(Reprinted from the July 2024 issue of Downbeat magazine. Photo: Gemma Warren/Downbeat)
Multi-dimensional musician Laufey will spend most of 2024 touring internationally on the strength of Bewitched (AWAL), her spectacular 2023 release and second studio album. This touring encompasses several hefty gigs—the Newport Jazz Festival, Lollapalooza, the Chicago Philharmonic, the Hollywood Bowl, and, notably, the 20,000-seat Mall of Asia Arena in the Philippines.
“I'm playing all of my dream venues this year, [the places] that were on my bucket list. So I'm very happy,” the Icelandic singer told Downbeat.
Laufey’s commanding rise to stardom has happened uncommonly quickly: The cellist/singer graduated Berklee in 2022, the same year that she released her first studio album, Everything I Know About Love (AWAL) and a year after she self-released her debut EP, Typical of Me. By the end of 2003, she had launched two more EPs on AWAL and one on Blue Note, the latter a Christmas collaboration with Norah Jones. All of this prodigious activity culminated in a 2024 Grammy for Bewitched, a convergence of freshly recalibrated standards and disarmingly clever originals.
“I never once thought that these songs would become big in any sense,” she said. “I was just making the music that was most authentic to me, the music that, growing up as a classical and jazz nerd, I would have wanted an artist to create.”
Though Laufey claims many stylistic allegiances, plays several instruments, writes much of her material, and self-produces besides, the Academy designated Bewitched as a Traditional Pop Vocal album. Laufey accepts this honor graciously: She embraces whole-heartedly the strong compositional skills of the Songbook masters and the timelessness of their output, and she looks to instill such qualities in her own writing.
At the same time, she appreciates that commercially defined limitations in music are lifting for young artists.
“Musicians nowadays are so talented that it's a shame to box people in,” she said.