Grammy-winning jazz-pop star Laufey: ‘When I was 17, Bill Murray told me I was a very powerful woman’

Words of affirmation are important when you’re a teenage girl – so when Bill Murray told Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, the Grammy-winning jazz artist known as Laufey, that she was a “powerful woman” at 17, she took it to heart. “I remember also being confused,” she recalls today, now 25. “I hadn’t put out any music then; I was just a nerdy little classical cello student.” Still, Murray turned out to be right.

Only four years later, the Icelandic-Chinese singer went viral on TikTok with her Forties-inspired classic jazz croons, which introduced Generation Z to the famously stuffy genre. The following year, she released her sparkling debut album Everything I Know About Love. By 2023, Jónsdóttir had beaten Björk and Sigur Rós as the most streamed artist from Iceland, and this year won the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys for her second record Bewitched – and all without the backing of a major label.

Laufey songs are comforting yet mischievous, indebted to her background in classical music, with deep vocals that dive effortlessly into those roaring low registers of female jazz icons before her. “I would sing in public, and everyone would be like, ‘She’s got the voice of a divorced woman in the body of a 13-year-old girl,’” Jónsdóttir says. “I never felt pretty or light or young. I always felt very foreign, different, and heavy. I felt like I was a circus freak. It’s so loaded for a young girl to hear.”

That voice has since become her calling card. And now, she’s putting it to good, albeit surprising, use with a tinselled collection of jazz-inflected Christmas songs. Her smooth crooning vocals are all over the Ella Fitzgerald-inspired single “Christmas Magic”, her EP A Very Laufey Holiday! and the two songs she recorded with nine-time Grammy winner Norah Jones. Right now, she has not one but three songs in the race for Christmas No 1 in the UK.

“I feel like the singer from Love Actually,” she laughs, pointing to Bill Nighy’s washed-up rockstar Billy Mack, who spends the entirety of the film promoting his cash-grab seasonal track. Luckily, Jónsdóttir’s Christmas tunes are a far cry from the bleated Christmas hits that are annually rammed down our throats. Instead, hers are sophisticated and elegant – sepia toned as if beamed in from a distant era. But the musician sitting in front of me today is present and grounded, chatting as if I were a friend popping in for a hot chocolate.

Christmas music can be tricky, I suggest. Do it well, and you won’t need to work for the other 11 months of the year. Do it too well and there’s a risk it becomes all you’re known for. (See Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé). Online, some fans have described Jónsdóttir as Gen Z’s answer to the latter. “Oh my god,” she says in response, pretzelled on a sofa in her sister’s London apartment. Her face is bare and framed by the loose curls of her chestnut hair. “As long as other people love my other music as well, I’m so happy to take any kind of torch like that,” she says. “Obviously, I want to be taken seriously as a musician. I think you can do both.”

When it came time to film the music video for her cover of Eartha Kitt’s 1953 flirty classic “Santa Baby”, Jónsdóttir wanted a narrator who embodied the Christmas spirit – someone whose voice alone conjures the scent of eggnog and peppermint candy canes. “What strings can I pull?” she recalls thinking. Then Jónsdóttir remembered the man who told her she was “powerful” all those years ago: Murray. She gave him a ring and somewhat miraculously, the Hollywood star said yes. The finished product sees an ethereal Jónsdóttir surrounded by ballerinas and gigantic Christmas trees as Murray looks on as the storyteller. It’s pure Christmas magic.

Born in Reykjavik to an Icelandic father and Chinese mother, Jónsdóttir and her identical twin sister, Júnía, were raised to be musicians. Their mother was a violinist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, her own parents professors of violin and piano at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Jónsdóttir was given her first violin aged two. Piano lessons began at age four; cello classes, age eight. When she reached her teens, she competed in Ísland Got Talent, where she sang a pitch-perfect rendition of Alicia Keys’s “If I Ain’t Got You” and made it to the finals. Later she appeared on The Voice Iceland.

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After a peripatric upbringing shuttling between America, Iceland and China, Jónsdóttir settled in Boston aged 19 to study at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, where she discovered jazz. “My whole life has been in classical music, I’ve been trained to become the best musician possible, play the piece the best, play the notes on the page the best,” she says. “At Berklee, the prize was completely different, it was about playing music, rather than what was on the page.”

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That flexibility and rule-breaking is one of the reasons she fell in love with the genre. “Jazz is all about that,” says Jónsdóttir. “It’s bending things and breaking away from what’s on the page and improvising. I love hiding meanings in my lyrics. There’s nothing I love more than a song that sounds like it’s about running around in a beautiful patch of grass with flowers, and it turns out it’s a song about sex.” Her own lyrics are playful in this way. On her jazz-pop breakout hit “Valentine”, Jónsdóttir sings: “I tell him that he’s pretty too/Can I say that? Don’t have a clue,” and later: “I’m scared of flies, I’m scared of guys, someone please help.” That same tongue-in-cheek tone is all over pop music this year, with Sabrina Carpenter’s album Short ’n’ Sweet laced with double entendre and self-deprecating asides.

Where Jónsdóttir sits on the scale of jazz and new-gen pop is an unending debate. “I’ve never been one thing and there’s definitely been moments where I feel like I need to conform and like there’s nowhere I can go,” she says. Her predominantly Gen Z fan base has helped Jónsdóttir feel confident in sticking to her guns.

“I don’t think the need to conform to pop is as much of a thing anymore,” she says. “We’re not trying to make music for radio necessarily. It’s not just one man sitting there, deciding everything that goes through, like some gatekeeper.” The fact she recently won Variety’s crossover artist of the year is a testament to changing times. “Everything is decided by audiences now,” says Jónsdóttir. “Gen Z likes to be different. Culture moves with those who are different. It’s always been like that.”

“Christmas Magic” is streaming on Amazon Music