How Laufey Found Her Sound by Unlearning the Rules
Laufey BM ’21, Hasan Minhaj, Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon, and Stanley Tucci on Cards on the Table.
Image by Matt Holyoak
Who would you invite to your dream dinner party? That's the idea behind Stanley Tucci's four-part series, Cards on the Table, produced in collaboration with Allbirds(Opens in a new window) and hosted on Rolling Stone's YouTube channel.
So far, Tucci has invited the likes of Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz, Spice Girl Mel C, Queer Eye star Tan France, and actor Sophie Turner to share a meal and deep conversation. On episode three, Laufey BM ’21 joins comedian Hasan Minhaj and mathematician Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon at Tucci's table, and the dialogue flows like the wine, covering everything from the best advice you've ever received to breaking the rules.
Watch Laufey on Cards on the Table:
Laufey's best advice came from Berklee Summer Programs alum Jon Batiste. He happened to call her right after she read "a mean review of a concert" while she was "having a little hotel cry." He told her not to read the reviews, "but now I still do in secret."
Minhaj asked her when she knows a song is complete, and she said, “What does perfect even mean? Art is so subjective. So it’s done when I’m happy with it in that moment. I know I’ll probably look back at any song and think I could’ve changed this or that but there’s so much beauty in knowing that’s the decision I made that day, so I kind of don’t often revisit it. I just let it be what it was when I made it."
“Years from now you’ll look back at those songs and you’ll say that’s who I was at the time," Tucci said.
"There’s so much beauty in imperfection and in the moment," Laufey agreed. "I listen to the songs I wrote when I was in college and they’re very naïve and I’m like wow, that’s so shitty, but so amazingly shitty, because that’s both led me to where I am now and that’s who I was, like an album of my life."
I started kind of breaking the rules. It was literally at that point where I started finding success as an artist.Laufey BM ’21
When the conversation turned to breaking the rules, Laufey shared about her Berklee experience.
"I was a chronic rule follower growing up . . . I practiced my scales and followed the rules of life and of music. When I moved from Iceland to Boston to go to college, for the first time in my life I was in contemporary music school, not classical music school, and I was mortified. All of these things that I had believed about music and believed about life were just completely dismantled. I had this moment where everything changed for me both as a woman and as a musician. I started writing music, and I started kind of breaking the rules. It was literally at that point where I started finding success as an artist. You can almost pin it down to a week where everything changed for me."
"There was such a distinct moment when I realized that if you kind of don’t know what you’re doing, you might be doing something right," she said.
Laufey also mentioned she's working on new music, so we'll be keeping our ears peeled for that.