'There Will Be No Darkness': Laetitia Tamko On The Making Of 'Vagabon'
"I'm naturally soft spoken," Laetitia Tamko says. "But when I sing, I'm not soft spoken."
Much of Infinite Worlds, the first album Tamko recorded as Vagabon, was her with a guitar, singing achingly introspective songs about the search for home and safety. Tamko says when she recorded it, she was uncomfortable with how deep her voice was. But now, hundreds of live performances later, she's embraced it.
She recalls stumbling across a tweet where someone said she sang like she had peanut butter stuck at the roof of her mouth. She gives a self-assured laugh; she thought the image was hilarious.
"I don't know if I'm breaking any singing rules, but to me it doesn't matter," Tamko says. "You know, it's my voice and it's deeply personal and I don't want it to be perfect."
Tamko's second album, the soon-to-be-released, self-titled Vagabon, is written from the perspective of someone who found not just the space to call home, but also a firm grip on her artistic identity, and with it, the luxury of being interested in what happens when carefully set boundaries dissolve. On the new album's "Every Woman," Tamko lets herself sink into the lowest part of her register to sing about generational exhaustion. On "Please Don't Leave the Table," Tamko floats a Destiny's Child reference in a relaxed falsetto: "When you call, say my name, say my name." She tries the folk singer, the popstar and the bedroom indie rocker all on for size.
Tamko is in the middle of a process she calls "the death of [her] imposter syndrome." But the phenomenon feels like it merits a more active phrasing. Tamko is quashing her self-doubt.
She's done with "walking into a space and wanting someone to feel like I'm non-threatening by making myself really, really small." She's also been removing a tendency to downplay the strength of her art.
"I feel like I made an amazing record." She pauses, exasperated. "Why can't I say that?"
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We are arguably at our healthiest when we set boundaries; when we let a relationship or a project
