Singers with Unique Voices: Vagabon (The Unique Voices Club #33)
- Alexia Rowe
- Nov 7
- 3 min read
Every Friday, I write a post about singers with unique voices not commonly heard in mainstream music in an effort to educate emerging artists and music lovers and inspire them to embrace their own quirks. This week I'm writing on Vagabon.
Early on in my own musical education journey I was looking for more indie artists of color to incorporate into my weekly college radio show, and Vagabon came up. Seeing as she's from Cameroon as well, I wonder if she's ever collaborated with Lorine Chia since they're both based in New York City. Similar to me, at the time 17-year-old her taught herself how to play guitar from instructional videos with a Fender her parents bought from Costco (in my case it was an acoustic Carlo Robelli that my mom just sat inside my bedroom door after overhearing me trying to make a song or something on GarageBand). Unlike me though, she conducted much of her early music career in secret, creating an EP and embarking on a cross-country tour after graduating with an engineering degree before her family found out and she left home thereafter to fight their disapproval (they believed in the "starving artist" stigma).
I'm kicking myself because I missed her at the Newport Folk Festival in 2021. The pandemic was rearing its ugly head at the time so I kind of have an excuse for my unawareness of it.
You can probably categorize Vagabon as indie rock/electropop, or at least that's what it says on Wikipedia. Some of the stuff I'm listening to as I write seems a bit more math rock though, with intricate synth arpeggios and guitar picking. Her debut album, Infinite Worlds, was made during a funky transitional period after college where you have your own bubble of community and then you're trying to navigate adulthood and Brooklyn's indie scene as a black woman. She deliberately tried to shift away from the indie rock label with her eponymous second album, producing it by herself and exploring new synth sounds that come from Afrobeats, pop and more. Inspired by Frank Ocean, it's a whole patchwork of different genres, a word she believes there's too much weight to when talking about music.
And as a word of encouragement for you young emerging artists: she doesn't have any formal training, vocal or otherwise. But it's been a gift to her artistry in terms of transforming songs into her own style. You can go to school for music if you wish, but just know that The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix couldn't read music either.
Vagabon tells NPR that it took her a bit to be comfortable with her really low voice. In fact, someone tweeted that she sounded like she had peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth. In the songs where she's singing in her lower register, I can understand that, but it's totally hilarious. The lowness of her voice carries some kind of emotional depth to it, but she also has this poetic, conversational falsetto evident on her latest album Sorry I Haven't Called. It sounds like she essentially has two different voices.
"I don't know if I'm breaking any singing rules, but to me it doesn't matter. You know, it's my voice and it's deeply personal and I don't want it to be perfect."
You see, educated firebird? Your voice does not need to sound like anyone else's, or be perfect or the like. If you've read the older posts from The Unique Voices Club, then you know that perfection that does not exist. Neither does the need to be pigeonholed. So go make that art. And follow Vagabon and the other artists while you're at. You might be inspired, especially if your voice sounds totally different from the norm.
And that is all for The Unique Voices Club this week! Don't forget to join the Patreon so that you then have the opportunity to share unique artists from your own catalog that can educate our readers, music lovers and aspiring creatives alike. I've also created a small merch thing below to spread the word about this project, so if you believe in it, place your order below!
Stay educated,
Alexia
