Singer Laufey on Asian Identity and Representation in Music

Laufey has all the time felt “undefined.” Whether or not it was her distinctive, fashionable 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.”

The artist, who just 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 totally different grew to become 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 dad and mom in Iceland and later residing 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 he or she carried out as a solo cellist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at 15. When she began attending Berklee Faculty 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 totally different sounds of every of my cultures and taught me in regards to the issues that bind totally 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.

Along with influencing her music, her school 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 greater Asian communities that I did not essentially have rising up in Iceland, the place my mom and some of her mates have been the extent of my Asian neighborhood,” she says. “Exterior of the music business, I have been capable of 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” along with her followers of Asian descent.

And now, as a younger girl within the music business, Laufey is captivated with opening up alternatives for different ladies artists, significantly these of coloration. She will be able to depend the variety of ladies producers she’s labored with on one hand. By way of 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 music from scratch in simply three hours. “Eunike has such an exquisite manner 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 ladies 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 individuals who could not determine who they wished 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.”