When Ray LaMontagne does a solo show, one of the side effects of not having a band onstage with him is, “I can’t shut up.”

That’s what he said Tuesday night at the Providence Performing Arts Center, and the New Hampshire native sure did talk a lot. After a pretty uncommunicative opening segment, LaMontagne had a Samuel Beckett-like one-sided conversation with an offstage guitar tech, told us about troubles with women (“They said if you look like a pit bull and sing like a bird, women will sleep with you. That’s [expletive]”), his experiences as a carpenter (“I mainly just carried stuff”) and an unsuccessful stint as an apple picker. And those were just the bits I can repeat.

In between all that, though, he played some of the most beautiful and yet no-nonsense songs of the modern singer-songwriter era, full of American-roots influences and sharply observed lyrical details.

Like Jackson Browne before him, LaMontagne’s songs are more about the emotional spaces that come in between the major events, rather than the events themselves. But LaMontagne has a plain-spoken, almost but not quite clichéd, way with words that draws the listener in.

There were touches of Townes Van Zant and Neil Young in his work during the show, which encompassed material from his three albums, and the influence of the former was most obvious when (following a digression about LaMontagne’s uncle, and seeing Van Zant with him) LaMontagne launched into a lovely version of Van Zant’s gorgeous “Loretta,” a song of romantic contentment, followed by LaMontagne’s own “Winter Birds,” an equally beautiful piece of New England-set pastoralism where natural and romantic imagery sat side-by-side in a tradtional yet seemingly new way.

As LaMontagne hid under a cowboy hat for most of the show, it was incongruous to hear his voice — call it an incredibly loud whisper, for lack of a better term — coming from such an impassive spectre. His ability to emote credibly gave such simple moments as the ending of “Jolene” a power that a lesser performer couldn’t hack. And the visual simplicity was accented by a small screen behind him, where a series of images — a gloomy canal, some railroad tracks, some abstractions — were projected. And that was it.

Some of the songs missed Ethan Johns’ excellent production touches from the recorded versions, and an hour-plus solo acoustic show is always going to feel a little long by the end. Still, LaMontagne finished strong, with the best-known stuff coming out at the end.

Highlights in the late going included the country influences and detail of “Jolene”; the Memphis soul-influenced hit “Trouble,” with LaMontagne showing his greatest vocal power of the night; a just-hanging-together wave at “Shelter”; the shouting blues of “Henry Nearly Killed Me” and the encore of “All the Wild Horses,” dedicated to his apple-picking compatriot as a memoir of wild youthful times.

Opener David Gutter, the singer of the Maine-based Rustic Overtones, mixed solo and band material, including songs from the new band disc that comes out Saturday. His voice was strong — somehow simultaneously luminous and sandpaper-like. The songs worked best when they stuck to detail — the emotional wallow of “Oxygen” felt unearned. But the homesick-soldier blues of the band’s “Dear Mr. President” was affecting; “The New Way Out,” the title track from the new band disc, was a song of burgeoning possibility, and the solo song “Shorty” was an entertaining bit of cultural defamiliarization.

rmassimo@projo.com