Here’s Laufey, casually resurrecting jazz standards for the TikTok generation, while making it look like she’s just been doing this since birth. Spoiler alert: she kind of has. Her latest album Bewitched isn’t just a nostalgic trip through mid-century romance and moonlit melodies—it’s a meticulously plotted world where every note, every word, every orchestral swell was part of her grand plan. “Everything I do is very intentional,” Laufey says, like a magician pulling sheet music from her sleeve.
Born into Icelandic classical royalty—mom’s a violinist, grandparents too—Laufey grew up more Bach than Billie Holiday. “I started playing piano when I was four and cello when I was seven,” she says. “I completely dedicated my life to this pre-professional classical music vacuum.” Then jazz waltzed in, courtesy of her dad’s record collection. “As much as I loved pop, I heard more of myself in the jazz singers—Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee.” Cue the inevitable turn from orchestral prodigy to jazz-pop sorceress.
Her album Bewitched opens with “Dreamer,” a four-part harmony recorded like it was 1945, not 2023. “I recorded each part on each side of this vintage omni mic,” she says. “It created this circular sound, like it’s wrapping around you.” It’s pure Andrews Sisters fantasy, if the sisters were one Icelandic-Chinese twenty-something looping herself into a choir.
The whole record plays like a musical, because that’s exactly how she wrote it. “I knew it was going to be called Bewitched before I’d written any of the songs,” Laufey says, already dreaming up the visuals before the melodies even existed. “I wanted to write a love album. Bewitched was just the perfect word for that confusing feeling—being in love but feeling like someone’s cast a spell on you.”
The results are songs like “Haunted,” “Serendipity,” and “Nocturne” that swirl with old-school charm and autumnal mystique. And yes, she timed it for fall on purpose. “Fall is the jazziest season,” she laughs. “I wanted my last album to feel like summer, so this one had to be fall.” Don’t worry, she’s not stopping there: “Christmas songs coming from me this year,” she teases. “Everyone listens to jazz at Christmas.”
If Laufey seems like she’s got her career plotted like a Broadway show, maybe blame (or thank) Berklee. “It allowed me to see beyond the rules of classical music,” she says. “It’s where I was told to improvise for the first time.” Berklee also handed her a full-ride scholarship—cue imposter syndrome. “I remember thinking, ‘They’re just handing these out now?’” she jokes. “But they saw something in me before I saw it in myself.”
Now she’s seeing it too, especially with the success of her single “From the Start.” A Bossa Nova-inspired jam with live instruments and a healthy dose of scatting, it’s become an unexpected chart-crasher. “Very surprising,” she says. “I think this is the first time someone scatting has had this much attention since the Scatman.” She’s not wrong.
And if that wasn’t enough, she roped in songwriting heavyweight Dan Wilson (yes, Semisonic) for the song “Promise.” “I was freaking out,” she admits. “He’s written some of my favorite songs—Adele, Taylor Swift. And now me.”
But it’s “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self” that might hit the hardest. Written for the awkward kid she once was—half Chinese in homogeneous Iceland, unsure of her voice or her place—it’s the album’s emotional center. “I cried the whole time I wrote it,” Laufey says. “I just wish I could tell her everything’s going to be okay. That one day other little girls would be screaming her name.”
They are now. And honestly, so are we.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
