Laufey on Bridging the Gap Between Traditional Jazz Singing and Gen-Z Pop: Young Fans ‘Connect More With a Vibe or an Energy Than a Genre’
Is Laufey a jazz artist, or a bona fide pop star? The qualified answer, with asterisks to spare, is “both.” And that’s part of the fun in discussing everyone’s favorite Icelandic-Asian-American singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist-cellist. Genre discussions can be a drag for artists and fans alike, but they’re suddenly a lot more fun when the overriding question is whether to talk about someone in the same terms as we would an Ella Fitzgerald or push her more toward the Taylor Swift side of the ledger. Good thing that, with Laufey, we don’t really have to choose.
Laufey is being honored at Variety’s 2024 Hitmakers event as the Crossover Artist of the Year. Much of the jazz world seems pleased enough to claim her, as there was no resistance when her sophomore album, “Bewitched,” came out in 2023 and made history as the first album ever to top both Billboard’s jazz and traditional jazz charts in its very first week of release. But follow the audience into any one of her shows — which are instant sellouts — and you’d be hard-pressed to be sure you weren’t in line for the Eras Tour, with an average age in the early 20s. An exception to that was the show she did this past summer with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl, where an older demo of subscribers mingled happily with the Gen-Z fans who usually snap up her tickets the moment they go on sale. That mixture of both genres and generations is captured in her new Imax concert movie, “A Night at the Symphony: Hollywood Bowl” (directed by Sam Wrench, who, not incidentally, also helmed Swift’s smash concert film).
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Laufey (pronounced lay-vay) grew up in Iceland as a multi-instrumentalist kid prodigy, schooled in classical as well as jazz. Now, living in L.A., she’s one of our unlikeliest as well as most talented pop stars, not to mention a fashion icon for a lot of her followers, the most devoted of which can be spotted with their clearly Laufey-inspired looks at her shows. This has to be the sole modern instance in which we see that kind of rabid fandom on a mass scale and, thanks to songs like “From the Start,” we can truly blame it on the bossa nova.
In advance of her honor at the Hitmakers event, Variety spoke with her again about what makes her such a one-of-one — and her eagerness to do culture-crossing shows like her appearance with the Chicago Philharmonic at this year’s Lollapalooza.
You don’t claim jazz as your genre, strictly. And yet you have impact in that field in small or big ways, from doing an intimate show at Hollywood’s Catalina Jazz Club last year to having your album debut at No. 1 on the jazz chart. What does it mean for you to be a part of that world, even though you’re also very much a pop artist?
I have so much respect for jazz music, and there’s no question that that is where most of my influences come from, especially when it comes to vocal performance and chord writing — that is really very obvious. I think one of the reasons I don’t fully call myself a jazz artist is because I don’t think every single one of my songs falls directly under that category, and it could be insulting to those who do full jazz to say that it is a fully jazz album. That being said, there are lots of tracks in my discography and on “Bewitched” that do resemble jazz standards and would be very, very at home in a jazz setting. So it’s so hard to put me under any kind of category. If I were in a pop category, I wouldn’t feel completely at home, either. So that’s kind of the only reason I haven’t claimed it.
I grew up listening mostly to classical and jazz, and jazz music is where all my vocal inspiration has come from. And I’m a trained jazz singer; that’s what I studied. So (topping that chart) was such an honor. I really would’ve never believed it, and especially not with an audience as young as mine, and an audience of listeners that don’t typically listen to jazz music. I think that’s what made it so cool.
It would be interesting to take a survey some time of the younger part of your audience and ask them, “What do you consider this music to be?” I wonder how many of them think, “Oh yeah, I’m getting into jazz singing through Laufey,” or whether categories matter so little anymore that that doesn’t enter their minds at all.
Right? Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s definitely kids that will listen to maybe “Valentine” or “Dreamer” or “From the Start” or something like that and think “I’m listening to jazz.” Because in comparison to the other music they’re listening to, it has a lot more color in the chords and it has a lot more of a kind of old sensibility and is played by jazz musicians and is very directly inspired by jazz music. And I’m sure that is the closest thing that resembles jazz that they’ve listened to, and they’ll consider that jazz. But then I think the majority just listens to it and thinks it’s just music, and it’s cozy, or it feels maybe like old-soul music or rain music. You know, I think they connect to it much more with a vibe or an energy rather than a genre. I don’t think many kids my age or even younger are compartmentalizing the music they listen to that much into genre.
Just from the way I’ve seen younger fans react to the music at shows, for a lot of them it seems like it might not be in a totally different genre than Taylor Swift or something.
I also think that kids nowadays compartmentalize music by lyrics a lot more than they do by sound: lyrics that are happy, lyrics that are sad, or lyrics that are wistful, that have longing. I think because music has become such a visual form with social media, lyrics actually are what people categorize it into. So yeah, for example, when I’m in a setting standing with Olivia (Rodrigo) and Chappell (Roan, on the red carpet at Rodrigo’s recent film premiere), I don’t think people are like, “Whoa, what’s this random jazz singer doing here?” I think also because of my age and the way that I present and market my music, I’m just music for a different vibe, definitely, but I don’t think it’s like a completely different thing. I think to them I am a modern musician.
With the classic influences that you do have, how have you adapted that to your modern writing style lyrically? There is a conversational tone that pops up in moments where you sing “blah, blah, blah” — which the audience shouts along with! — in “From the Start.” But the jazz singing that you’ve been influenced by tends to come out of songs with a little bit more of a formal writing style. Was it ever challenging for you to kind of find the balance between that sort of formality that you grew up versus the kind of confessional lyrics that pop fans of your generation tend to love?
No, because actually, I would almost argue that I am more lyrically inspired by the lyrics of jazz standards than lyrics in pop music. The lyrics that I love the most are these lyrics in Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Gershwin songs that are a little funny. There’s a bit of irony to them and they’re very descriptive of what’s going on around the singer. It’s also very first-person, because they’re taken from musicals. So it’s very literal. And especially if the song comes from a musical comedy, then the lyrics are often humorous. And I think that’s actually what I borrow a lot from. But instead of using lingo from the ‘40s that maybe Cole Porter was using, I just exchange it with lingo from my time that I would say. But if you asked a Gen Z-er about the lyrics in my songs, I think a lot of people would think they’re also old-fashioned. Like, it strikes a balance. I actually lyrically am really inspired by the musical theater writers whose songs turned into standards of the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s. I think there’s a level of humor and irony to them that is now creeping into pop. Even three or four years ago, there was less of that.
That’s interesting. It’s true, in pop singers of your generation, there really has been a lot more of a sense of humor lately, just looking at Taylor, Sabrina, Olivia and Chappell, for starters.
Oh yeah. I mean, that is kind of the common denominator, I think, between music that is really popular nowadays. But I’ve kind of been trying to infuse humor in since I started. You can kind of hear that from even my first EP (2022’s “Everything I Know About Love”), but my influences didn’t come from the current climate. They came from, honestly, songs like “Makin’ Whoopee” (from the 1920s). I’m so obsessed with songs where it’s like you don’t really know what they’re singing about, but if you dig further, you find out that the song is about something like quite racy or funny.
Sometimes in some of your songs, there’s a little bit of whimsy in the fact that, while you are taking love so seriously, there’ll be some aspect to the way you express it that’s sort of taking the piss out of it a little bit too.
Always, always. And that’s what I like to call Nordic sarcasm. Like, I think Icelanders can never take themselves too seriously. Nothing can be too serious. So, you know, I’ll say something insane like, “Oh, I’ve never been so heartbroken before,” and then follow it up with a line that’s like some humorous line to take a piss at it or diffuse it, and that’s a very Icelandic thing.
By the same token, you certainly have written dead serious songs. I don’t know if it portended a new direction or not, but the song “Goddess” you did as a sort of semi-title song for the deluxe edition of “Bewitched” was very emotionally raw. I didn’t know if that was kind of a one-off because that’s how you felt at the time, or whether you were trying to shift your songwriting style in a different direction.
No, I mean, “Goddess” came out in tandem with a song called “Bored,” which is maybe one of my most sarcastic songs. With the songs that had been popular — “From the Start,” “Valentine,” “Falling Behind” — so many of the lyrics were so funny and unserious, and I wanted to show a side of myself that was a little more looking in the mirror and facing the facts, you know? I just wanted to showcase that side of my storytelling, and I guess I also just wanted to tell the story of something that was close to my heart.
On the so-called crossover front, you’re obviously not on the classical charts and not likely to be, but you did grow up as part of that world, and people do feel at least a bit of that influence when you do your concerts. You always make it a point to perform at least one number on the cello each night.
Yeah, it’s something I definitely don’t ignore. And, you know, the amount of classical influences in my music is actually almost just as much as the jazz influences, and I have all these hidden classical little references. I allude to a lot of my favorite classical pieces in “Bewitched,” they’re just quite hidden. And if you know the music, you can find it, but if you don’t know it… You know, I never want to seem unrelatable. But I really have a lot of fun infusing my favorite classical music in, and yeah, I do a lot of the concerts with symphonies or with orchestras.
I do really want to make more of an effort also in the coming years to collaborate more with classical musicians, doing something more on the classical front. We released a rework of my song “Bewitched” with the classical pianist Vikingur Olafsson. He’s Icelandic, and is I think one of the greatest living pianists. He has a big following right now, and coincidentally, we went to the same conservatory growing up in Iceland. You should go listen to it if you haven’t. It’s so beautiful, very austere, recorded on three pianos. All of his recordings are just extremely classical, so this was a fun one to dip into. But yeah, I think more things like that are really important to me, and it’s something that I really don’t ignore and really hope to do more in that space in the coming years.
And then there’s the idea of crossing over into different spaces. You did the Hollywood Bowl, obviously, as seen in your new concert movie, and Radio City Music Hall was another iconic venue. But doing Lollapalooza sounds like it might have been amazing. You probably don’t like to think of yourself as an ambassador, but there has to a little bit of aspect of that when you’re at Lollapalooza — so far astray, in a good way, from most of what’s there, and certainly in the sheer physicality of having an orchestra there. Was that a pretty cool thing for you?
It was so cool. I was so scared. I’ve been very careful with festivals like that because, as much as I may belong to a lot of the same playlists as the other artists playing there … I don’t know. My idea of a festival is people going to have fun and maybe being with their friends and being a little rowdy and having a drink. But also, I just literally had never visited a festival before, so I didn’t know what it would be like or how it would be received. My thought with having an orchestra there was, at the very least, I’m doing something memorable, and hopefully even if I’m turning one person on to maybe go listen to the Chicago Philharmonic next week, or just introducing that soundscape to even one person, I will have done a good job. That was kind of my goal with it. Like, people will either love it and they’ll remember it, or they’ll hate it and remember it, but either way it will be remembered. So it was definitely scary, but it turned out really well in the end, and I’ll definitely try to do it again at different festivals.
Before getting on the Zoom with you, I did check your tour schedule and saw it was clear, so I wondered if you might be working on stuff in the studio.
Yeah, I’m literally, as we speak, outside the studio where I’m working on my third album. I’m happy to have a little break from touring to make music and breathe and live a little bit. But I’m super, super excited about this next one and really curious to see how… I feel like this is the first year where I am needing to look for some sort of growth. I never want to stay stagnant, but also want to stay true to myself and true to my sound… I’m not going to do anything insanely different, but an artist always wants to grow. So that’s kind of the balance I’m trying to strike right now — in a very happy and exciting way, not in like a scary way. Just in a “this is a really exciting puzzle ahead” way, if you will.
You haven’t released a full Christmas album, but you add some holiday songs to your recorded repertoire every year.
Yeah, I wrote my first original Christmas song, “Christmas Magic,” for this film “Red One,” and it’s very classic and very playful, in the vein of Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. So there’s that one as well as “Santa Baby” this year. “Christmas Magic” is the first time I’ve also written a song for a movie, which is exciting to me regardless. But the fact that it’s a Christmas song just feels super appropriate given that I love Christmas and I love Christmas music. It is the one time of year that I do feel like the whole world listens to my favorite genre of music.
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