Laufey on being called Gen Z's jazz icon

From a young age, Laufey says she felt like a "circus animal." The 25-year-old singer-songwriter grew up in both Iceland and America, never quite feeling at home in either place. She also had a singing voice that wasn't quite like other girls her age.

"People were always remarking on the fact that I sounded so old," Laufey tells Tom Power in a Q interview. "I sounded like a woman at the age of 13 or 12, which made me feel kind of weird."

This year, Laufey's sophomore album, Bewitched, earned her best traditional pop vocal album at the Grammys. Her music blends jazz with contemporary lyrics, making her both a TikTok sensation as well as a favourite of older jazz lovers. Plus, there's her deep, Ella Fitzgerald-esque voice.

"I always had a very specific way or style of singing that definitely felt like it was something from an older time," she says.

With the popularity of her music on TikTok, Laufey has been touted as the young woman who's saving jazz and bringing it to Gen Z, but she says she isn't making jazz-inspired music and releasing it on social media to educate people her age.

"I really want to remind Gen Z, especially, that [this music] is something that is entirely theirs to listen to and entirely theirs to love," she says. "But other than that, I'm just making the music that feels most authentic to me."

Laufey grew up in a musical family with deep roots in classical music. Her grandfather was the head of the strings department at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and her grandmother was a piano professor. Her mother is a violinist and her father often played jazz and Brazilian music at home.

From the age of four, Laufey trained as a classical cellist, later attending the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston to continue her studies. There, she was exposed to all kinds of different music, including "Berklee cello" — a contemporary cello technique that lends itself to a wide range of genres beyond classical.

During the pandemic, Laufey moved from Boston to Washington, D.C., where her parents had relocated. She wanted to continue her practice of singing jazz standards and playing cello. To keep herself accountable, she decided to post videos of her music online.

One day, she had a video go viral. Then, more and more videos blew up. In just a few years, Laufey went from her bedroom to the Grammys.

Though Laufey isn't making music to educate Gen Z, she does realize that her music often serves as the gateway that introduces her peers to it.

"I look out into my very young audience, and many of them are in a symphony hall for the first time in their life," she says. "Maybe they'll go next week and listen to a Beethoven symphony and discover a new type of music that they didn't know that they could love."

The full interview with Laufey is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Laufey produced by Mitch Pollock.