“Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

Singalong 015: feeling like a new person

“She lifts her skirt up to her knees, walks through the garden rows with her bare feet, laughing”

I got to hear Ray Lamontagne on a winter night at Radio City, the year after he released "Til the Sun Turns Black". My girlfriend at the time and I had formed a deep bond with that record, so I bought four tickets. But on the afternoon of the show, the other two people who we'd invited to join us decided not to come. I had to find a way to unload the other two tickets at the last minute.

Have you ever tried to sell your extra concert tickets in front of a big city concert venue? It's a gauntlet. You’re competing with all the career scalpers who are there every night, selling all kinds of fake tickets. You also have the enforcement apparatus shooing those guys away, in some cases confiscating what they're holding. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Meanwhile, thousands of people mill around, meeting friends as they wend their way inside. Most people are in a hurry.

So to an introvert with a couple extra tickets on my hands, it started to seem like a pickle. We decided to take a lap around the block.

My companion worked at the time as a cocktail waitress, so she turned on the charm as we passed folks on their way in. "Going to see Ray?" she'd say to the folks we passed. Yes, they all were. Yes, they all had tickets.

“If through my cracked and dusty dime-store lips, I spoke these words out loud would no one hear me?”

And then we passed a guy leaning up against a truck. He seemed kind of quiet, downcast. "Going to see Ray?" she said, all bubbles.

"Ha. I wish."

We stopped.

"Need a ticket?"

He did. I saw my opening, but then I hesitated. How do you suss out a stranger in this situation? I needed to recoup some money, the show was starting, we had a lead... but it's the streets of New York. You know the drill: could be anybody, anything can happen.

So I smiled and asked, "what's your favorite song of Ray's?"

His face fell a bit. He looked suddenly overwhelmed by the question. There are a lot of songs to choose from. Or maybe he was busted, a lurker. I couldn’t tell, I just needed him to name one song, to see if he was legit. The clouds on his face parted:

"I don't know man. Empty?"

My man!

I forgot about selling the fourth ticket. The three of us went in and piled up our coats in the fourth seat.

“Outside the rain is tapping on the leaves / To me it sounds like they're applauding us, the quiet love we've made.”

The show was lifechanging, mainly because of the lighting design: nothing but a low purple glow and occasional faint spotlights on the musicians. You could barely see anything, but the sound penetrated deep into our hearts and I left that night feeling like a new person.

“It's the hurt I hide that fuels the fire inside me”

Ray’s version of this song encapsulates something truly remote.

I have a long history of feeling alienated, and I got my degree in underdoggery. There were dark times of thinking I was somehow separate from the sounds in the air. Folks have their reasons, the roots of how they wound up weird and alone. If pressed for mine, I wouldn't be able to whine about a central trauma. I can’t blame the acts of a specific person for sending me down the chute of feeling chronically estranged. It just kind of happened.

Some people are proud of their quirks and will cling to them as a part of their identity, to differentiate themselves. I am not. My whole life I've craved inclusion, and the shoots of my alienation stuck out of my heart like thorns begging to be removed.

Singing songs with other people is the best way I've encountered to pull thorns out of hearts. I’d love to hear a choir arrangement of this tune, but for now here’s a solo take: