Icelandic Chinese pop/jazz musician Laufey puts a new spin on tradition
The work of an artist isn’t necessarily to create something that has never been seen or heard before. Often the creative spark is in the synthesis of one’s unique experience and perspective into something that bridges past and future.
Few contemporary pop artists embody, and leverage, this notion more successfully than Icelandic Chinese pop/jazz musician Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay), who is set to perform a run of three soldout shows at the Masonic in San Francisco from Thursday to Saturday, April 11-13.
The 24-year-old has gone from an unknown freshman studying cello performance at Boston’s Berklee College of Music to winning her first Grammy, shattering streaming records and selling out a worldwide tour. But Laufey’s wild success is no accident. It’s more a case of preparation meeting opportunity, and has as much to do with her intuitive mastery of social media as her formidable musical skills.
Her first notoriety was the viral response to a series of posts on TikTok and Instagram from her dorm room, and she aggressively cultivates engagement both online and in person through campaigns like “A Very Laufey Day,” inviting followers to use the hashtag to be featured on her website, and “The Laufey Book Club.”
The singer was set to kick off the “Bewitched: The Goddess” tour in Vancouver on Monday, April 8, in support of the album scheduled for release on April 26 — three days after her 25th birthday. “Bewitched” was originally released in September 2023 and was the biggest first-week debut for a jazz album in Spotify history. The “Goddess Edition” features four previously unreleased tracks.
A self-described “orchestra nerd,” Laufey spent her childhood in the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik. She reflected on her journey from her rehearsal studio in Los Angeles.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you paint the picture of your early years growing up in Iceland?
A: Every day after school, I would practice piano and cello and go to the music school where I’d have either a private lesson, chamber music lesson, or orchestra rehearsal, which was often in the same concert hall where my mother plays. I was in the Iceland Youth Orchestra. That was pretty much the rhythm of life back then.
Q: Was there a moment growing up when you envisioned your current career path?
A: I always just viewed myself as a student of music, and I thought if I were to ever become a professional, it would be as a classical musician because that’s all I really knew. I was studying cello performance and music business at Berklee, and I never really thought of myself as a pop singer until I put my first song out, which was near graduation.
Q: And that first TikTok post that started everything, “Street by Street,” coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic? How did that materialize?
A: I thought at first that COVID was a two-week break and that this was a great opportunity for me to spend time writing and test those waters because I knew a lot of people were at home without much to do. … I had recorded that one song on campus before lockdown and I posted it two weeks after the pandemic started. It happened to be in this perfect storm where it all snowballed from there.
Q: You’re in California now. Do you have any connections to San Francisco?
A: My great-grandfather came from China to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. He eventually moved back to China, but that’s the first time that anybody from my lineage on either side touched American soil. Being Chinese and being Asian is something that’s so important to me and integral to my artistic identity, and I really feel that history running through San Francisco. It warms my heart.
And also of course the San Francisco Ballet had an Icelandic artistic director, Helgi Tomasson, for many years.
Q: Congratulations on the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album. That must have felt like an arrival looking back on the last five years?
A: It seemed just about as impossible as going to the moon, so the fact that I’ve achieved that at 24 is overwhelmingly wonderful. I don’t think it has fully hit me yet. Q: The jazz and classical worlds can be fiercely competitive. Have you experienced any blowback from either community?
A: Of course I have. I’m a woman who is borrowing principles from two highly refined fields where people have very strong opinions. I’ve done my due diligence. I’ve studied classical music my whole life. With jazz music especially, I think the history of it and where it comes from absolutely cannot be ignored and it’s something that I don’t take lightly. This is music that comes from communities that are not my own, and I’m highly aware of the fact that my music is a derivative of jazz.
I grew up putting all of these genres into boxes and my goal as a musician is to take down these barriers between them — to make jazz and classical music more accessible to my generation and hopefully be a gateway to all of these musicians that I’ve been inspired by and love. My message is that I really want people to know that I honor and respect the music.