Suffering is Softening with Vagabon’s Latest Album

Performing as Vagabon, multi-instrumentalist Cameroonian-American Laetitia Tamko is the kind of artist whose sound is always evolving. Her three albums, ​​Infinite Worlds (2017), Vagabon (2019) and Sorry I Haven’t Called (2023), each have a personality of their own. Ranging from moody, Lykke Li-esque indie-rock to celestial FKA Twigs-like dance-pop, Vagabon’s projects do a little bit of everything — much like Tamko herself. “The artists who I really like and respect are constantly giving us something new,” she tells me when we chat ahead of her performance at this year’s Kilby Block Party. 

Tamko is a self-taught musician and producer; in addition to vocals with a range I truly think is reserved only for angels, Tamko plays piano, drums, guitar, synths and probably anything else you can think of, too. But being a career artist wasn’t Plan A. She says, “I used to kind of scoff at people who’d say, ‘I must be an artist, there is no other way,’ because I lived a very different life before this.” She studied and worked in computer engineering, which she says influenced her outlook toward art and the endurance it takes to make it. “Music is this very mystical counterpart to my very technical brain and technical education,” she says.

“I find that words — although English is my second language — are a really fun playground.” In her current songwriting process, Tamko is largely inspired by classics — but not the stuffy kind. “Speaking of playgrounds, a piece of work I read recently that felt like linguistically was just so fun and funny and smart and is Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, which I loved for its kinship with Proust. Right now I’m reading my first Dostoevsky [book]: The Brothers Karamazov.” She says that she gravitates toward comedic writers — especially those who can brighten something dark with playful levity, which is something evident in her own lyricism. “I like playful language and I like using language in ways that are unpretentious and effective and accessible,” Tamko says. 

Sorry I Haven’t Called, Vagabon’s latest album — on which Vampire Weekend founding member Rostam Batmanglij collaborated — is particularly emblematic of the balance between darkness and light Tamko strikes within her work. Though created following the death of a close friend and collaborator, Sorry I Haven’t Called gushes with joyfulness and hope. “Before this album, I think there was a lot of association of my work with despair. Although I think a lot of artists suffer, I think suffering is softening as well. I think one’s ability to experience joy after knowing grief or knowing despair is a joy greater felt. I think that’s kind of a throughline in [the works of] everyone who’s ever written about grief or from a place of grief — it’s this ability to now find beauty in smaller and smaller and smaller things than before.”

Tamko says a new Vagabon album is well underway. “It’s a bit of a return to form in some ways,” she says, “while also taking from all of the experimentations that I’ve done along the way.” Though it’s too early in the process to say much more about it, Tamko is excited that this album will be vocals-first: “Voice is a huge part of all my records, but I think this time around, I’m not afraid of the richness of my voice, the deepness of its timbre.” 

A Vagabon project doesn’t translate directly from album to stage. “The music really comes alive in this set of people, which is me and my band playing together and improvising together. The live performance is really its own thing that gives people what they want if they know the record, but also brings a new interpretation to some of it,” Tamko says. There are a few tracks in particular you’ll want to check out before Vagabon’s show at Kilby Block Party — during “Lexicon” you’ll be invited to dance, during “Water Me Down” you might accidentally transcend to heaven, and during “Carpenter” the band will really hit their stride — it’s everyone’s favorite to perform. See Vagabon on Friday, May 16, starting at 2:10 PM on the Lake Stage.

Read more to prep yourself for Kilby Block Party:
Bartees Strange on Horror, Alternate Worlds and George Clinton
17 Stand-Out Performances From Kilby Block Party 5