Andrew Biagiarelli - Vagabond

Andrew Biagiarelli

​Vagabond
self-released; 2018

​4.0 out of 5

By Jamie Robash

There’s always something about the traveling troubadours that I’ve always fancied. Just packing up and heading out on the great open road and writing about your experience. I mean given a person with great talent and imagination one need not leave the comfort of one’s living room in order to conjure up a realistic portrayal of anything. But I’d argue that if one put tales of the fictional travels next to those of real, experienced travels, one would begin to notice little details that the fictional universe just can’t seem to nail down exactly. That sense of surprise and loneliness and despair, of always being on the lookout and the scenery always changing. Not having a solid place to hang your hat or your head for more than a few days. It’s these concrete details of natural wandering and being able to capture the nuances of a sense of place which make the Connecticut based singer/songwriter Andrew Biagiarelli’s debut record Vagabond feel so real.

​Andrew Biagiarelli has been playing around and bars and clubs around Connecticut and elsewhere for the past fifteen years. Vagabond is a selection of songs that he wrote both on his couch in Connnecticut and also in the Alaskan wilderness. Vagabond though feels like a road album, and has a rough polish of The Grateful Dead’s bluesy folk to it. Its tales on these songs represent Biagiarelli’s journey from home and eventually back, so that one feels a sense of movement throughout the record, albeit loose, it rambles like a drifter.

The opening track, “Heading West” is a rickety acoustic old school country rambler that starts us out on the journey that Vagabond is set to take us on. The images are crisp, lifelike, and in a few words paint a precise picture of what the road can be like. Biagiarelli sings, “I slept out on the rockies, and my car broke down on the plains / Spent ten months in the desert, it nearly drove me insane.” Later on “Moving to the Country” we get another sense of the road out there, but from someone who has not yet left as we hear the narrator lament, “Living in the city is like having a disease / It makes me sick, it makes me tired, it brings me to my knees.”

​Biagiarelli abandons the road tunes on “Let Me Tell You” and along with a funky blues guitar riff brings in a roiling Hammond organ and cooing backing vocals that gives the song that magic that the Dead so often had. But all journeys must come to their end and Biagiarelli wanders back home on the slow country groove “Going Home.” It reminded me of a hero of a long battle finally jotting his course back to where it all began and where it will all be new again after all this time. It just helps to hammer home the heartfelt sentiments that Biagiarelli nails so many times on Vagabond. Whether you’re a fellow traveler or a couch potato Vagabond will relate to you if even for a moment you ever dared to dream.

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