Ray Bonneville - Easy Gone (2014)

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Ray Bonneville - Easy Gone (2014)

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Red House Records is pleased to announce a new release by Ray Bonneville, a poet of the demimonde whose new album, Easy Gone, was released on April 15, 2014. The album finds the French Canadian-born, American-bred guitarist/ songwriter delivering a powerful, gritty batch of songs written from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge, including a stint in Vietnam and a struggle with drug addiction. In his life, he’s been a bush pilot and a cab driver among other jobs, living both in the States and French-speaking Canada. A true raconteur with a lifetime of stories to tell, the self-taught musician was just too busy living to get around to opening his storybook until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing. But with a style that draws comparisons to such artists as JJ Cale and Daniel Lanois, this blues-influenced, New Orleans- inspired “song and groove man,” as he’s been so aptly described, luckily found his rightful calling. With the release of this tour de force, Ray confirms that he’s an artist whose time has definitely come.

On Easy Gone, Bonneville delivers 10 reasons why longevity pays off. On each song, his taut guitarwork shimmers like the scales on coiled rattler, menacing and confident. His voice carries the rich, natural timbre of time and his harmonica rhythms add an extra dollop of grit to his streetwise sound. Produced by Bonneville and Justin Douglas, Easy Gone wears the faded workclothes of a man who knew when he “said I do to a highway,” as he sings in “Who Do Call the Shots,” that it wasn’t going to be an easy marriage. But he also knew divorce was not an option, and affirms his vows in soulful lyrics that balance thoughtful observation, impassioned emotion and the restless soul of a wanderer.

Songs like “When I Get to New York,” “Mile Marker 41” and “Love is Wicked” percolate with hints of something sinister and sexy. In the bluesy “Wicked,” you can almost hear the finger-poppers lurking in the club’s corners — the ones who might get a little wicked themselves later on. Even the album’s lone cover, of Hank Williams’ classic, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” carries a groove and momentum that’s Bonneville’s alone. It’s haunting, like many of his songs. He populates a lot of them with society’s fringes: the desperate and dangerous, damaged and vulnerable.

“I like the criminals and the lost people,” he says. “That’s why I love Flannery O’Connor and those kind of writers. ’Cause I’m lost myself.”

Whether that’s true or not, he knows how hard it can be for our internal compasses to lock on the direction in which we might need to go. That’s the subject of “Where Has My Easy Gone,” written with drummer Geoff Arsenault. In it, he sings, “In the heart of a seeker a needle swings/homing on some elusive thing/I looked in the endless sky down along the sea/I could not find my easy.”

With just a few simple words, Bonneville clearly expresses his thoughts, while allowing space for multiple interpretations. “The whole songwriting thing, to me, is mysterious, and I want to keep it that way,” Bonneville says.

His highway life began at age 12 when his parents moved their nine French-speaking children from Quebec to Boston. He learned to play a little piano, then guitar, but language and cultural challenges made school uninviting. But before getting expelled, he played weekend frat parties in New England with a young band that drove to gigs in a green Cadillac ambulance. At 17, he joined the Marines, mainly to escape his devoutly religious, oppressively authoritarian father. That was just before Vietnam began showing up on the nightly news. He wound up there for more than a year. Post-discharge, he discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Butterfield, James Cotton and other bluesmen, and taught himself to play harmonica in- between fares while driving a cab in Boston. That led to playing in a duo known as Bonneville & Hayes.

Bonneville spent the ‘70s in Boulder, Colo., where he formed the Ray Bonneville Blues Band, an electric five-piece, and got over his fear of flying by earning a commercial pilot’s license. “I was hooked bad right from the start,” he says. “When I was flying, I felt completely at home, like the plane’s wings were part of my body.”

He headed to the Pacific Northwest — first Alaska, then Seattle — flying wherever he could and playing rowdy rooms where listeners wanted to get their groove on, which helped him evolve a delivery that covered all bases. “My thumb became my bass player and my index finger became my lead guitar and rhythm player,” he explains. “My feet became my drums and with my harmonica and my vocal, made for a four-piece blues band.”

In Seattle, he got hooked on something else: his old friend, cocaine. Escaping to Paris, where he knew the language and could avoid temptation, he busked and played for boozy late-night revelers, but for the first time, Bonneville also encountered audiences who sat in silence, truly listening.

“It scared me,” he admits. “I realized that you’d better have something to say if you’re going to play in front of this kind of crowd.”

Returning stateside in ’83, he moved to New Orleans. Training pilots by day and playing at night, he was stirred by the city’s hypnotic undercurrent of mystery and magic, which hangs in the humid air like a voodoo spell. In his six years there, it seeped into his sound — and still ripples through it today. His post-Katrina ode, “I am the Big Easy,” was folk radio’s No. 1 song of 2008 and earned the International Folk Alliance’s 2009 Song of the Year Award, but Bonneville wasn’t yet ready to write in New Orleans. That would take more living.

The romantic notion of becoming a bush pilot took him to northern Quebec’s wilderness, where he shuttled sportsmen via seaplane and played Montreal clubs in the off-season. That is, until, flying in fog, he almost hit a power line, and with no fuel left, barely found water to land on. After a nerve-calming whiskey, he decided his bush-pilot days were done. At 41, he moved to Montreal and began to write. He also began touring and recording; his 1999 album, Gust of Wind, won a Juno Award.

In 2003, Bonneville moved again, this time to Arkansas, where the fly-fishing was good. He began recording for Red House Records, and adding his talents to albums by Mary Gauthier, Gurf Morlix, Eliza Gilkyson, Ray Wylie Hubbard and other prominent artists. Bonneville also has shared songwriting credits with Tim O’Brien, Phil Roy and Morlix, among others. Slaid Cleaves placed Bonneville’s “Run Jolee Run”
on his lauded 2009 album, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away.

Bonneville headed to Austin in 2006, and released Goin’ By Feel, his second Red House album. Allmusic.com gave it four stars, the same as Gust of Wind, Roll It Down and Bad Man’s Blood — which it calls his “magnum opus,” noting, “With darkness and light fighting for dominance … he’s stripped away every musical excess to let the songs speak for themselves.”

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On 2011's Bad Man's Blood, singer/songwriter/guitarist Ray Bonneville revealed himself as a songwriter in the same tradition that begat J.J. Cale: equal parts blues, rockabilly, folk, country, and R&B. On Easy Gone, he establishes that he is also a unique stylist. His words and metaphors are skeletally spare, stiletto sharp. There aren't any extended guitar breaks. His pace is unhurried and deliberate, rhythm and melody parts of the same animal. Produced with Justin Douglas, Bonneville's band is small and his grooves tight. The settings in these songs are the American highway, the road in all its seduction and fury. His traveling characters are all vulnerable to the gnawing hole of loneliness; they're hungry for connection but can only inhabit it for a moment if at all, because they're haunted – or pursued by – the spirits of restlessness and movement. Bonneville has always been drawn to hard-bitten characters, not for what they signify, but simply for who they are. In the first person songs here, his narrator is inseparable from them. "Who Do Call the Shots" is a snaky, mercurial blues with snarling guitar lines that testify against the harsh blackness: "Four hundred miles of dark road on this no mercy night/Lie-telling shadows tryin' to fool my eyes…Riding a line thin as razor between eternities/used up luck against a long cold sleep…" "Shake Off Them, Blues," with its slippery, sleepy NOLA R&B, is deceptive in its emotional depth. "Where Has My Easy Gone," with Eliza Gilkyson on backing vocals, is sweet, weary Americana that asks questions we all have to answer as we age. "Love Is Wicked" contains a brooding Willie Dixon-esque groove that retells the eternal "Frankie and Johnnie" story with the drama of a film noir script. "Lone Freighter's Wail" is a tender, soulful, ballad whose title image bears witness to the lost and those who will be: "I wail for the old man/Alone on a porch/looking back on/what is no more….I wail for the drifter/who is like me/no direction/or sure place to be…" Hank Williams' "So Lonesome I Could Cry," with a low-moan harmonica and silvery guitars, is a modern country-blues that exemplifies its subject matter chillingly. The murder ballad "Mile Marker 41," uses sinister slide and fingerpicked electric guitars, a tense bassline, and martial snare; it connects directly to Cale's slow-churning grooves that ratchet tension like a coiled rattlesnake. The evil in its narrative is balanced by his protagonist's suffocating, consumptive paranoia. The songs on Easy Gone depict aspects of the wandering life without romanticizing it. Bonneville skillfully strips the veneer from popular illusions about the freedom of the road. His characters choose it or are cursed by it, but either way, they accept it as the price of doing business. Easy Gone is not just another chapter in his remarkable late-blooming saga, but the finest one to date.

~ Thom Jurek, All Music

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Ray Bonneville - Easy Gone (2014)

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Ray Bonneville - Easy Gone (2014)

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