Sorry I Haven't Called Vagabon

• 1 Can I Talk My Shit? 03:25
• 2 Carpenter 03:19
• 3 You Know How 02:44
• 4 Lexicon 02:57
• 5 Passing Me By 03:13
• 6 Autobahn 03:28
• 7 Nothing to Lose 02:22
• 8 It's a Crisis 02:32
• 9 Do Your Worst 03:27
• 10 Interlude 00:44
• 11 Made Out with Your Best Friend 02:45
• 12 Anti-Fuck 03:11
• Total Runtime 34:07

Info for Sorry I Haven't Called

"Sorry I Haven't Called", by Lætitia Tamko better known as Vagabon, is the singer-songwriter's first release in 3 years. "'Carpenter' is about that humbling feeling when you desperately want to be knowledgeable, you want to be advanced, you want to be mature, forward thinking, and evolved." she says of the lead single. "It’s about being confronted with your limitations. It’s about that A-HA moment, when a lesson from the past finally clicks and you want to run and tell someone who bore witness to the old you, 'I finally get it now.'"

“I didn't feel like being introspective,” Tamko says of Sorry I Haven’t Called. “I just wanted to have fun.” Following her intimate 2017 debut Infinite Worlds, the New York artist favored expansive and evocative electronic textures in her breakthrough 2019 self-titled follow-up Nonesuch debut album. But her latest LP feels like a wholly new era for Tamko, one that’s transformational and uncompromising. Across twelve vibrant tracks she wrote and produced primarily in Germany, she channels dance music and effervescent pop through her own confident sensibilities. These conversational songs are alive and unselfconscious, a document of an artist fully embracing her vision and reclaiming her joy.

The first words she sings on the album are, “Can I talk my shit? / I got way too high for this.” It’s a statement of purpose for the rest of the album that this is an unapologetic artist. “This whole record is how I talk to my friends and how to talk to my lovers,” says Tamko. “I think honesty and conversational songwriting can become poetry. There’s beauty in plainly speaking without metaphors and without flowery imagery.”

The story of Sorry I Haven’t Called started in grief after her best friend died in 2021. This devastating and unexpected loss unmoored Tamko but also gave her a newfound clarity. “The things that I thought I cared about, I no longer cared about,” she says. “I had a realization that I need to make sure to feel everything that comes my way.” She decided to sell her things and move to a small lakeside village a few hours north of Hamburg in northern Germany to process everything. “There's no linear path to grief, and everyone handles it differently, but uprooting my life just felt like exactly what I had to do, ” says Tamko. “I needed a place to think and go through my discomfort privately but to also explore the newness and urgency I was feeling in my life.” In the village, her phone didn’t work and there were no close grocery stores or restaurants, so she spent her time alone working on music.

Despite the palpable absence in her life, her new songs were her most disarming and ebullient yet. The first one she wrote was “Carpenter,” a mesmerizing track anchored by a tangible bass groove, where she sings, “I wasn’t ready to move on out / but I'm more ready now.” It’s a fully-realized track and feels like the culmination of her catalog so far. “A lot of the music that I was making there had nothing to do with my grief at all,” says Tamko. “Once I gave myself permission to make a record that's full of life and energy, I realized that’s the point of this album. In the midst of going through all of these tough things, it became a record because of the vitality that these songs had.” For Tamko, there’s power in pursuing happiness.

While writing in Germany, Tamko nurtured her love for dance music and let it seep into her new songs. “The only things that were giving me access to a feeling were dance music and going to a rave in an extremely dark club where if I wanted to cry, I could do it and be around other people.” she says.

After a few months in Germany that included marathon writing sessions and a whirlwind romance, Tamko decided to stay with friends in Los Angeles and finish her record. She enlisted co-producer Rostam to help her unify her vision.

Sorry I Haven’t Called is a warm and resilient album about embracing the ecstatic moments wherever you can by knowing how you love and how you mourn. It’s an LP born of both communal dancefloor revelations and the clarifying peace from solitude, an emotional rebirth as well as an artistic one. “This record feels like what I've been working towards,” says Tamko. “When I think of this album, I think of playfulness. It's completely euphoric. It's because things were dark that this record is so full of life and energy. It’s a reaction to what I was experiencing at the time, not a document of it.”

Vagabon

Vagabon (aka Lætitia Tamko)
announces her sophomore album, All The Women In Me, due September 27 via Nonesuch Records. The follow up to her breakout debut, Infinite Worlds, All The Women In Me is an artistic leap for Tamko, who wrote and produced the entire album. Guitar-driven melodies are largely absent, replaced by hybridized analog and digital arrangements.

Of “Flood Hands,” on which she performs all of the instruments, Tamko says “‘Flood Hands’ is a track I originally produced and arranged for a well-known pop-duo to have on their album. Knowing I was writing this song for musicians I admire, allowed me this relief from my writer’s block. I used this assignment as a chance to flex my production muscles and write something I wouldn’t have written as a ‘Vagabon’ song a couple years ago. The result felt like a triumph for me in my progression as an artist and I just couldn’t stand to part with the song by the time I was finished.”

This album contains no booklet.