For years, singer and musician Laufey knew she wanted to be a performer but struggled to find an audience. The child of an Icelandic father and a Chinese immigrant mother, Laufey sometimes felt out of place in Iceland. She tried out for local versions of singing competition TV shows -- The Voice Iceland and Ísland Got Talent -- but it wasn't until COVID-19 lockdown that things started to click. That's when Laufey began posting videos of herself singing jazz standards while also playing cello, guitar or piano.
"I was ready to do anything to get my voice to be heard," she says. "I knew that the first step to that was trying to get out of Iceland and see if ... perhaps my voice would resonate more in the big world where I wasn't an odd fish."
Laufey's 2020 renditions of "It Could Happen to You" and "I Wish You Love" became viral hits. "I think people were like 'What? Why is this young woman playing cello and singing?' It was multiple things they hadn't seen combined together," she says.
A classically trained pianist and cellist, Laufey grew up in a musical family. Her twin sister plays the violin, her maternal grandparents are both music professors and her mother is a violinist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. All of which gave her an appreciation for different kinds of music — and a respect for daily practice.
"My mom has been in the orchestra for almost 30 years and she still practices every single day for every single concert," she says. "It's not something you shelve after you grow up."
Laufey's songs draw on her deep knowledge of classical and jazz, as well as from pop and classic musicals; her 2023 album, Bewitched, topped Billboard's jazz and traditional jazz charts and also won a Grammy for best traditional pop album. All of the sounds came together in 2024 when she took the stage accompanied by an orchestra at Lollapalooza — one of the first music festivals she had ever attended.
"Lollapalooza was such a perfect moment for me [to show] exactly who I am to the world. ... I mean we had a K-pop act playing after us and a rapper before us on that very same stage," she says. "I think it painted just a very beautiful portrait of modern music today, but also of me and how I am as an artist, because I don't reject any of that. I don't think I've grown up in the wrong century at all. I think it's so beautiful that all of these different styles of music can exist in one."
Click on the audio link to hear the full Fresh Air interview, including Laufey performing in the studio.
Interview highlights
On why she composes on guitar
I compose a lot on piano too, I think increasingly now. I started writing a lot on guitar, I think, because it was this unknown instrument to me where I wasn't following a set of rules that I had learned over my years of classical training. I wasn't going back to any habits. I was just letting my heart and fingers wander. I think also it's a fairly soft instrument. So singing over it, it's easy to hear myself and hear the lyrics and really understand what I'm trying to say. It didn't get in the way of my songwriting. I think sometimes, especially in the beginning when I was composing on piano, I'd sometimes accidentally start falling into old habits.
On her mom's feedback during her practice sessions
It was like having a teacher every single day. I would practice piano while my sister was practicing violin. And then we would swap and she would practice piano and I would practice cello. And my mom spent the entire afternoon just drifting back and forth from the piano room to the string room. … It was very disciplined. But I'm so thankful for that. I'm still running off of that stamina today. And my mom still tells me if I'm playing out of tune and I'm so thankful for that and I think it's one of the reasons I'm the musician I am today.
On her Chinese grandfather's influence as a music professor
He had all these idioms to explain violin playing and so it was a very poetic way of learning. Like, he would talk about how vibrato needed to feel natural and flow like wind flowing through the branches of a tree, like your hand needed to be like the branches in a tree in the wind. And pronating properly on a bow, it felt like pouring water out of a kettle. It was things like that that kind of taught me how to learn music in a very poetic way, which I think has had such an effect on me as a songwriter as well, because I think so much about how music and physical movement come together.
On introducing young people to classical music and orchestra
I really do try to play as many concerts with orchestras because I just want to get young people into those buildings, into those rooms, get young people used to that sound of 60 plus instruments playing and musicians playing at the same time. There's nothing quite like it. ...
And then, at the same time, I kind of push against the classical medium [by] just kind of blabbering on stage. Like, in between songs, I'll explain what the songs are about and just to feel that connection with the audience and just to further show them that this is something classical music, orchestral music is something that can be theirs too and doesn't need to feel like this foreign thing that exists behind wall.
On touring her new album
Every night I go out on stage and I'm shocked that this many people even know who I am. ... It's so fun. It's my first arena tour, so it's definitely different and a little bit daunting, but I feel like I've been able to show every part of my artistic vision at once, which makes me so happy. I have ballerinas on stage with me, jazz dancers. I have my band and I have a quartet. And I get to have some choreography, but then I have a jazz club in the middle of the stage, and in the middle of the set, I turn the whole arena into what I hope is something that feels a lot more intimate. And I have rearrangements of some of my songs to make them just a little more jazzier, and it just feels really, really special to finally get to kind of show the world exactly what I'm about. …
I've always seen myself as this artist. I've been inspired by Golden Age films, the va-va-voom of it all. And I've also always loved pop music and how I feel like at pop concerts that the artists can go all out and be unapologetically themselves. I've wanted the same. I think I gained a bit of a reputation as this very soft artist with my last projects, and though I am that, I am so much more than that as well.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Jacob Ganz adapted it for the web.
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