Laufey: Generation Z Jazz Lady

What do you picture in your mind of a jazz singer like Laufey? They must look like a glamorous diva with a cocktail in hand in a smoky room like Billie Holiday.

Jazz singer Laufey

Or maybe they're spontaneous, energetic, and wildly eccentric like Ella Fitzgerald. If we need a more contemporary figure, it's probably Norah Jones - quiet, unassuming, a little shy, and indie.

But when you look at Laufey's TikTok account - the 1999-born jazz singer whose album A Matter of Time recently entered the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart - you don't see any of the above styles.

Laufey is a true Gen Z

Not afraid to appear with very carefree, even sometimes senseless entertainment content. But if you open A Matter of Time and listen, you will not believe that the person singing these songs and the person on TikTok are the same person.

The musical space of A Matter of Time seems to lead people into the fairy tale world of Disney movies from decades ago, with the main character being a princess who sings well and constantly dreams about love.

Laufey says she was inspired by both Ella Fitzgerald and Taylor Swift. Don't frown at the disconnect. They were both definitions of romance in their own time, and their love songs, though of different genres, both spoke the love language of women in their time.

Their repertoire is a dictionary of emotions (especially romantic emotions) for women. And you'll find something similar when you step into Laufey's musical castle, from last year's Grammy-winning album Bewitched to this year's A Matter of Time.

Laufey's dictionary of emotions includes the blindness of love when falling in love with a man who already has "white moonlight" in his heart, the infatuation of a young woman who has just fallen in love with a stranger and finds herself transformed into someone else, jealousy and envy of other women, and all sorts of other emotions.

Laufey - A Matter of Time, Snow White, Clean Air

An unsolved mystery

It's also a love story, but if Taylor Swift's music is full of "realism" with very ordinary, very realistic stories, Laufey's music sometimes has a magical, legendary color. For example, in Forget-me-not, she uses Irish folk music and lyrics to evoke a desolate, vast natural landscape.

A nomadic, free-spirited atmosphere, unmoored; a lonely soul in the midst of a vast and frozen world.

The melancholy and melancholy of the song also reminds us of the classic lieds of composer Schubert.

Even when Laufey sets a scene that couldn’t be more modern, like the Tokyo skyscrapers in Lover Girl, the lyrical character doesn’t seem to live in real time like everyone else, but is still lost in her own fantasies. Love makes her feverish, makes her feel like she’s living in a movie.

In a world where even love has become a science, dissected like any other ordinary material object, the music of artists like Laufey gives us a breath of fresh air.

It’s a relief that there are still people in this world who see love as it is. An unsolvable mystery. We rush into it madly, excessively, unreasonably without knowing why. Absolutely not because we have any mental illness or trauma. Just because we love.

Laufey's classic voice seems to come from another era - one where people lived in castles, loved princes, and believed in fairies. Of course, this princess is more complex than a Disney princess.

Hien Trang

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/laufey-nang-jazz-the-he-z-20250928083122933.htm