Vagabondage play "well-into-the-night" music. Music for a time when the crowd is sufficiently socially lubricated and the dullards have headed home or passed out where they sit.
It's that time of the night when people start singing with little or no provocation. When everybody starts singing *together* through half-lidded eyes, arms around one another.
The songs on this CD aren't complex, they get to the heart of the matter. A simplicity in tenor and instrumentation (a couple of voices, a guitar or ukulele, an accordion, some brassy low end) keeps these tunes universal. The listener quickly starts humming, and then singing, along to the numbers on "Songs from the Bottom of an Empty Glass".
This is troubadour music. Itinerant performer music. The songs of people who can't help but sing, can't help but fill the night with song. It's the same basic instinct that inhabits folk, country and blues. The instinct that gets entire barrooms to singalong to jukeboxes, that drives drunks to fill streets with half-remembered verses after they find themselves between bar-stool and bed.
You don't need a degree in music to understand Vagabondage, you just need to have lived life... and broken your heart a couple of (dozen) times.
Very nice.
Favorite tracks: "Old Lady Devil", "Lowdown Friends"
