You’ve Got a Friend in Laufey

When I come face to face with Laufey, she’s in her green room at the Dickies Arena in Forth Worth, rushing through a meal. Her new record, A Matter of Time, has been out a month, and the accompanying shows are nearly running themselves. “I really feel like I got to put on the show of my dreams,” she beams, between mouthfuls. “It’s still settling in that there’s that many people. Every day, I walk into the arena empty and just have a look at it. And I’m like, ‘There’s no way there’s this amount of people in the world.’” She’s finally feeling the weight of getting to do exactly what she wants. These are her biggest gigs ever, in venues with caps at ten-thousand people or more. And the set-up is a fabulous fairytale: a staircase with a swing on top, a catwalk leading out to a clock. There’s a B-stage in the middle of each arena with a second clock that spins, like something out of Fantasia. Laufey’s band bedecks the A-stage, accompanied by a string quartet and four dancers—some of whom are ballerinas. “I really want to protect those intimate moments, where it’s just me with the audience in the middle of the arena,” she says of the B-stage’s placement. “I was really, really strict about having that there, so I could get closer to everybody.”

The Matter of Time concerts are split into four acts, with the second act turning the entire arena “into a jazz club.” There, Laufey performs a standard and three rearrangements of her own song, turning bossas into sambas and re-charting ballads into swing numbers. Tonight in Fort Worth, she’ll do Carmen Lombardo’s “Seems Like Old Times,” a song she recorded onto a 7” and then hid away in the sleeve of every vinyl packaging. The mind immediately wanders, thinking about the B-stage’s construction. I ask Laufey about the challenge of singing while spinning in circles, to which she insists that dancing and singing is way harder to pull off, that holding onto the clock arm helps her move less. And the songs, no matter the tempo, turn the buildings inside out. Drums and dancers fill the arenas just as much as piano singalongs, Laufey tells me, because “it’s about understanding the audience and having them trust you.”

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Trust has clearly been on Laufey’s mind for a minute now. A month before our chat, she joined her friend Clairo (who sings backup on the Matter of Time track “Mr. Eclectic”) on an episode of Hot Ones Versus, trading munches on lethally hot chicken wings for embarrassing anecdotes and regrettable takes. The episode went off without a hitch (it’s racked up a million views as of this writing), but she reveals that it took her two days to recover afterwards. “And the thing is,” she says, “I have quite a high spice tolerance. I have an ego about that. I was like, ‘It can’t be that bad.’ My God, it definitely went through my stomach in a bad way.” The consolation prize? Clairo was going through it, too. “I was proud of the both of us,” Laufey grins.

Let’s detour back to the beginning. Laufey was born Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir in Reykjavik. She’s Icelandic on her father’s side, Chinese on her mother’s—the latter of whom is a classical violinist and daughter of a teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in China. As a child, Laufey split time between Washington, D.C. and Iceland, learning piano, cello, ballet, and figure skating before graduating from Reykjavik’s music college in 2018 and Berklee College of Music in 2021. In her teenage years, she was a cello soloist in Iceland’s symphony orchestra and even made it to the finals and semi-finals of the country’s versions of Got Talent and The Voice. In 2020, her debut single, “Street by Street,” topped the Icelandic Radio chart and released her Typical of Me EP a year later. Her jazz standard covers got big on TikTok, and AWAL scooped her up after the New York Times gave her music a shoutout.

Last February, Laufey’s second album, Bewitched, nabbed her a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. It was an end-cap, she says, to “the nuttiest day,” because she also played cello with Billy Joel that night, as he unveiled his new single, “Turn the Lights Back On.” The category she won was announced during the pre-ceremony, which she performed “From the Start” during. “I was jumping between two different soundchecks all morning, and the soundcheck for the main stage show was at the same time as the pre-show,” she recalls. “I was running around that arena all day, switching outfits and switching instruments. I was a hamster in a wheel.” Winning brought everything back down to Earth for her. “I got to play with the band that’s on stage during the Grammys, and they’re all so talented,” she continues, touting the fashion and poshness of the ceremony as a new environment. But standing on a stage with some like-minded artists soothed the noise. “There were a couple of Berklee alumni there. I got to feel like a musician for a second, which feels very grounding on a day of glitz and glamor.” Getting rock-ognized by Billie Eilish in the hallway after her win certainly didn’t hurt.

Even though Bewitched earned some gold and turned Laufey into a true star, she didn’t want to change her process for A Matter of Time. “I think the limitations that I had for Bewitched were a part of the art,” she reflects, “and something I was very accustomed to.” What she’s getting at is: if there was a blank-check project awaiting her, she didn’t even bother to look for it. “Booking out the fanciest producers and writers in a big, fancy studio and having the best photographers… I really, really, really wanted to emphasize my artistry. I didn’t want to lose myself in something. You don’t want too many decision-makers, either. You want it to feel the same as the first [album].” She did take some advantage of her newfound cred, shelling out for more elaborate set decorations and wardrobes for photoshoots, but Laufey and Spencer Stewart built the Matter of Time string sections themselves, with the help of her sister Júnía on violin. “I didn’t go all out, because I think that’s, oftentimes, where artists lose themselves.”

The orchestral arrangements on A Matter of Time sound bigger, fuller than the strings on Bewitched. The eruptive passages in “Sabotage,” the coquettish, lounge-y “Silver Lining,” and the waltz-y, breathless pop of “Carousel” make for maximalist, hi-res successors to the stripped-back, cozy effervescence of “Dreamer,” “Promise,” and “From the Start.” Laufey wanted her music to “take up space,” which she’s never even tried to do as a person let alone an arranger. “I was always a goody-two-shoes orchestra kid,” she admits. “I didn’t know how to take up space. It’s something I’m learning to do, and this album was one of the first steps in doing that, letting the songs live in their worlds.” She scaled the Bewitched songs back to create a “pure piece of art,” to show the world who she was. “I didn’t want anybody to be mistaken that I could make an album without all the modern bells and whistles,” she clarifies. “With [A Matter of Time], I wanted to have fun. I wrote songs about sabotaging a relationship, about anxiety. I wanted the music to feel like anxious intrusions. I wanted it to feel loud, because that’s what it feels like in your head.”

Emma Summerton

Forget the cello or the piano. Laufey’s voice is her greatest instrument, in the same way that it was for Judy Garland, Nina Simone, and Astrud Gilberto. She used to sing with a lot of vibrato and legato and drama, but then she figured out that most of her favorite singers were doling out emotions and storytelling without overworking their voices. Simple is best, she says, and you can hear that on “A Cautionary Tale” and “Carousel.” Laufey says she “let her heart wander” on A Matter of Time, which really means she didn’t think too much about how to fit into any one box. She especially didn’t set out to write jazz songs or pop ballads; it her moods that directed her. “Forget-Me-Not” started as a folk song about missing Iceland and ended up as this grand arrangement recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, because that’s the turn her emotions gestured toward. “The lyrics are about the wind and the nature, so I needed a flute to depict the wind,” she recounts. “Then, all of a sudden, I had an orchestra, you know?”

A Matter of Time finds Laufey giving away more pieces of herself than ever before, creating a shadowy, open-arms concept through radical, uncensored vulnerability. One of her core pillars, she says, is her honesty. “I’m a very open book immediately, upon getting to know me. So, I was like, ‘Oh, the truth is right there. I just write exactly what’s on my mind.’ I’ve shown the world who I am, and it wasn’t just depicted by one thing or another. I felt like I had gotten to the point where I could write an album like this.” She was waist-high in her mid-twenties growing pains, too, falling out of the “stupidity of teenagehood” and falling in love and contending with what that might mean for someone like her, a “very anxious person.” A Matter of Time is a reflection of what she was going through.

The definitive song on the record is “Silver Lining.” Sometimes, words fail me, but “Silver Lining” is undoubtedly perfect, no matter what language I come up with. The arrangement builds slowly, sauntering through velvety details and Laufey’s confident, swooning vocals. Everything is rinsed in gooey, sensual cliché, as she sings about the terrors of our world only being livable because she’s living through them with “you.” I get lost in “Silver Lining” every time I click play. The “When you to Hell, I’ll go there with you, too” lines are funny—so much of A Matter of Time is—but never forced, because Laufey doesn’t believe in cringe. “It’s not a filter that I run things through,” she confirms. “Maybe it’s somewhere in my subconscious, but I don’t write what I wouldn’t say. My lyrics are a very direct reference to my daily talk.” Humor, she says, is how she copes with “cheesy shit”; sarcasm comes natural and bubbles into the music. You can hear her eyes roll in “Mr. Eclectic.” Her fantasy falls apart on “Sabotage,” but she’s still laughing once the strings settle.

And while my heart tugs at “Silver Lining,” Laufey’s tugs at “Snow White,” a song she wrote to heal herself that ended up “so honest that I was even reluctant to put it out,” she says, “because it doesn’t really send a good message out to young women. How can they believe in themselves when it seems like this person up on stage doesn’t believe in herself?” The song confronts Laufey’s Guangzhou identity and womanhood (“The world is a sick place, at least for a girl”), beauty standards and body dysmorphia (“And I don’t have enough of it, I’ll never have enough of it”)—ideas that she would have been scared to sing about in 2023, despite critics using some of them to box her in. It was a risk, she tells me, just like the pop songs placed around it were risks. “Tough Luck” and “Castle in Hollywood” would have never made sense on Bewitched, because they don’t align with Laufey’s tastes—or the tastes of her peers, for that matter. “But there’s something about pop music,” she concedes, “and the freedom of expression within pop music. It’s the transcription of time. If you look in the past decades, pop music is what’s writing history. So, I’ve always been quite interested in it, and I really wanted to challenge myself, to see how far I could push myself into writing a pop song while still staying true to my core values as a musician.” “Tough Luck” is a “Laufey pop song”—a sarcastic, humorous, strings-coated composition that gives A Matter of Time some speed and some shine. She’s our generation’s Norah Jones but primed to be even bigger and more critically-acclaimed (though I do wonder what Ted-equivalent comedy Laufey will cameo in ten years from now).

AT SOME POINT IN HIGH SCHOOL, I went through a jazz phase. Anytime I tried putting Chet Baker Sings on the aux it was embarrassingly laughed out of the tape deck. Maybe that’s why Laufey’s music reaches me, because she’s my age and her stardom is a product of jazz singing. When she began pursuing the medium, there wasn’t much pushback from her friends or family, because she was “always a loser,” she says. “I’ve always been the orchestra kid. I’ve always been an old soul. I went home and watched old movies after school, after practicing piano and cello.” Kids just didn’t care back then, she reckons, so she’s spent her career trying to get people to “jump on and care” about jazz music. At the Reykjavík College of Music, she was surrounded by contrasting tastes, as sixties, eighties, and nineties music were held in just as high of a regard as jazz and classical: “Kids listen to anything nowadays. They just need to be told it’s cool. We can’t go to a Chet Baker concert anymore. You want someone that looks like you, talks like you, experiences being ghosted like you. That’s what my whole career has been, trying to get people to listen and to love.” Laufey’s biggest goal, she says, is to redirect her fandom’s attention to classical musicians, both modern and old, by using her music as a “gateway drug,” in hopes that people will “get addicted to that sound and want to learn more about it.” It’s why she plays orchestra concerts every year; she wants somebody to hear her do it and then come back the next week to hear Beethoven.

She had an eye-opening moment watching La La Land in theaters in Iceland nine years ago. “All of a sudden, my friends who had never listened to jazz music, never listened to classical music, never cared, were obsessed with it, because Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were in the movie. They were obsessed with the soundtrack, and I was like, ‘You guys are listening to classical music and jazz music. You’re listening to musicals and you’re watching dance. You’re watching, essentially, a Golden Age film.’” Young people were clinging to La La Land, and it proved, at least to Laufey, that jazz music could be enjoyable in the right context. “People want to relate to something,” she wagers. “They want to feel like something is close to them. The reason why so many of our stars are so big is because they’ve built a whole platform off of making their audience feel seen. It’s what we need from artists nowadays, whether we like it or not.” Of course, not everyone was watching La La Land and then falling down a Bill Evans rabbit hole, but it was the first time, Laufey says, she ever saw young people care about music that she loved. “I remember being stressed at the movie theater, being like, ‘You guys, this is literally what my whole life is about,’” she laughs.

Laufey’s music traffics in vintageness without shrouding modernity in mystique. Lana Del Rey comes to mind as somebody who mastered that in the early throes of her career. Making retro, historical music palatable and accessible to Laufey’s own generation was an inevitability. “I sound really weird singing pop music,” she says. “This is exactly the kind of music I would be making if I had no audience. The audience feels like a happy accident. Five, six years ago, if you want to be successful, you sure as hell did not start out with singing songs like the songs that I do. You don’t start with a ‘From the Start.’ Now, it seems obvious, because there’s proof of concept.” But industry figures were calling bullshit on that. When she was ready to sign with AWAL and release her debut record Everything I Know About Love, the label asked her, “What kind of venue would you want to play?” “And I didn’t even dare to say an arena, because I just didn’t think it was possible,” she remembers. “I didn’t even know, really, the difference btween a club or a theater. I was like, ‘Oh, I guess Radio City [Music Hall] would be my absolute dream.’ And they were like, ‘Who would you want on stage?’ I said, ‘Oh, probably a string quartet and a band,’ because I had no clue. I grew up playing in an orchestra. I remember he was like, ‘Sounds expensive.’ I was mortified! I went home and almost started crying, because I felt so embarrassed that I had expected something so huge and I had no clue how everything worked.” Well, look at Laufey now.

Emma Summerton

While her making it in the industry was an “accident that worked,” she made a conscious choice to introduce her generation to the music she loves—but she’s never been one of those “I was born in the wrong time” types. “There’s no other time I’d like to be a woman,” she confirms. “To be able to make my songs with just me and [Spencer Stewart], before that would have been a many-day process. Now, I have an idea and I get to execute it in two seconds.” Also, Laufey built her career online. But not all artists who go viral aren’t interested in adhering to social media engagement after growing an audience, even when some are vocally comfortable gambling on their art impressing the algorithm. Laufey thinks of all of this as an “equalizer” in an unequal industry, elaborating: “This is a democratic selection process of finding artists. And, though it doesn’t always feel like that, it does for me, because that’s what happened. Because I was fished out of my bedroom, during college, to get to do this thing.”

She hails from, as she lovingly calls Iceland, “a floating rock in the middle of the Atlantic,” and her success story was never at the mercy of an A&R rep’s recommendation. Sure, her family’s classical background probably made the door visible, but where her music could go online is what busted the hinges off. “With the internet, you can take matters into your own hands. And, as silly and stupid as it can feel sometimes, it’s hard to ignore the fact that there’s this device out there giving you your own voice and an opportunity to tell things exactly the way that you want them.” It ain’t all easy, though. “I would really like to not have this much access to discourse about myself,” Laufey admits. “I can’t help but think that the artists that I admire from the past were not looking at comments about themselves and then having that dictate, in any way, their day—whether it’s a positive comment or a negative comment. They didn’t put out a 15-second snippet of their song and then have people judge it before they’ve even heard the whole song.”

Gaming the internet into your favor is cool, but the rapport she’s got with her fans—the people filling the front rows at her shows—is much cooler. And that connection has gone from the phone screen to these big fucking arenas like the one she’s at in Fort Worth. “These are people who believed in me before the industry believed in me,” Laufey says. “Some of these people believed in me before I believed in myself. I so deeply feel the weight of that. I look around the pit, and it’s like, those are people who spent so much money and so much of their time and energy to learn the lyrics and stand there and understand this world and listen to what I’ve put out.” It’s emotional, to say the least, and that thankfulness is amplified by just how ordinary Laufey feels off stage. “I just feel like a girl, and the fact that people go to these lengths to support me is just… I don’t know. I don’t take it for granted, and I hope that I communicate with them like they are at my level. We are one in the same. If I can do this, you can do this, with whatever you do. I see them as friends. Call it parasocial, but I just call it gratitude.”

I remember being fifteen years old and falling in love with twenty-something bands and excited to, maybe one day, get stoked on an artist the same age as me. I think I’m there, finally, and it’s cool to see Laufey doing kick-ass shit like Bewitched and A Matter of Time, even if a lot of people still can’t pronounce her name correctly (it’s LAY-vay). I’m convinced she’s about one or two record cycles away from headlining Coachella and/or winning Album of the Year. And I get to believe that while we’re still growing up together! “When you have the context of many years behind you, you see them go through ups and you see them go through downs,” Laufey says about aging with our heroes. “You see them go through different musical eras, trying something new out, and you’ll still be there at the end of the day, because you’ve been there for a while. When you are someone’s friend, you allow them to go through different emotions. You allow them to go through different trials and errors. Getting to grow up alongside fans, they see you through that, too. I think that creates a very unbreakable bond.”

A Matter of Time is out now via AWAL.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

COVER STORY | You’ve Got a Friend in Laufey

The Icelandic singer-songwriter spoke with Paste about embracing humor in her lyrics, the unbreakable bond she has with her fanbase, winning her first Grammy, how La La Land got her friends to take jazz more seriously, and how her excellent new record, A Matter of Time, got made.