‘Tired of chasing beauty': Singer Laufey wants 2025 to be the year she is less anxious about fame

Straits Times

2 days ago

NEW YORK – For Laufey, 2024 was a whirlwind year. 2025 may be even wilder.
Last year, the indie singer-songwriter, who cannot be described without a flurry of hyphenated hybrids – Icelandic-Chinese, jazz-pop-classical, TikTok-trad – became a breakout star with a quirky pop style that draws equally from American singer Taylor Swift and the romantic whimsy of mid-century musicals.
She won a Grammy (Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for 2023's Bewitched) and attended the Met Gala in a rose-coloured princess gown and, in perhaps the ultimate orchestra-nerd Easter egg, a veil embroidered with a Bach fugue.
As she prepared to release her third studio album A Matter Of Time, the 26-year-old was still practically glowing over those accomplishments. But seated at a control console at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, where she recorded three of the album's 14 songs, she also catalogued the jitters and anxieties she felt being thrust into the machinery of fame.
'I wanted 2025 to be this year where I was less anxious,' she said, ' and instead of walking meekly onto the red carpets or into relationships, I wanted to walk with confidence.'
'And I wanted to write a country song,' Laufey continued. She paused a beat. 'Countryish,' she amended herself, and then pushed a button to play Clean Air – a twangy starting-over ballad she said was partly inspired by American singers Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris' Trio albums from the 1980s and 1990s.
In just a few years, Laufey – her name is properly pronounced with a vowel unfamiliar to most English speakers, but she answers to LAY-vay – has become a phenomenon almost without comparison in contemporary pop.
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Even in an age of scrambled genres, she stands out as a master code-switcher who cites inspiration from Sergei Prokofiev and Chet Baker, yet has racked up more than five billion streams with concise, witty earworms that paint a glamorous wonderland shaded with the second guessings of a Gen Z diarist.
Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, she has cultivated a vast fan base online and, this autumn, will embark on her first arena tour , including two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Icelandic singer Laufey attends Gold House 4th Gold Gala at the Music Center in Los Angeles, on May 10. Gold Gala celebrates the 100 most impactful Asian Pacific changemakers in culture and society over the past year.
PHOTO: AFP
Laufey described A Matter Of Time , which comes out on Aug 22, as an exploration of romance and time, with songs that portray relationships as they blossom or fall apart. Her songs are drawn from episodes in her life, although some are also intermingled with the experiences of her identical twin sister, Junia Lin, who is Laufey's creative director, occasional violinist and constant correspondent.
With A Matter Of Time, Laufey said she pushed her own musical envelope , making songs that are 'a little weirder and a little more surreal', and that she confronted her own attachment to pursuing beauty above all.
'I think that's what we're taught as women,' said Laufey, who wore jeans, a blue sleeveless blouse and a simple brown sweater. 'I was always choosing the photo I thought I looked the prettiest in, the vocal that I sounded the most beautiful in. For the first time with this album, I think I was just tired of chasing beauty.'
Those changes can be subtle: vocal cracks left uncorrected in Snow White or some harmonic unsteadiness in Carousel, a slightly woozy waltz depicting Laufey's love life as a swirling, tiring circus ride.
In Snow White, Laufey explores falling short of a fair-skinned beauty ideal. Her mother is Chinese and her father is Icelandic, and she and her sister grew up standing apart from Iceland's ethnic majority.
'I remember being a little girl and watching Snow White,' Laufey said. 'I always remember thinking, 'I'm almost her, I have the dark hair, but I'm just not quite as beautiful, and not quite as white.''
To record the album, Laufey, who plays the cello, guitar and piano, worked with her long-time producer Spencer Stewart and guitarist Aaron Dessner of American rock band The National, who has made hit albums with Swift, Gracie Abrams and others.
Both producers noted Laufey's perfect pitch and her skill in layering multiple cello lines – sometimes two or three dozen at a time – to build out the illusion of a full string ensemble.
Laufey Lin Bing Jonsdottir was born in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, in 1999, and grew up in a home filled with music. Her mother is a violinist in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Her father, a finance executive, instilled in Laufey a lifelong affection for American singer Ella Fitzgerald's voice and British director Alfred Hitchcock's films.
Laufey grew up with strict musical discipline, practising her cello while other kids were playing sports ; the only pop music that her family listened to at home, she said, was the Beatles .
By her teens, she was entering singing competitions. One clip from reality talent show competition Iceland's Got Talent shows a 14-year-old Laufey ably belting out American singer Alicia Keys' If I Ain't Got You in a huskier tone than fans know from bonbons such as her 2023 viral hit From The Start. She came in second.
'I remember I did one singing competition and the judges gave feedback on the spot,' Laufey said. 'One of them said, 'You sound like a 40-year-old woman who has been divorced twice.''
She won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, known for its jazz programme, and, inspired by the entrepreneurship of fellow students, began writing and recording her own songs. When she went online to release her first, Street By Street (about reclaiming her surroundings after a breakup), she was stumped when the system asked her to classify the song under a single genre. She went with 'singer-songwriter'.
'I've never been able to put myself in a box,' Laufey recalled. 'I've always been an Icelandic Chinese American girl. I've always played two, three instruments. I always spoke two or three languages. I've literally been two people.'
She also began to draw notice for the casually elegant covers of standards she posted on TikTok. In 2021, she signed a deal with Awal , a recording company that partners artistes to distribute their music widely but, unlike a traditional record label deal, allows them to fully retain their intellectual property.
Laufey attends the 78th Annual Tony Awards in New York City, on June 8.
PHOTO: REUTERS
As Laufey found growing success with her first two albums – Everything I Know About Love (2022) and Bewitched – she built her business and branding enterprise, which includes a book club and an extensive direct-to-consumer merchandise business.
One popular recent item was Mei Mei the Bunny, a stuffed rabbit in a navy-blue cardigan who, its website says, plays the violin and has a pet bee named Beethoven. The first run quickly sold out.
With success , she also became a target for jazz critics and aficionados who bristled at the idea that she could 'save' jazz – a claim Laufey never made, although she had long made clear an ambition to bring classical and jazz music to her generation.
In think pieces and YouTube analyses, musicians and journalists debated whether Laufey's music qualifies as jazz, and whether that question even matters.
Laufey shakes it off. 'Of course I expected it,' she said , not quite rolling her eyes . 'I just had to believe in myself and know that I know what I'm doing. No matter what music I write and put out, I will always be a jazz singer.'
She added: 'I didn't play a lick of classical cello on this album, but I will forever be a classical cellist, because I studied it, and that's what I am.' NYTIMES