This Obscure Musician’s New Album Will Be The Soundtrack To My Winter

And why it should be yours too

I like to think I have very eclectic musical tastes.

I love every moment of music history, from ancient traditional music to the pop songs that topped the streaming charts in 2023.

According to Reuters, it was five years ago that streaming services became the “music industry’s single biggest revenue source, overtaking physical sales and digital downloads for the first time.” Despite this statistic, the vinyl industry has made a somewhat astonishing recovery in the age of digital media. This is probably due to the fact that vinyl isn’t digital, meaning it suffers no compression as a result of being made digital.

Especially when a song is made into an mp3 or other compressed format, sacrifices are made by excluding parts of the sound spectrum that are considered to be inaudible by humans: the very high and the very low sounds are essentially thrown away. With a vinyl record and with a good enough amplifier and speakers, you can hear the entire frequency spectrum of a song without anything being thrown away.

Yes, I know that the FLAC digital format exists, saving more of the original sound without compressing it.

Nevertheless, a record player allows you to record your own FLACs from its output, which is sometimes music that was never made available in a digital format.

I actually own a vinyl record of the album that inspired this story, although I must admit I discovered it on Apple Music originally.

If you use this streaming service and are interested in finding out your listening stats by track, album, or artist, I used a free app called snd.wave, which connects to your account and gives you access to this data. I have not been paid to promote them; I just think it’s a useful tool. I switched to Apple Music from Spotify in August 2015, so it’s a good way to find out what I’ve been listening to for nearly ten years.

I first discovered this artist on September 11, 2023. That date is significant as the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but that had nothing to do with my musical discovery. Since that day, I’ve spent about 35 hours listening to this artist, with over 80% of that time spent listening to an album that had coincidentally only been released three days earlier.

I think I found it through the ‘related artists’ section at the bottom of another artist’s profile, but I can’t be sure.

Although I said my music taste is eclectic, I’ve never openly identified as a jazz fan.

I own some Louis Armstrong vinyl albums I inherited from my dad, including a 1961 recording with Duke Ellington that was later included in the 2001 compilation The Great Summit.

Despite my unending love for Satchmo as a pioneer of the genre, I have never had the opportunity to be excited about a jazz artist who was still alive. Jazz has long been a genre for music history nerds and culture aficionados alike, but it has long been forgotten by the mainstream charts. The artist I’m recommending has achieved mainstream success through being something of a crossover artist, mixing some pop elements with traditional jazz.

This has allowed her album to ascend to number 23 on the US Billboard 200 charts, but that is an outlier in terms of mainstream success.

In my native UK, the album barely broke into the top 100, although it ranked 16th on our indie chart.

In the jazz world, the album was a runaway success, becoming a number 1 album on the US Jazz Albums chart as well as the Australian Jazz & Blues Albums chart. When it was released, it immediately had the biggest first day for a jazz album in Spotify history, snatching the title from Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s Love For Sale.

The lead single has become a firm fan favourite, receiving over 1 million streams less than 24 hours after it was released.

This instantly made it the most streamed jazz song in the world and as I write this in early December 2023, it is approaching 2 million streams.

Many songs get played endlessly during the holiday season, but many of them have a jazz subgenre in common. As a jazz outsider, I may be mistaken, but I have a suspicion that the subgenre is called ‘cool jazz.’ This art form originated in the 1940s, although only when the album Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet was released in 1953 did the word ‘cool’ start being used to describe it. A mono recording of this seems to be available on Amazon Music, though oddly only on Amazon UK and not Amazon US, it seems.

Why did cool jazz become a popular subgenre for Christmas music?

The answer may lie in the fact that cool jazz uses classical music elements, and classical Christmas music has been around since, for example, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (1734) and Handel’s oratorio Messiah (1742). For centuries, those who could afford to experience classical music were relaxed by the soothing strings that remind them of curling up with a good book with a roaring fire as snow tumbles down outside.

These activities could be combined once the radio and the phonograph brought music into the home without the need for a full live orchestra.

Why is summer the time to dance, but winter is the time to relax?

Perhaps it’s the way that cold weather causes our muscles to tense up, and only when we are home can we warm them up and stretch them out.

Why is this the artist I have chosen to provide the soundtrack for my winter?

I love music that introduces no conflict, with notes that dance joyfully around a predictable scale in sometimes playfully unpredictable ways

According to Wikipedia, jazz scales include “the diatonic, whole-tone, octatonic (or diminished), and the modes of the ascending melodic minor.” Although I don’t know music theory well enough to hear which is being used at any given time, the prevalence of these scales in popular music does give me an intuitive sense of where an artist might go next.

I love music that relaxes me, but I also like music that fades into the background

The subtitle of the compilation that gave the subgenre its name is Cool & Quiet, after all. Let me read in peace without attracting my attention too much, but also let me listen to the song that is playing when I feel the desire.

I love music that reminds me how it feels to be falling in love and, depending on my mood, perhaps falling out of love, too

No matter where life takes me, let me be soothed by a lullaby.

Let me be at all times wide awake and deeply asleep.

Let me be a dreamer, let me float I can see the whole world From my own little cloud up on the Milky Way I’ll stay here forever and a day

For those of you who are fans of Norse mythology, or perhaps just the Marvel Cinematic Universe:

Yes, Laufey is the name of Loki’s mother.

No, Laufey has no children, but she has considered the name for a future child.

Unless you’re Icelandic or are otherwise familiar with vowels that don’t exist in English, you probably can’t intuitively figure out how to pronounce Laufey. The equivalent to an English F sound would be represented by FF in Icelandic, so the F is more of a V sound.

Therefore, when restricted to only using English vowels, the name is pronounced “Lay-vay.”

Here is a video where Laufey herself shows you the pronunciation:

She also points out that the Icelandic vowel sounds are substantially different. I like to think of it as similar to the English phrase “love you,” but with -ve and -ou removed. This would force you to combine the “luh” of the word “love” with the Y of “you” to form the unusual sound “luh-y.”

Add “-vay” to the end of this, and you have a pretty good approximation of the Icelandic pronunciation of Laufey.

Or you can just give up and say “Lay-vay” instead

Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir’s father is an Icelandic jazz fan, while her Chinese mother is a classical violinist. Her identical twin sister, Júnía Lín Jónsdóttir, has followed in their mother’s challenging footsteps. Both twins share a middle name from their Chinese grandfather, Lin Yaoji, who taught violin at the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

“I know that you feel loud,” she sings in a song called Letter To My 13 Year Old Self, “So different from the crowd of big blue eyes and long blond hair and boys that stare.”

Around the time she was born in 1999, Iceland’s population was still over 90% Icelandic, while only about 2% had even one foreign-born parent. While still only around 4%, this proportion has mercifully doubled in the intervening years. Laufey spent her childhood moving between Reykjavík and Washington, D.C., singing in the same song, “I’m so sorry that they pick you last, try to say your foreign name and laugh.”

Could this be about the American kids struggling with the complexity of Laufey, or could it be the aforementioned blonde-haired and blue-eyed Icelanders struggling with Lín, her Chinese middle name? Whatever the meaning of that lyric, the song depicts a child who fits in nowhere and retreats to the familiarity and safety of jazz.

Unlike her violinist mother and violinist twin sister, Laufey started learning piano at 4 and moved on to the cello at 8.

She graduated from the Reykjavík College of Music at 19, which included studying singing specifically for two years.

It’s difficult to imagine what any one of us would say to our 13-year-old selves if we were given the chance.

Laufey chooses to give her younger self only the good news:

You’ll grow up and grow so confident and write your story, fall in love a little too. The things you thought you’d never do… I wish I could go back and give her a squeeze, myself at 13, and just let her know… know that she’s beautiful.

I hope your 13 year old self would be proud of and impressed by where you are now.

The 10th day of September 2023 was A Very Laufey Day!

There was a website called averylaufeyday.com with maps of cities all over the world where businesses and tourist attractions had agreed to participate in all manner of Laufey-themed activities.

“Thank you for joining along A Very Laufey Day,” the singer said at a free open-air and solo acoustic performance in LA, “it’s been so cool.”

I snooped past the coffee shop and was staring at some of you, unbeknownst to you, and then I went to the The Melrose Trading Post as well and got to meet a couple of you there, and it was just so special. There was a thing where you could write little letters to your 13-year-old self and it was so cute, and I read some of them, and it made me so, so, so emotional.

I was such an awkward, sheltered kid. I felt really foreign and loud and weird and growing up in Iceland was just… it was fun but… I had grown up partially in America and I was half-Chinese so I looked different and I felt different, and I was like an orchestra nerd, I was like a cello player. I felt so different and I wanted to be a singer but I didn’t know how I would be able to break out of Iceland.

It just seemed really unrealistic, and the fact that I get to do cool stuff like this now is just really, really amazing!

If all this isn’t enough to make you fall in love with Laufey, one other moment caught my attention. She warned the crowd that she was performing many of these songs for the first time and, therefore, she might forget the lyrics, and this happened halfway through the opening track of her record-breaking new album Bewitched, ‘Dreamer.’

“What’s this part again?” she asked nervously, “anybody got it?”

And the whole crowd sang in unison with Laufey as she found her place:

Some might call me mad, the worst this town has had. I fell right down the rabbit hole, legends say I fell so fast I lost my soul. Oh, my melancholic days are few and far away. I’ve had enough, called it off, as far as I’m concerned, this witch is numb to love. Oh, I’m giving up, I’m throwing in my hat, I can’t take another lifeless little chat, I’m moving up into a cloud, into my fantasy, and…

No boy’s gonna be so smart as to try and pierce my porcelain heart and…

No boy’s gonna kill the Dreamer in me!