LÆTITIA TAMKO’S musical origin story sounds familiar: Inspired by the sudden urge to channel herself into something external, she speedily wrote, recorded, and released her cathartic debut EP, Persian Garden, under the moniker Vagabon in 2014. But the result of this common exercise was something wholly new; in the EP’s six folksy guitar-rock confessionals, she turned her insides out with searing, radical vulnerability.
“I started to play guitar when I was 17. My first guitar came with an instructional DVD that I watched and learned all the major chords that were on the video,” Tamko says over the phone. But after this preliminary instruction, she put down the guitar until her junior year of college, when she began making music as Vagabon.
Now the producer/multi-instrumentalist is getting ready to release her debut full-length album, Infinite Worlds, on Father/Daughter Records in February. Several songs on the album are reworked versions of Persian Garden originals, including “Cold Apartment” and “The Embers.” The latter pushes the hardcore intimacy of Tamko’s vocals to the forefront, bringing a rush of power to the lyrics “Run and tell everybody that Lætitia is a small fish/I’m just a small fish/And you’re a shark that hates everything/You’re a shark that eats every fish.”