First Berklee, then the world ... Laufey makes her musical mark
Laufey had a shock as she scanned the radio while driving around her native Iceland last summer. A song, “Street by Street,” featuring a cool croon and breezy, jazzy melody somewhere between Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan and early Adele was playing. The song was one Laufey had written and recorded just a few months earlier.
“I was living in Boston for college and went back to visit family, and I didn’t know ‘Street by Street,’ my song, had been playing on the radio,” the Berklee singersongwriter said. “I was so surprised that I started crying.”
With classmate Davin Kingston producing, Laufey recorded her debut single “Street by Street” the day before the pandemic shuttered Berklee’s campus for the semester. Now Laufey has become a sensation. The single, which doubles as a love letter to Boston, topped the charts in Iceland and helped her attract a global following with hundreds of thousands of followers and spins on social media and streaming services.
None of this seemed possible a few years ago. Laufey was set on going to a classical music conservatory; instead her pop-jazz debut EP, “Typical of Me,” comes out April 30.
“Berklee was the only popular music school that I applied to, but by some lucky stroke of fate, I got offered their Presidential Scholarship, which covers tuition and living expenses,” she said of the prestigious scholarship awarded for talent and hard work (no luck involved despite Laufey’s modesty). “It was a huge opportunity for me to leave Iceland and in the end it was my mother who encouraged me to go saying, ‘The music industry is changing so much and Berklee is the school following that change.’”
Her mother, a classical violinist, told her Boston would give her plenty of opportunities to continue her classical cello studies but also allow her to evolve as an artist. And Laufey has evolved dramatically.
“Typical of Me” shows off her cello skills, vocal range and songwriting chops that nod to the Great American Songbook.
“I had always been interested in writing and tried in the past but always brushed it off as something that wasn’t for me, that I wasn’t good at,” she said. “I struggled stylistically because I had this classical background but I sang jazz music. But I wanted to write my own modern music, have my own modern style. I had trouble figuring out a style. ‘Street by Street’ was where something clicked. It tells my own modern story (of a romantic breakup and subsequent love affair with Boston neighborhoods) with a sound of a jazz standard.”
Laufey’s sound — a hybrid of genres that feels completely natural — reflects her as a person. She is half Chinese and half Icelandic. She spent her childhood between Iceland, China and Washington, D.C., and speaks Icelandic, Mandarin and English. Now it is time to present this music to the world in a natural setting.
Because of the pandemic, she has played a score of livestreams but has never performed a single song from her EP in front of a live audience. Hopefully, that changes fast as the pandemic subsides and she graduates from Berklee next month (a full year early).
“Just like my music and my background, I will be all over the place in the next few months and years,” she said with a laugh. “But I will definitely be back to Boston because I will miss it very much.”
Find more details and music at laufeymusic.com.