Lessons from Laufey
“Hey,” my husband Doug said to me one morning this summer. “There’s some new singer performing with the Cleveland Orchestra next week - want to go? She’s from Iceland and she’s supposed to be great.” “Sure,” I said. We hadn’t been to Blossom Music Center for a Cleveland Orchestra concert in a few years. The outdoor venue abuts the forested Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a gorgeous setting, the amphitheater at the bottom of a green hill.
The minute we parked and began walking towards the entrance, we knew this was no ordinary orchestra crowd. The average age was…19, maybe? A few decades younger than usual.
We noticed the way the largely female crowd was dressed and we later learned that we were surrounded by “Laufey Girls,” wearing white dresses or flouncy skirts and huge hair bows.
Laufey, I have since learned, is 26 years old, an extraordinarily talented musician who began playing piano at 4, cello at 8 and graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music. She was influenced by classical music (Chopin and Liszt) but also by the Great American Songbook (Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday).
In her own songs, you can hear other muses: Taylor Swift for the lyrics, Gershwin and Berlin for the tunes.
But we knew none of this when we bought our tickets. My husband and I were intensely curious before the concert began. What kind of music might this be? We felt a little self-conscious, two of the oldest people in attendance.
Halfway through the concert, my curiosity shifted to a new question: How did it happen that thousands of young people, teens and early twenties, are listening to these jazzy ballads? The young woman next to me clearly knew every word to every song and she wasn’t alone. These were not casual fans.
“Close your eyes,” I told Doug, after the first few songs. “If you just listen, you’d swear you were hearing a singer from the 1940’s or 50’s.” But all around us were kids in high top Chuck Taylors, drinking cans of Liquid Death water.
Here’s how it happened, the short version of Laufey’s rise to fame. During the pandemic lockdown, to keep in vocal shape, she began posting song after song, her takes on jazz standards. She caught the attention of record labels and millions of fans on TikTok and now Instagram. She seems to have a genius instinct about social media. She posts sheet music of her songs before releasing them, she hosts an online book club, she invites her followers along on Saturday outings. They see the workings of her inner creative life, they see where she shops and buys her lattes. They are part of her life.
I would never have believed that a classically trained cellist would become a jazz/pop star. “Kids don’t like that kind of music.” That’s what I would have told you a month ago. What other myths do we hang onto? How about: “Young people will never return to church.” Or, “This generation isn’t interested in anything like traditional religion.”
I don’t know the answer, but I keep thinking about the questions, wondering if there’s something to be learned from a 26-year-old whose imagination has led her to connect with millions of people who are amazingly open to new things.