(Self-released, digital)
If Vermont radio host Arty LaVigne had a goofy DJ moniker, it’d be Arty “the One Man Party.” That’s according to an icebreaker Q&A on the website for WNCS-FM the Point, where LaVigne has hosted the 2 to 7 p.m. time slot since 2018. Other answers offer candid snapshots of the man behind the mic and reveal that his roots in Vermont’s music scene run deep. Likewise, his namesake band’s latest EP, Heartland, highlights the DJ’s candor and appreciation of classic sounds. LaVigne is at his most reflective, but he’s not rocking out all by his lonesome.
The Arty LaVigne Band consist of LaVigne and veteran Burlington musicians Jeff Barrows, Andrew Bedard and longtime collaborator Mark Christensen — he and LaVigne were members of the Vermont bands John Tower Group and Radio Underground. While a handful of the EP’s songs are reworkings of old arrangements from those early projects, each feels right at home on the new record.
It’s fitting that these tracks have their own histories. Heartland‘s songs find LaVigne facing life and its hardships head-on. While his 2023 release The Getaway looked to the past to tell LaVigne’s story of growing up in Winooski, Heartland sees the songwriter taking stock of the present and future with frank sincerity.
The EP’s opener, “The Little Things,” sets the forward-looking tone. After a quick count-in, Christensen’s bouncy electric guitar and its fine-grit finish hold command over the steady rhythm section locked in a throwback groove, setting the stage for LaVigne. In a warbly tenor somewhere between Willie Nelson and Warren Zevon, he sings: “We all want the little things / the little things in life / some dream bigger dreams / others hold on through the night.”
LaVigne’s heartfelt performances bring a coarse intimacy to more mundane lyrical moments. When the songwriter crosses into abstraction, however, as in “Blue Water,” psychedelic arrangements help clarify his intentions. On another of the EP’s more enigmatic numbers, “California Dreaming,” Christensen’s guitar spirals around LaVigne’s nocturnal stream of consciousness, making big waves — and one effusive jam sesh.
Alongside the influence of late-1960s SoCal folk-rock, elements of prog-rock guitar gush all over the EP. And with lyrics that are more photographic than narrative, the mood is, well, moody. On “Rivers Rise Up,” LaVigne recollects Vermont’s catastrophic flooding in the sparing yet potent image of blue lights flashing amid torrential rainfall. While two distinct voices are in play — LaVigne’s dramatic, commanding vibrato and Christensen’s sleek, meandering guitar — the driving tension of both the song and the EP as a whole remains rooted in an emotional core of hope and despair. As LaVigne sings, “You were hoping the sun would come out from behind the clouds and see what you lost.”
Heartland showcases folk songs amplified to full-on rock ballads and solidifies the Laurel Canyon-era sound the band so skillfully captured on its debut. It’s available at theartylavigneband.bandcamp.com.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.
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