'Everything I Know About Love' by Laufey
Laufey is romantic in the way Antônio Carlos Jobim was romantic: always yearning for love and yet always yearning for heartbreak, too. Her official debut album, Everything I Know About Love, is unsettlingly refined, pensively classicist, and in love with being in love and with being lovelorn.
At 23, Laufey is already somewhat accomplished—the recipient of a Presidential Scholarship at Berklee College of Music, she graduated in 2021, and her fanbase includes Billie Eilish—but she’s intelligent enough to convey, particularly in this album’s title track, that she’s also somewhat naïve.
“I don’t know that much at all/I trip, I fall,” she confesses to a beat not far removed from Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” and, for all her vocal sophistication, she means it. She means it just as much when, in “Just Like Chet,” she compares her hopeless romanticism to that of the late trumpeter Chet Baker, whom Josh Shpak echoes modestly with his own horn.
It’s tempting to attribute Laufey’s tastefulness and reserve to her Icelandic and Chinese heritage, but those qualities owe much more to the approach of mainstream-ready contemporary jazz: neither Norah Jones nor Diana Krall belts it out any more than Laufey does.
Laufey is a pianist, like Krall and Jones, but she’s also a cellist, and her skill on the latter instrument helps her slip smoothly toward the pop side of jazz, especially as she nestles it into the lightly Brazilian groove of “Fragile” and the dramatic lift of “Night Light.”
Although she does only one cover—a richly retro version of Frank Loesser’s “I’ve Never Been in Love Before”—Laufey’s own songwriting tilts an attentive ear to Lena, Ella, and Billie (Holiday, not Eilish). She has years and miles to go before she reaches their and Jobim’s artistic depths and heights, but as a romantic she’s rapidly catching up with them.
|
|
