Laufey interview: ‘If you date me, I may write a song about you’
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Laufey is standing by a window on the first floor of the Roundhouse, waving regally at the hundreds of fans below who have gathered early for her show at the north London venue. “Oh my god,” she says, “I feel like a queen”. Later, when she is on stage, those same fans will sing along tunefully and roar enthusiastically; some will even let out a scream. If Laufey were the latest big thing in pop, none of this would seem surprising – but when was the last time you heard someone scream at a jazz gig?
“People kept telling me this wasn’t going to work, that nobody’s going to listen to jazz songs with complicated chords,” says the 25-year-old Icelandic-Chinese performer, whose full name is Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir. “But I’ve just been doing it. And here we are.”
Whichever way you cut it, Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay) is something of a sensation. A graduate of Boston’s renowned Berklee College of Music, she plays guitar, piano and cello. Four years ago, she began releasing her own songs, which marry the structures and rhythms of the Great American Songbook with sharp lyrics wryly addressing the romantic struggles of a young woman in the 2020s.
Her ascent has been dizzying: she’s gone viral on TikTok; accrued 14 million monthly listeners on Spotify; and earlier this year beat a shortlist that also included Bruce Springsteen to win the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for her second album Bewitched. In short order, she has gone from playing jazz clubs to big theatres; next week she’ll be back in London for a show at the Royal Albert Hall.
The scale of her success – and, perhaps, the poise with which she handles it – has led some people to describe Laufey as jazz’s answer to Taylor Swift, a label she’s happy to accept. “I like to say I listened to three genres of music growing up: classical, jazz and Taylor Swift,” she tells me. “Taylor has a way to create songs around feelings we almost don’t realise we have been passing through. She’s such a good storyteller.” Laufey met Swift at the Grammys in February. “That was very exciting. Most of my heroes exist in the past, so I don’t get a chance to hang out with them.”
The daughter of a classical violinist, Laufey began playing piano at the age of four, and cello at eight. “When I started singing, I had this lower register alto sound,” she says, “which resonated with the darker timbres of voices like Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Julie London and Billie Holiday a lot more than with the pop singers of the time.”
And so jazz became her passion. “Growing up in Iceland, it was very beautiful, very safe, but quite isolated. There was something about jazz music that had a way of transporting me to a different time and place; it was a form of escape.”
From the age of 14, Laufey competed as a pianist and singer on TV music contests Iceland’s Got Talent and The Voice Iceland. At 15, she performed as a solo cellist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and began attending the Reykjavik College of Music. But songwriting did not come easily at first. “I wrote one song when I was 16 and it left me traumatised,” she says. “It was very, very simple and I was like, ‘Who am I to write music?’ ”
A full scholarship to Berklee expanded her horizons. “Before I went there, I was a classical cellist and a jazz singer,” she says. “When I left, I was a musician, a composer, a producer, a songwriter, a singer, all of the above. I didn’t see music in boxes anymore.”
She was living in America, far from her family, separated for the first time from her identical twin sister, Júnía, a violinist pursuing her own studies in the UK. “At first it was a bit shocking. I had come from an environment of very strict classical training to a place where grades or discipline alone didn’t make you the top performing student. It forced me to be more creative. And I was starting to live life a little bit, which gave me experiences to write about.”
Laufey delivers her lyrics with the kind of dry understatement that is unusual in modern pop, unpicking the day-to-day details of dating with forensic sharpness and subtle wit. For example, one track called Promise – “So I didn’t call you / For sixteen long days / And I should get a cigarette / For so much restraint” – has a verse of bittersweet romance worthy of Hoagy Carmichael.
“Icelanders are very sarcastic,” she says. “We don’t take anything too seriously. If something’s very sad, we’ll tell a joke to make it more light-hearted. I think I do that with my music. It will be the saddest song, but it has a funny or upbeat undertone. And then I end with a joke, because I’m kind of poking fun at myself.”
Her romantic songs rarely end well for anyone concerned. “There’s always some sort of melancholy running through, because that’s been my experience with love,” she says. “It may feel really, really great for one second, and then you’re like, ‘But why?’ Maybe I over-analyse everything.”
The recently released deluxe “Goddess Edition” of Bewitched includes four brand-new songs. One, the poignant Goddess, grapples with the effects of fame on her relationships, summed up in one plaintive couplet: “You took a star to bed / Woke up with me instead.”
“There’s a weird juxtaposition between being a celebrated person on a pedestal onstage, and then going home and taking all the make-up and the fancy clothes off and you’re just human like everyone else,” she says. “I think it’s something a lot of women go through in this day and age, where the version of ourselves we portray in public or online is always well dressed and perfect, defined by a selfie on Instagram. We put up a good front, but there’s a vulnerability about letting people know you as you really are.”
I wonder how the men in her life feel about her diaristic approach to songwriting. “It’s a given that if you date me, I may write a song about you,” she says. “But there’s always a line of ambiguity that every listener can interpret in their own way. And I try not to be mean.”
Laufey is delighted that her music has struck such a chord with a young fanbase and is optimistic – or, as she puts it, “cautiously ambitious” – about the future. “I think a part of my Chinese heritage is learning to manage expectations: Dream realistically! Honestly, I would have been happy just singing standards and being a jazz singer, but there aren’t many opportunities to do that nowadays. Writing my own songs opened things up.”
Her musical inspirations may come from the mid-20th century, but the stories Laufey tells and the coolly confident way in which she delivers them are resolutely contemporary. “I’m very much a modern girl,” she says. “I use TikTok and social media. Perhaps the music tricks people into thinking it could be from a different time – I mean, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, these are all my idols. But we’re living in a different age, I’m a woman, there’s so many reasons why I can’t even put myself on a plane of comparison with them.”
This leads Laufey to reflect on equality in the music business – or, rather, the ongoing lack of it. “Within the world of jazz, being a woman can sometimes make you feel a little bit ‘less than’. It is very male-dominated.” As a woman in jazz, she adds, “you have to work harder: you are more judged on your appearance, you have to maintain a certain demeanour or you get tagged as a mad woman or a crazy girl. Those biases are still very prevalent; they’ve just been normalised to the point that you don’t even recognise them sometimes.”
Bewitched: The Goddess Edition is available via all streaming platforms. Laufey plays the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (laufeymusic.com) on Thursday
