Laufey Enchants with ‘Everything I Know About Love’

By Dean Roberts

Across the thirteen songs on her debut album Everything I Know About Love, Icelandic jazz-pop singer Laufey (pronounced lay-vay) reveals she seems to know quite a bit about the subject. Her brilliant trick is in making every word seem like the first one ever spoken about romance and heartbreak. 

The first track “Fragile” opens with the invitation: “Will you let me come closer to you?” The album sustains this intimacy throughout its runtime, even as it shifts from innocent to lost love. Laufey’s lush instrumentals and introspective storytelling lyrics create a perfect space to explore feelings of disconnection, naivete, and fantasies.

Laufey’s talent has been quietly in development for some time. As a child, she lived in both Reykjavik and Washington, D.C., which shows in her adept mixture of American and European styles. In 2015, she competed in the Icelandic version of The Voice where she was a finalist and, soon after, enrolled in the Berklee College of Music. 

Throughout COVID, she has been working on not only her degree,  having graduated in 2021, but also on her first album. Her first single was released in April 2020, soon after the start of the pandemic.

The second track, “Beautiful Stranger”, evokes Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (see my 2021 article on the film adaptation) in considering the possibilities of a stranger. Laufey describes a beautiful man sitting behind her on the subway and wonders what would have happened if she got to know him (“What if I would’ve stayed on the train/Dared to stand up and ask for his name?”). The story ends with Laufey putting aside all possibility: “My beautiful stranger will have to remain/A love that came and went with this train”. 

Two tracks later in “Dear Soulmate”, Laufey brings up this theme of romantic possibility up again. What will they look like? Does she know them already? If “Beautiful Stranger” ponders the past, “Dear Soulmate” ponders a seemingly inevitable future. The refrain is “One day I’ll give this song to you”. 

The frustration and the often isolation is in the between. The reality of quarantining and prolonged disconnection makes these moments only more poetic. On the one hand, Laufey seems to think she knows a lot about love but, on the other hand, is in constant self-doubt as to whether her knowledge is true or just the inference of many fantasies. From the title track, “Oh, it’s Heaven or so they say”. 

Every part of the album is suffused with an anxious nostalgia for a bygone ideal that may have never existed. Laufey’s most direct influence is the classic pop of Frank Sinatra or Perry Como but she removes the certainty from it. For every “the best is yet to come”, there is a “or so I’ve been told”. The lyrics are covered in a symphonic dreamscape, which include pieces of Tchaikovsky and Bach, according to a recent interview with music news outlet Consequence of Sound. 

Some songs recall classic Christmas songs of the fifties and sixties, like “I’ve Never Been In Love Before”, or fifties pop vocal harmonies of the Chordettes/Andrews Sisters variety, like “Dance With You Tonight”. Still, a track like “Above the Chinese Restaurant” has a distinctly contemporary flavor. Laufey is immensely well-read in music and is able to deftly balance callbacks and originality.
Everything I Know About Love does not fully reveal its hand until the final track “Night Light”, a supreme encapsulation of longing. In it, Laufey reflects on her childhood of “waiting for ever after” and now wonders if it is time to, literally in the song (“guess I won’t be living here anymore”), pack up and move on. In the end, her choice is “keeping on the night light”. Should we rest in the fantasy or move onto something more realistic? Let’s stay just a moment longer.