Many years ago, before he had learned to sing, written a song or had become the object of a major-label bidding war, Ray LaMontagne was, as usual, awakened at 4:30 a.m. by his clock radio. It was playing a song that changed his life: Stephen Stills' "Treetop Flyer." That day, LaMontagne blew off his job at a Lewiston, Maine, shoe factory to hunt down the 1991 album Stills Alone. "I was in a very dark place and very self-destructive and very close to killing myself in various ways," says the thirty-one-year-old folk singer. After he found the Stills record, he started digging into Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ray Charles. "It was like I found a religion," he says. "I realized that you could take all this stuff that's making you miserable and turn it into something beautiful."

In September, RCA will release LaMontagne's first album, Trouble. His sandpaper croon sounds like church, Van Morrison and dusty porches. "When I started singing," he says, "it was weird, because I was an introverted person. At first I just whispered." LaMontagne recently left the rural-Maine log cabin he built and had lived in with his wife and two kids for the past five years. "Life is changing," he says with disarming understatement.

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