'Bewitched' by Laufey
Last August, Everything I Know About Love helped turn Laufey—Icelandic-Chinese singer, pianist, guitarist, cellist and 2021 graduate of Berklee—into a soft sensation who topped at least one chart (the Spotify Jazz Chart) and whose fall tour is sold out (in venues that generally hold under 2,000 patrons apiece).
Those parenthetical caveats might indicate the smaller-scale expectations of a neglected American musical genre, but Laufey’s second album, Bewitched, shows how much romance and refinement a young artist can embody.
Co-producing mostly with Spencer Stewart, who also assisted with the production on Everything I Know, Laufey doesn’t lunge toward new vistas. The bossa nova of Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto remains a humidly palpable influence, and it isn’t difficult to imagine an intrepid interpreter converting the American English of “Haunted” or “From the Start” into Brazilian Portuguese.
Laufey could probably sing those interpretations with the skill she’s maintained from first to second album: the rounded fullness of her voice seems not only a few years older than her actual age of 24 but also a few decades into the past: “Dreamer” has the air of an Andrews Sisters ballad, and the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra tidally carries the singer from the set of South Pacific toward Angeleno shores with “California and Me.”
On the following track, “Nocturne (Interlude),” Laufey doesn’t sing, but the studiously sensuous way she caresses the piano further elaborates on her classical and classicist sides. And her cover of Erroll Garner and Johnny Burke’s “Misty,” complete with brushed drums, takes cues from Sarah Vaughan’s 1958 version.
“Promise,” the song she co-wrote with Dan Wilson (who also co-wrote Adele’s “Someone Like You,” among many other 21st-century hits), brings her closer to modernity, and she sounds at home there. So Bewitched might indicate Laufey’s willingness to progress artistically … at her own ambling, old-fashioned pace down the promenade.
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