Barack Obama Includes Laufey on His 2025 Favorite Music List

When Barack Obama shares recommendations, people listen. The former president dropped his favorite books, music, and movies of 2025 on Instagram on Thursday, and there's a Berklee connection. Laufey BM ’21 caught Obama's attention with the song "Silver Lining."

The track is on the Icelandic singer's August 2025 album, A Matter of Time, of which Rolling Stone says the "talented throwback-pop flag-waiver has her own spin on the cycle of limerence, love, and loss." Pitchfork describes "Silver Lining" as "sung exactingly and with delightful flourishes, could almost be an Amy Winehouse slow jam, but the unblemished perfection of the delivery seems part of the track’s comic subversiveness." The song has over 63 million streams on Spotify. 

Obama's 2025 list also has another Berklee connection. I'm With Her has previously collaborated with Berklee Instant Strings while on campus, and their singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan used to be in the band Crooked Still with professor and banjo player Greg Liszt.

Being included on the former president's playlists can have a big impact—just ask Arooj Aftab BM ’10. Her song “Mohabbat” made the summer playlist in 2021. 

"It means a lot to me personally that he included me on there, because I think that often doesn't happen, because I'm a Pakistani American, brown, female artist, and in so many ways that kind of puts you aside from from the main story a lot of the time," she said at the time. "I just feel like he's really cool to do that. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, maybe he just likes the song or whatever, but I think that there's a lot of meaning there in putting me on that list."