“Maybe I should run, I’m only 21, I don’t even know who I want to become,” sings the woman with 4 million TikTok followers who sounds like she’s from another era entirely.
She’s on stage in an industrial warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland, on a Monday night in early 2024, but it could as easily be a 1930s jazz club. A double bass player and drummer are riffing in the shadows, while in the warm haze of diffused lights, the singer’s elegant and melancholic voice washes over a crowd of girls with bows in their hair.
This is exactly the kind of show I frequently attend – a female singer-songwriter, an audience of enraptured women. But Laufey (pronounced lay-vay) is a very different type of musician, a kind I’ve never seen before and might not have if it weren’t for TikTok.
Now 24 and newly anointed a Grammy winner, the Icelandic-Chinese composer/singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist has said in interviews that she’s as much influenced by Chopin, Liszt, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as she is Taylor Swift. Her musical career has taken her from performing as a soloist on cello with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at 15 through to graduating Berklee College of Music in Boston, to now, when you have to beg, borrow or steal if you hope to score a ticket to her sold-out tour (I only did the first two).
By the time I see Laufey, her elegant, velveteen voice warming up that drafty warehouse, I’ve been on an entire sonic journey on TikTok and across the internet, discovering artists I never knew existed and signing on as a member of the Laufey fanclub (or Lauvers, as we’re know).
The young TikTok star is fresh from performing at the Grammys a week prior – but the audience here, on the second night of her first European tour, lives for the Laufey they see on the small screen in their pockets, rather than the one on a primetime broadcast. She might be a classically trained musician known to the Recording Academy for her jazz-inflected sound, but to her fans, she’s Laufey…
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