This song has been stuck in my head for the past three weeks.
This is "From The Start," an upbeat song released earilier this year by Laufey (pronounced "lay-vay"). It's an easy song to sing, and it gets stuck in your head very, very easily.
I'm singing the damn song as I am writing this damn thing as we speak.
This song and others by the Icelandic-Chinese jazz pop and bossa nova performer have been on the playlists of many people ever since I began seeing TikToks of her performance with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.
What I found very peculiarly interesting about her rise in popularity is her seemingly seamless crossover appeal; her tracks tend to appear on friends playlists that contain indie artists like beabadoobee, Clairo or mxmtoon and 88Rising-adjacent R&B acts like Keshi, Crush and DPR Ian.
I like jazz, but her brand of "jazz" does not entirely come from a yearning for a time when sport coats were casualwear. Her style is more of a modern and DIY-type interpretation of the genre.
"From The Start" and other popular tracks like "Like The Movies" touch on very specific, but relatable and lighthearted themes about love that a lot of contemporaries tend to miss. Laufey herself stated in an interview with NBC's Today that the perspective she writes from in her music is that of a '"young, confused" woman', saying,
"I’m very, very honest in my songwriting. I’m not cryptic. I’m definitely very self-aware and I think this is a very self-aware generation. We make fun of ourselves a lot. So I think there’s a relatability."
Take her track "Like The Movies" as an example. The reason why the track is called "Like The Movies" is because the protagonist of the song yearns for a love akin to what she saw in movies of yore. She seekd to fall in love with an adventurous gentleman"she could take on or be led onto escapades like "sneaking into bars" and slow dancing "under stormy skies," before realizing the realities of modern dating when she says that "no one is ever good enough."
Before you say "I can fix her," realize the fact that though she is evoking a fantasy, what she is singing about is something that many people of all ages want in this day and age of online dating, hook-ups and fuckboys - a simple honest relationship based on simple love and attraction.
The fact that a song like this is set up by a jazz singer makes it seem like something that seems so simple, is also something seemingly distant and unattainable because it seems to a something of the past.
That's some crazy ass insight, innit?
Before I wrote this, I tended to describe Laufey is "this generation's Michael Bublé," but I don't think it is actually a fair comparison. Bublé is mostly known for performing standards, which have been originally performed by people back when our grandparents were teenagers and a time when women sang songs that seem sympathetic to the thoughts of men.
That's what separates what my parents like and what I like.
I will be looking out for her new album when it comes out in September.
Ingat.