” Much, it has to be said, like Caustic Love itself. LONDON GRAMMAR It is doing no disservice at all to London Grammar to say that very little happens in their songs. Talk to Hannah Reid, Dot Major and Dan Rothman and it’s soon clear that they’d take that as a compliment, though; that what the three of them prize above all in music is space, understatement – even silence, if that’s what a song needs. This approach – “actually, that should be ‘obsession’, Hannah corrects – has resulted in a debut album whose emotional impact is out of all proportion to the musical content of the songs. The result of 18 painstaking months spent writing and recording, its eleven tracks are testament to the trio’s innate understanding of the roles that subtlety, contrast and restraint have always played in great music. “That’s how this all started,” says Dan, “and it’s always been our primary goal, to keep space in the music. The way that, say, the guitar and vocal interact is massively important to us.” We first heard that interaction last December, when the trio posted the track Hey Now online. A brooding, haunting song, as a mission statement it made plain London Grammar’s intent: Dan’s measured, minimal guitar and Dot’s caressing piano lines and punctuating percussion are precision bombs, always on the point of explosion but, tantalisingly, never quite detonating, their sonic architecture entirely at the service of the song – and the vocals. Okay, let’s talk about those vocals. Perhaps the most endearing thing about Hannah is how absolutely unaware she seems to be of what an extraordinary singer she is. Crystal clear yet rich with vibrato, confiding yet detached, imperious yet vulnerable, Hannah’s voice translates the sound pictures the band obsess over in the studio into raw emotional reality. As Dot puts it: “I know the word is easy to misuse, but I do think Hannah’s voice is truly unique.” Hot on the heels of Hey Now, February’s Metal & Dust EP twisted the knife further, and strengthened the impression that here was a band with something new and compelling to say, but with the courage to say it as economically as possible. By the time the single Wasting My Young Years appeared, any doubts about London Grammar’s significance had disappeared. Overwhelming precisely because, both lyrically and musically, it drops hints rather than shouts in your face, the track’s sepulchral, desolate, after-hours alt-soul captures everything that is so ensnaring about the band’s less-is-more music-making. Following its release, the buzz built and the chatter grew: you started to overhear people at gigs saying, “Have you heard that new London Grammar song yet?”, and you realised you were witnessing that thrilling moment just before a band explodes. Hannah, Dot and Dan met at university, bonded over a desire, a need, to make music, and who now, like age-old friends, tease and bicker with one another – and, as Dan puts it, “Fight tooth and nail over only one thing, which is how to do what’s best for the songs. But not in order to achieve perfection. You have to avoid that trap. We really believe that the beauty is in the imperfection.” Don’t let that remark fool you that they are casual about what they do. On the contrary, they are stop-at-nothing perfectionists, sometimes to their own frustration, and sometimes, each concedes, to that of Ministry of Sound, the label to which London Grammar signed just after leaving Nottingham university and now home to their imprint label, Metal & Dust Recordings. “We were incredibly lucky in that we got spotted at that point,” says Dan. “If we’d signed with someone else it might well have been different, but they wanted to nurture us, and that’s what we needed. A lot of young bands don’t have that time. They were really clear about how to do things, they sort of didn’t want us to exist but to start again from the very beginning.” The band exchange glances. “Okay,” Dan adds with chuckle, “I’m pretty sure they thought the process would be quicker than it was.” You don’t hurry this lot, though, as everyone who works with them has discovered. Heavily Involved in every aspect of the making their album, even they admit that there came a time when the tinkering and the tweaking had to stop. “If something isn’t completely right, it really sticks out for us,” says Dot. We tend to agree about deleting stuff more easily; when it comes to putting something in, there are more disputes.” “Of the three of us,” says Dan, “I’m probably the quickest to go, ‘It’s fine as it is’. At one point while we were making the album, we got too caught up in putting too much on the tracks and losing that sense of space, so we then went through this process of deleting everything we could.” “If I’d had my way,” adds Hannah, with a wry smile, “we’d probably still be in the studio. I’m a nightmare like that. We wrote a couple of new songs earlier this year, when we were in the studio and actually meant to be learning how to play them live. But Dan stepped in, as he usually does.” Her bandmate is having none of this. “I’m always being accused of that,” he says, looking mock outraged, “because I’m sort of the business head. But there were times during the writing and recording process when I just sensed that it was time to put something out, that if we didn’t release Hey Now, we’d miss our moment.” Well, they didn’t miss their moment. It’s right here, right now. The album is – finally – ready, new songs such as If You Wait and Flickers possessing that strange duality of lament and defiance, that beauty that is somehow at once icy and suffused with warmth, filled with textures, colours, shadings and interjections that are barely there, but which achieve a devastating power. The next single, Strong, is the final, killer blow. Building – as you would expect from London Grammar – from nothing, from the barest of bones, Hannah’s finest vocal yet propels the song to its climax. It’s a song you finish listening to and then find yourself thinking: very little has happened, but everything has changed. “The longer we’ve gone on as a band,” says Hannah, “the more we agree on what we’re doing and why. You eventually reach a point where you find your place, and you realise your music has found its place, too. You just know.” She’s right: they have found it. Now it’s your turn.