Austin-via Montreal artist Ray Bonneville is playing a concert in support of his upcoming Red House Records release, Easy Gone, out April 15, 2015 on the Grammy-winning indie. Ray’s gritty, Delta-influenced sound didn’t happen overnight; he didn’t write his first song until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing. But with a style that draws comparisons to JJ Cale and Daniel Lanois (or a French-Canadian Ton Waits), this blues-influenced, New Orleans-inspired “song and groove man,” as he’s been described, has found his rightful calling.

Born in Quebec, his family moved to Boston when he was 12. Not speaking English, he struggled with school and dropped out in his teens. He served a year in Vietnam as a Marine, struggled and overcame drug addiction, earned a pilot’s license in Colorado, then moved to Alaska, then Seattle, and Paris and New Orleans. But it took a close call while piloting a seaplane across the Canadian wilderness to make him decide it was time to get busy writing songs – gritty narratives inspired by a lifetime of hard-won knowledge set against his gritty, soulful guitar and blistering harmonica playing.