Song Exploder - Laufey - From The Start

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Laufey is a singer and songwriter originally from Iceland. She studied piano and cello as a kid. When she was 15, she was a guest soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. She went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and that’s when she started writing songs. While she was still a student, she had a number one hit on Icelandic radio. Her first album debuted at number one on Billboard’s Alternative New Artist chart. Laufey was Spotify’s most streamed jazz artist of 2022. Her second album, Bewitched, came out in September 2023. And her new album just broke Spotify’s record for the most streams of a jazz album in a single day. And for this episode, I talked to Laufey about the breakout hit from that new album: a song called “From The Start." For more, visit songexploder.net/laufey.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Lave is a jazz artist, but I'm not sure how much that label matters to all the people who listen to her. I read this headline in Vice from a few years ago that said, The musical genre is dead. Gen Z killed it. TikTok and Spotify algorithms aren't serving music to audiences based on genre, and so it's easier than ever to ignore genre and just take what you want, like, the entire musical world is a giant breakfast buffet at a fancy hotel.

But here are a couple of genre-related stats. Leve was Spotify's most streamed jazz artist of 2022, and her new album just broke Spotify's record for the most streams of a jazz album in a single day. Let me back up. Levei is a singer and songwriter, originally from Iceland. She studied piano and cello as a kid. When she was 15, she was a guest soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. She went to Berkeley College of Music in Boston, and that's when she started writing songs.

While she was still a student, she had a number one hit on Icelandic radio. Her first album debuted at number one on Billboard's alternative new artist chart. Her second album, Bewitched, came out in September 2023. And for this episode, I talked to Leve about the breakout hit from that new album, a song called From the Start. My name is Levee. I remember I was sitting on my couch just in my apartment. I'd been listening to a lot of Basanova records and I thought I would try my hand at writing something in that style.

There are some very playful little songs. I have on my notes app on my phone just a long list of song titles that I think would be cool that I literally write down when I'm like on the train. Oftentimes it happens right before I go to sleep. I'll be like, wait, this could be a good song title. So I had the song title for a while and I was like, okay, what can we from the start? This was recorded on my phone.

I started playing guitar like four years ago maybe. I barely dare to call myself a guitar player just because it feels almost like offensive to the 20 years of cello and piano lessons that I've taken. but it's my favorite instrument to write on. Because I know the piano so well, there are more limitations on guitar almost so I can focus on the writing. The title is usually the last word in the chorus that I write,

so I know what I'm writing towards. I wanted it to be this confession of love. And it was after I wrote the chorus where I was like, okay, how do I make this interesting? What's a feeling that I felt before that would kind of make sense with this and I realized it was this unrequited love feeling what's a girl lying on my bed staring in too quite a terrifying love is dry have to fix it so i guess i'll tell you this today i mean i had a bit of an experience where i liked a friend and and you think that they like you and then all of a sudden they're

talking about someone they like, this new soulmate that they found. And you just get this kind of like sinking feeling and you're kind of like almost a little bit embarrassed. That's the feeling I wanted to illustrate. And I kind of imagine it as these two people sitting on a couch or me and this friend who I'm in love with sitting on a couch and just describing it kind of word for word. I grew up very classically trained and actually kind of always thought I'd become, you know, an orchestra musician. My mother is a violinist and her parents were both classical music professors as well. So it was kind of just my lineage. Growing up in classical music, I think I took myself quite seriously and overthought a lot of the things that I was doing. When I started learning jazz music

and singing jazz music, I was just very much a classically trained musician at this point. And that's all I knew how to do, you know, like look at a piece of music and learn it. When I got to Berkeley, I kind of found a new type of freedom within music just through seeing other kids who hadn't grown up with a classical background and were a lot less strict with themselves, kind of allowing themselves to mix and match sounds and styles and not take it too seriously. So even though I was a cello student, I had started singing by then and I listened to a lot of jazz and also pop and I knew I wanted to bring all these worlds together. So I brought this song to my producer, Spencer.

That's producer and songwriter Spencer Stewart. He just understands exactly what I want to do. He understands the jazz references and the classical references. We did one of my songs the first day that we worked together. And I remember thinking, wow, this guy just gets me. I knew I wanted it to sound kind of reminiscent of an old Bussanova recording. I wanted every instrument to be recorded live. So Spencer played guitar.

and bass on this. And the drums. We recorded most of the album at Spencer's Home Studio. It's kind of like my comfort place. It feels very much like a living room and not overwhelming at all. And I feel like I can be my most creative in spaces like that instead of in like a dark, humongous studio where I could get a little bit more stressed. Don't you notice how I get quiet.

When there's no one else around. Bosanova style singing is like kind of, it feels like storytelling. You know, it's very, it's quite spoken. Oh, the burning pain. Listening to you, heart bump out some new soul made. And the lyric, oh, the burning pain, to me, that kind of sounds like it's almost harking back to this, like, dramatic time when women were. were mad, you know. They were like, oh, the burning pain. Almost like this Renaissance kind of reaction

to it. But yeah, oh, the burning pain listening to you harp on about some new soulmate. She's so perfect, blah, blah, blah. I really like that lyric. I just think it's so, it's so funny and so directly telling of how it feels in that moment. Dramatic and petty, that's what I'm aiming to do. And then I played the piano. It's recorded on like a third. It's recorded on like a felted piano, which brings this kind of playful touch. Like a loom, but don't you feel it to confess, I loved you from the star. The word loon is just this old-fashioned way of describing someone being crazy. I think it's so cute.

It's kind of like a fun word to bring back to today's vocabulary. I have old-fashioned word choices just as a human, so I think that seeps into my writing. I've been told I speak quite formally sometimes. I don't know why. Maybe because English is my third language. Well, my mother's Chinese and my father's Icelandic, so my first language was Mandarin. It was Chinese, and my second language is Icelandic.

I started learning English when I was about five or six, but I think I'm starting to think in English, and so it comes the most naturally to me. It makes the most sense. Bye your brother. Ella Fitzgerald was like my idol growing up, so as a part of my vocal training, I used to transcribe a lot of like Ella Fitzgerald, scat solos. People ask me a lot, like, how do I learn how to write jazz music?

And I'm like, just transcribe your favorite solos. Like, just listen. When you recorded that scatting part, was that hard for you? Did you have to do a lot of takes, or is that something you always have in your back pocket? Could you just bust that out right now? I guess I could bust it out right now. You kind of like flip your voice up. Like, you kind of have to like let go and hope that your voice will catch you, kind of.

I heard that I want to have that kind of rhythm going against the guitar. It's kind of meant to be this playful, like interwoven melody. That's just me playing cello. Just lots of layers of cello. The cello is such a versatile instrument. You can get really high pitches and you get the bass as well. So you can kind of create almost like a string orchestra-like sound with just one instrument. We record very close to the mic and I'm very intentional about getting that kind of wispy sound.

So I play like, you know, higher up on the bridge and want to capture that kind of like, it almost sounds like an ocean breeze to me. It's like a swell, almost like the swelling of a heart. It's falling in the pentatonic scale. It kind of has this like Chinese sound to it, which I kind of see as this way of showing my Chinese side a little bit. For the outro, I wanted it to sound all of a sudden really different from the rest of the song. because the end for me was like, okay, jokes aside, tricks aside, this is how I feel, just this full confession, I've loved you from the start. And I wanted to end only strings and voice, which I always feel like is me to the core.

Those are my two voices, cello and singing. Growing up, I listened to almost only classical and jazz music, and then Taylor's Swift. And looking back, I'm like, why was it specifically Taylor Swift? And it's because she wrote these lyrics that were quite literal and quite relatable. I wanted to hear that within the music that I made. Like when I wrote music, I wanted to be able to bring that kind of feeling. Because those jazz standards were written by Gershwin and Berlin, Cole Porter. And these are my favorite composers and writers, but they wrote these songs in the 30s and the 40s. They're all like old men who wrote it for musicals. So as beautiful as they are, and I take a lot from their craft, like, it loses this

sense of relatability. The day I released the song, it got a million streams in the first day. And I remember I was just gawking at my phone. I was like, what the hell is happening? And I just remember thinking, like, wow, I don't think many people think of it as like a Basanova song or a standard. I think they just hear a song. And I think that's so cool. Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the full song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length.

And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists,

including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings,

John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website. Rishi-kash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploader.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's from the start by Laveh in its entirety. Don't you notice how I get quiet when there's no one awkward silence. Don't you how you don't feel the same.

Oh, the burning to you heart bomb about. some new Oh, how What's a Goin' Visit songexplor.net slash Leveh to learn more. You'll find links to buy

or stream from the start and you can watch the music video. If you like this episode and you want to listen to another artist who uses a lot of elements of jazz and their music, check out my episode with Nora Jones from 2017.

You'll find that and all the other episodes of the podcast at songexplor.net or wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Theo Balkam, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about all our shows at Radiotopia.fm.

You can follow me on social media at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at SongExploder. If you want to support the podcast in another way, you can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.