Laufey has all the time felt “undefined.” Whether or not it was her distinctive, trendy jazz sound or her identification as a Chinese language Icelandic artist, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and producer tells POPSUGAR she “all the time felt like an anomaly and a little bit of an outsider in my communities.”
“Being a bit completely different turned my establishment.”
The artist, who lately took dwelling her first Grammy for greatest conventional pop vocal album, has taken the music world — and TikTok — by storm. Since going viral on the platform in early 2022, she’s launched two albums, the second of which earned her the accolade. “Being a bit completely different turned my establishment. I took my expertise of being undefined into the music business,” she says.
Laufey’s background rising up with Chinese language and Icelandic mother and father in Iceland and later dwelling within the US was pivotal to constructing her sound and, ultimately, her profession in music. “I had such a mixture of experiences studying music,” she says. Her first foray into music was related to her Chinese language tradition — by way of her mom, a world-class violinist, and her maternal grandfather, who taught the instrument.
Laufey took piano classes at Beijing’s prestigious Central Conservatory of Music, and she or he carried out as a solo cellist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at 15. When she began attending Berklee School of Music in Boston, she realized jazz and pop for the primary time. “All of these experiences allowed me to develop up listening to the completely different sounds of every of my cultures and taught me concerning the issues that bind completely different musical disciplines collectively and what units them aside,” she explains. Her mix of jazz, classical, and pop is so distinctive that there is typically debate over defining her actual style of music.
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Along with influencing her music, her faculty expertise allowed her to embrace extra of her Asian heritage, which she says she wasn’t uncovered to rising up in Iceland. “Residing within the US has given me publicity to larger Asian communities that I did not essentially have rising up in Iceland, the place my mom and some of her pals had been the extent of my Asian group,” she says. “Exterior of the music business, I have been in a position to embrace my identification as an Asian and be extra pleased with that facet of me.” In flip, that shift has given her the chance to “join on a deeper stage” together with her followers of Asian descent.
And now, as a younger girl within the music business, Laufey is enthusiastic about opening up alternatives for different girls artists, significantly these of shade. She will be able to rely the variety of girls producers she’s labored with on one hand. Via Bose’s Flip the Dial initiative, which goals to shut the gender hole in music manufacturing, the musician collaborated with Eunike Tanzil, a rising producer and composer, to create a tune from scratch in simply three hours. “Eunike has such a wonderful means of approaching a easy melody, which is what drew me to her to start with,” Laufey says. “It is an honor to create music with different Asian girls within the business. Collectively, we convey to our music a kind of sincerity that’s distinctive to our backgrounds.”
As she continues to climb the charts, Laufey understands her undefined style and identification symbolize what mainstream music and media have been lacking. For Laufey, her current Grammy win was “for many who could not work out who they needed to be.”
As she places it: “It was a stamp of approval proving that you do not have to observe a sure path so as to achieve music.”