A small signpost prompts Laetitia Tamko to find out her “plant personality,” and she obliges. Pulling out her iPhone, she scans a QR code and, eight questions later, is staring at a photo of a flower that looks like a frosted pinecone. As it turns out, Tamko is an ice blue calathea, or Calathea burle-marxii. According to the New York Botanical Garden—or, at least, their digital media team—that means that she’s a wallflower. “‘You recognize the importance of alone time and occasionally sequestering yourself from the outside world,’” Tamko reads aloud from her screen, laughing self-consciously. “Pretty spot on.”
On this June afternoon, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter who performs as Vagabon has just begun to emerge from a period of self-imposed seclusion. Strolling through a conservatory in this sprawling Bronx oasis, she gives the impression of someone who was recently awakened and is slowly acclimating to the outside world. Tamko has been off tour for almost a year now, finishing up work on her self-titled sophomore album. It’s the follow-up to 2017’s Infinite Worlds, a collection of homey guitar tunes that swung between elegance and chaos. The debut showcased Tamko’s deeply resonant inquiries about taking up space and searching for community, launching her from humble DIY venues to stages around the world.
But if not for the through line of Tamko’s singular, warbly voice—which, even as she gains skill and experience, retains the rawness of someone who has just discovered that she has lungs—it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that her two albums share a creator. Where Infinite Worlds leaned on conventional rock instrumentation, Vagabon is lusher, neater, and made predominantly of digital sounds. This was largely a result of scarcity: Tamko did much of her writing on the road, where the available resources were limited to her computer and herself. She describes the process as intensely isolating, an experience mirrored by the internal bent of the album’s lyrics. Tamko is still adjusting to the fact that now, as she prepares for the record’s fall release, she’s no longer her only stakeholder.
Tamko has never been to this particular botanical garden before, despite having lived in nearby Yonkers, New York, as a teenager. The current exhibition honors the life and work of the Brazilian landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx—the namesake of Tamko’s purported spirit flower, about whom she learned during a recent trip to São Paulo—with a monumental display of bromeliad plants and bossa nova music. The sky had split open just moments after we met up in Brooklyn, where Tamko lives, that morning, and the rain continues through the afternoon—bad news for garden-viewing, but good news for privacy. We walk laps around a steamy conservatory in relative solitude, snapping photos of hanging staghorn ferns and vivid, scarlet torch ginger. The only other people there are staff and a couple of retirement-age women. One friendly employee who’s seen us circling approaches to ask if we need help finding an exit.
Tamko speaks in the same way that she often sings: with soft, magnetic intensity. Throughout the day, I notice myself lowering my own voice to match hers. The quietness comes from years of being told she was intimidating—feedback she responded to, she says, by making herself as tiny and docile as possible. That sense of diminution was central to Infinite Worlds. “I feel so small,” she sings right at the top of the album’s first song, “My feet can barely touch the floor.” But contorting herself to meet people’s wayward desires is exhausting, and lately she’s trying to be less accommodating. “Every year, you find something else you don’t give a shit about anymore,” she offers, shruggingly, by way of explanation.
It’s an ongoing effort that surfaces on the new album. When Tamko intones, “I know that I was gone a lot last year/But I hoped that you’d still be here,” on a song called “In a Bind,” it sounds like a timid expression of utter betrayal. Elsewhere, she sings about personal dilution on “Water Me Down,” but rather than sounding defeated, the song—with its chipper synth line and danceable beat—is resolute and collected. So is the album’s opener, which talks about feeling good instead of feeling small. Tamko’s newfound self-assurance is on view on the record’s cover, where she is resplendent, working her angles in a striking, hexagonal hat. And one of the album’s most memorable lyrics is an eloquent statement of autonomy: “We reserve the right to be full/When we’re on our own.”
Amidst the greenery in a section adventurously dubbed the “Explorer’s Garden,” Tamko points out a banana plant and glides her fingers over its massive, waxy foliage. Seeing it makes her nostalgic—in Cameroon, where she was born and lived for much of her childhood, they used these leaves for cooking, as one might use aluminum foil. Tamko and her family moved to New York when she was 13 so that her mom could pursue graduate studies in law and international affairs, and she hasn’t had the chance to go back to her home country in nearly a decade. Upon arriving in the U.S., Tamko spoke almost no English; she learned by watching reruns of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and wearing out the family’s limited DVD selection, which included kids’ movies like Matilda and Chicken Run.
Like many immigrant households, Tamko’s was fastidious and pragmatic. “My parents always told me, ‘You can love music all you want, but always have a Plan B,’” she recalls. Her fallback ended up being engineering school, for the uncomplicated reason that it required fewer years in the classroom than a medical or law degree. It wasn’t an obvious fit—Tamko isn’t naturally great with numbers, and she sometimes got 50s on her math tests in high school. Through sheer will and self-discipline, she muscled her way to graduation from her program at Manhattan’s City College of New York, and into a job as a computer engineer. Tamko doesn’t imagine ever returning to her former profession—she wants to make records for the rest of her life—but the rigor of her experiences in hard science has informed her practice as a musician. “I’m used to being tortured to be good at something,” she tells me, before clarifying, “I don’t want to romanticize being tortured.”
Her version of torment doesn’t square with the familiar—and arguably dangerous—tortured artist archetype anyway. Many who fit that bill speak of “art as therapy,” a notion that can color mental illness or personal trauma with unintended glamour; Tamko’s agony seems less a force that drives her to create than a byproduct of the creative process itself—of her obsessive determination to excel. “I’m interested in being the best,” she says. “I’m interested in being phenomenal.” At this, she pauses for a moment, but does not hedge.
For Vagabon, being phenomenal involved ambitious goal-setting. Tamko knew she wanted to produce the entire record herself—a hefty undertaking for someone without an especially robust knowledge of Logic, her music production software of choice, or music theory. (“People are going to hate this,” she cautions, before explaining that she rarely knows what notes she’s playing on her guitar.) She managed to figure out most of the technical stuff with a combination of YouTube tutorials and patience, but some of the biggest hurdles ended up being in her own head.
Tamko says she had trouble accepting that the music she was equipped to make could be considered a “real musician’s album.” She was nagged by guilt about using Logic’s stock sounds. She went to a fancy, Grammy-lined studio in North Hollywood and discovered that she couldn’t manage to record a proper vocal take in such an imposing space. (She had better luck in a closet-sized studio back in New York.) At another point, she brought in session drummers and was inexplicably unsatisfied with their work, which she ended up scrapping altogether. In March, on her final day in the studio, Tamko tweeted that she had cried every day of recording.
As the rain starts to taper off and we nestle into a bench, I ask if she can explain why the experience made her so anguished—into an “unreasonable, uncontrollable bucket of emotions,” to use her words. She speaks about both the sheer difficulty of the task she set for herself and the stringency of her own expectations. She also mentions the difference between making her first album, which she didn’t think anyone would hear, and one that she knows will have a much higher profile. “How do I keep my naïveté, so that this doesn’t destroy me?” she recalls wondering. “How do I make my world rounded so that this isn’t the only thing I’m thinking about, sleeping about, eating about, existing in?”
To force herself to care about something else, Tamko took up long-distance running (she’s currently training for a half-marathon). To remind herself that she was good at something else, she did calculus problems every morning before recording. Given how all-consuming she finds her work, I wonder aloud if she worries about the possibility of burning out. “I have never considered it—and I consider everything,” is her response. She feels too certain that making music is her calling. “Not to be super wholesome or whatever,” she says, “But this was only a dream—only something that I saw in my head. So it makes me really believe in the things that I see in my head.”
Tamko’s success is clearly owed to her talent, drive, and stamina, but she is right that her story stands out for its sheer improbability. As a teenager, her exposure to music came mostly from the radio and MTV, where she discovered the Avril Lavigne-era pop-rocker Fefe Dobson, who she recalls as the only guitar-playing brown girl to get much air time. She picked up a starter Fender around age 17, but put it back down for an extended period when she got busy with school. A guy in her engineering program was a guitarist who talked incessantly about his band, and the idea of people she knew playing music intrigued her. She eventually started sneaking her own instrument into the jazz practice rooms on campus. Her early, low-tech recording sessions yielded a demo track called “Vermont,” which she posted to Bandcamp in early 2014. Not long after, Tamko was asked to open a show at the Silent Barn, a onetime bastion of Brooklyn DIY culture. It was, incidentally, the first concert she had ever attended.
Tamko became such a regular at the Silent Barn that friends joked about her being the venue’s house band. She appeared on bills there with artists like Frankie Cosmos and Mitski, whose scrappy aesthetic she shared, but whose arty credentials (Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline is the child of notable actors; Mitski attended music conservatory) she lacked. Over email, Mitski recalls feeling drawn to the intensity of Tamko’s performance at one of those early shows: “You could tell she cared, she took it seriously, this wasn’t just a thing she was doing as an excuse to hang out and party, or to boost her ego. This mattered.”
Back then, Tamko wasn’t very comfortable performing. She still isn’t. As she once did with math and science, she has undertaken a rigorous curriculum—this one self-designed—to help her improve. First, she worked on playing guitar and singing at the same time. Then, she set out to overcome her fear of her voice and all of its astonishing depth. With those items checked off her list, she began persuading herself to open her eyes while onstage, even though keeping them shut felt much safer.
These are only the preliminary stages of her curriculum, though. When I ask her what caliber of performance she aspires to, Tamko immediately cites a woman widely considered to be the best entertainer of her generation. “I’m a high achiever,” she reiterates. “Why not look at Beyoncé and say, ‘If I can be 30 percent of that athleticism…’ You know?”
Tamko is leaning forward on the bench now, earnestly stopping and restarting her sentences to make sure she gets them right. She wishes she had heard more stories like her own when she was a teenager. She wishes she had known that, with few exceptions, musicians are made, not born. As a result, she’s remarkably transparent about her own progress. Essentially, her entire musical journey is documented online—“Cold Apartment,” which appears on Infinite Worlds, is the first song she ever wrote. Rather than feeling any embarrassment about her nascent efforts, Tamko is proud of how far she has come. She wants people to know that she didn’t just “show up good.”
She wants to look out for people like her, she says—who don’t grow up around artists, whose parents don’t have money to buy them fancy instruments or send them to lessons—and show that the music industry has space for them, too. She also hopes to be the figure that she wished she had seen when she was younger: an artist who is vocally Cameroonian. The last time Tamko was interviewed by Pitchfork, she spoke about her desire to stand up and be seen and felt by black girls like her. After that piece was published, she was stunned to hear from readers (“not black girls, as you can imagine,” she quips) who felt that her comments constituted a deliberate effort to shut them out. Her intention was to include an audience that has historically been excluded from indie rock—not to exclude anyone who’s always had a space in the genre.
“I’m not in a place of being responsible for accurately speaking about everyone’s point of view. I don’t have that perspective,” she stresses. “But I do know trauma, and I do know pain, and I do know the power that comes from those things.” To that end, she wrote a song called “All the Women,” borrowing a line from Nayyirah Waheed, the elusive writer known for her Instagram micropoems. The song came quickly, in an urgent, five-minute burst of inspiration that Tamko still struggles to wrap her head around. (After Tamko learned that Waheed preferred to not be quoted, the singer changed the song’s title to “Every Woman” and altered a couple of lines in it. She also switched the album’s original title, All the Women in Me, to Vagabon.)
“Every Woman” nods to the compounding weight of inherited oppression that grows heavier with each passing generation. But it’s also a show of resilience: “We’re not afraid of the war we brought on,” Tamko sings in the final verse, “And we’re steady while holding you all.” The women she speaks of aren’t just women, she explains, but rather a stand-in for “everyone who has been ostracized and marginalized and cast to the side.” She wrote the song to make them feel seen. She begins to single out some of the groups that she especially wants to stand up for—“black people, trans people, queer people, nonbinary people, survivors of sexual assault”—but trails off. I get the sense that she’s wary of leaving anyone out.
Back in Brooklyn early that evening, we tuck into curried cauliflower (Tamko is vegan, but doesn’t care to preach about it) and dosas approximately the size of our torsos at one of her favorite restaurants in Clinton Hill. We sit quietly for a while, perched on magenta metal chairs with young families buzzing around us. Since waking up, Tamko had neglected to eat anything other than the protein bar she nibbled on throughout the afternoon. Now, with every bite, she rematerializes a bit. Food is a big part of how she keeps herself whole during long weeks spent on the road. On tour, she prefers to stay in Airbnbs where she can cook for herself, rather than relying on venue hospitality or takeout. She calls herself a homebody—which she recognizes is not very convenient for someone whose career requires her to be semi-nomadic—but is willing to commit to the fractured existence demanded by the road.
Home, and being separated from it, comes up a lot on Vagabon. Its lyrics seem to point to relationships stretched thin by distance, but when asked if she was missing anyone in particular while she was out touring Infinite Worlds, Tamko demurs. She acknowledges that much of her new material came from a feeling of rootlessness, but says that “very few songs are about a person; it’s more just about a feeling of not being in place.” And, to be fair, this is hardly a new concept for Tamko—just look at her chosen stage name.
The idea of home had come up earlier in our conversation, too, in a context that felt much less expected. Tamko said that she feels most at home onstage, the same place where she experiences nerves so intense that she sometimes can’t open her eyes. To me, this seems paradoxical—to find solace in a space so riddled with anxiety. But Tamko embodies many seemingly opposing forces: She’s nervous yet fearless, methodical but trusting of her intuition. And she’s not above succumbing to a whim. “Do you ever feel like blowing your life up?” she asks me abruptly, mid-meal, fire in her eyes. She’s talking about the thrill of behaving recklessly—the feeling of freedom that accompanies a leap against odds—and I recognize the sentiment. Comfort and ambition don’t always play nicely.
