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Her name is Regina George, and she is a massive deal. Renee Rapp shines as the leader of “The Plastics” in the official trailer for Mean Girls, the upcoming adaptation of the Broadway musical, which itself was an adaptation of the original 2004 Tina Fey film. And guess which 20-year-old pop princess’ music is featured? […]
At the height of the pandemic, singer-songwriter Laufey spent her free time outside of classes at the Berklee College of Music taking hours-long meetings with industry executives. With only two self-released singles out at the time, the modern jazz artist was already fielding emails from managers, labels and publishers interested in signing her — but for Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay), the conversations were about understanding the inner workings of the music business.
“I had a second education talking to so many people,” she says. “I would take meetings on my own and say, ‘I’m not signing anything, but tell me everything you know about the music industry.’”
Three years later, Laufey has taken that information and built a team to help bring her pop-infused style of jazz to the top of her genre. In September, her second album, Bewitched, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts, fueled by the success of catchy bossa nova-inspired lead single “From The Start.” Her prior releases have subsequently soared up the rankings, prominently stamping the 24-year-old’s name across charts otherwise filled with legacy acts including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Miles Davis. Thanks to her confident and dreamy voice and social media savvy, she’s now crossing into the mainstream as one of the biggest jazz stars of the streaming era. And following a year in which fellow jazz artist Samara Joy won best new artist, appetite for the genre seems at its hungriest in decades.
Long before she dedicated herself to learning the industry, Laufey understood life as a musician. Her maternal grandparents were both professors of music in China, and her mother is a classical violinist. (She has appeared on a few of her daughter’s songs, such as the titular track from 2022 debut album, Everything I Know About Love). Born in Reykjavík, Laufey began playing piano at four years old, picked up cello at eight, and started singing jazz a few years after that, all while moving between Iceland and Washington, D.C., and spending her summers at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. “My mom could tell that I had a natural inclination for music,” Laufey says.
While studying as a cello student at Berklee, Laufey knew she wanted to mix her jazz and classical background with her own contemporary voice. As she grew into her own at school in Boston, she gained confidence and began writing her own songs. She recorded her first track, “Street By Street,” on the last day before campus shut down due to COVID-19 restrictions. A few weeks later, she uploaded it on DistroKid. “It got some attention,” she remembers. “I started growing a social media following online and it all snowballed from there.”
Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
She continued to hone her songwriting skills amid her virtual college experience, challenging herself to pick up her guitar, create catchy hooks and pen “cheeky” lyrics every time a Zoom class ended (“Listening to you harp on ’bout some new soulmate/ ‘She’s so perfect,’ blah, blah, blah,” she sings on “From The Start”). She began posting videos of her singing jazz standards by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and more on Instagram and TikTok. The clips quickly became a refuge for people seeking levity during the pandemic. “I was freaking out,” she acknowledges. “I was like, ‘OK. I have a duty to fulfill.’ It was such good practice for me.”
Later in 2020, her social media success led to inquiries from top music executives. Following months of meetings, she signed a global recording deal with AWAL and added a manager in Max Gredinger from Foundations Artist Management. “I saw her building this insane online audience on her own and thought, ‘We could build on that,’” says Gredinger. He acknowledges that there wasn’t much precedent for breaking jazz artists into the mainstream today — but if anything, he notes, they used it to their advantage.
“I hear a lot of artists talk about other artists like, ‘What’s the blueprint?’ Laufey doesn’t really do that. Of course, there are artists that are massively inspiring to her. Norah Jones, Adele, Chet Baker, all the jazz greats [and] a lot of classical composers. But she always knew that what she was doing was one of one and something that hadn’t been done before.”
Max Gredinger and Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
Without a definitive outline to follow, Laufey primarily focused on further developing her social media presence, specifically on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to teasing music and responding to fans’ comments and DMs, she livestreamed weekly sessions of her performing lullabies. “If you gave me all the money in the world, I don’t think I could come up with a better social strategy than Laufey,” Gredinger says.
Following the August 2022 release Everything I Know About Love, she toured 250-to-500 capacity rooms in the U.S. — a crucial component to Laufey’s development, stresses Gredinger, and a way for her to build buzz amid her growing fan base. By the middle of 2023, she was ready to start the rollout of her follow-up album, beginning with her biggest hit to date, “From The Start.” After writing the entirety of the song in half an hour, she released the charmingly upbeat song last May, and it immediately took off on TikTok, though she initially brushed aside the numbers.
“Sometimes you put a song on TikTok and it does well because it’s visually stimulating or it has a hooky lyric, but it won’t go past that,” Laufey says. However, once it eclipsed a million streams in a 24-hour period and tripled her previous record, she knew that she had something special.
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Laufey continued to grow momentum with new singles throughout the summer — and expanded her team as well, signing a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music in August. The following month, Bewitched arrived through AWAL and has since spent eight weeks atop both Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums. Following its first tracking week, “From The Start” also hit No. 1 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart. Through Nov. 2, the song has 3.5 million official on-demand streams, according to Luminate.
Amid her current 30-date sold-out North American tour, Laufey earned her first chart entry on Hot Alternative Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs with her seductive beabadoobee team-up, “A Night To Remember.” On Friday (Nov. 10), she’ll drop two holiday tracks: Her rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and an original titled “Better Than Snow,” both with jazz-pop icon Norah Jones. And as she continues to carve her own path and expand her audience across genres, Laufey is more confident in her future than ever before.
“When I started out, people were always asking me, ‘Who do you want to be like?’” Laufey reflects. “I had no idea what to say. I still have no clue what to say. The difference is, now I don’t need to. I’m just going to keep making the music I want and hope that it reaches as many ears as possible.”
Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
A version of this story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Maren Morris is one of a lucky few who gets to call her hero a friend. While on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Tuesday (Nov. 7), the vocalist opened up about her relationship with Taylor Swift five months after she and the “Anti-Hero” pop star performed their Fearless (Taylor’s Version) collaboration “You All Over Me” together at the Eras Tour.
“We’re the same age, but looking up to her since I was a teenager, and watching her navigate her country music to pop career so gracefully, and the way she treats her fans is so kind and generous,” Morris gushed. “She’s setting a high bar.”
The 33-year-old singer-songwriter also recalled meeting Swift in 2018 on the Reputation Tour. “She was kind enough to ask me to come out and sing my song ‘The Middle’ with her,” Morris shared. “She’s just been so supportive of me and my career over the years.”
Following somewhat in Swift’s footsteps, Morris recently announced that she’s planning to leave country music behind. Her genre hop, however, isn’t just about changing up her sound. As she explained to Fallon, “There were just some facets of [country] that I didn’t really jive with anymore.”
In October, Morris revealed she will no longer submit her music for country awards consideration and transferred from her label in Nashville to the New York-based Columbia Records. “I really cannot participate in the really toxic arms of this institution anymore,” she shared in an October interview on the New York Times’ Popcast, noting her disappointment with the country industry’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and social issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I couldn’t do this circus anymore of feeling like I have to absorb and explain people’s bad behaviors and laugh it off,” she added. “I just couldn’t do that after 2020. … I’ve changed.”
As part of her departure, Morris released two-track EP The Bridge in September, produced by Swift’s own frequent collaborator, Jack Antonoff. The Grammy winner performed one of the project’s songs, “The Tree,” alongside guests Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer for Fallon’s audience on The Tonight Show.
Watch Morris’ Jimmy Fallon interview and performance below:
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BTS‘ Jung Kook took his solo act to the Today Show on Wednesday morning (Nov. 8), stopping traffic all around the plaza outside the show’s New York studios for a live performance of songs form his just-released debut solo album, Golden. The program’s hosts said JK drew one of the biggest crowds they’ve ever had, […]
Korean artist MIDNATT made history earlier this year by using AI to help him translate his debut single “Masquerade” into six different languages. Though it wasn’t a major commercial success, its seamless execution by the HYBE-owned voice synthesis company Supertone proved there was a new, positive application of musical AI on the horizon that went beyond unauthorized deepfakes and (often disappointing) lo-fi beats.
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Enter Jordan “DJ Swivel” Young, a Grammy-winning mixing engineer and producer, known best for his work with Beyonce, BTS and Dua Lipa. His new AI voice company Hooky is one of many new start-ups trying to popularize voice cloning, but unlike much of his competition, Young is still an active and well-known collaborator for today’s musical elite. After connecting with pop star Lauv, whom he worked with briefly years before as an engineer, Young’s Hooky developed an AI voice model of Lauv’s voice so that they could translate the singer-songwriter’s new single “Love U Like That” into Korean.
It’s the first major Western artist to take part in the AI translation trend. Lauv wants the new translated version of “Love U Like That” to be a way of showing his love to his Korean fanbase and to celebrate his biggest headline show to date, which recently took place in Seoul.
Though many fans around the world listen to English-speaking music in high numbers, Will Page, author and former chief economist at Spotify, and Chris Dalla Riva, a musician and Audiomack employee, noted in a recent report that many international audiences are increasingly turning their interest back to their local language music – a trend they nicknamed “Glocalization.” With Hooky, Supertone and other AI voice synthesis companies all working to master translation, English-speaking artists now have the opportunity to participate in this growing movement and to form tighter bonds with international fans.
To explain the creation of “Love U Like That (Korean Version),” out Wednesday (Nov. 8), Lauv and Young spoke in an exclusive interview to Billboard.
When did you first hear what was possible with AI voice filters?
Lauv: I think the first time was that Drake and The Weeknd song [“Heart On My Sleeve” by Ghostwriter]. I thought it was crazy. Then when my friend and I were working on my album, we started playing each other’s music. He pulled out a demo. They were pitching it to Nicki Minaj, and he was singing it and then put it into Nicki Minaj’s voice. I remember thinking it’s so insane this is possible.
Why did you want to get involved with AI voice technology yourself?
Lauv: I truly believe that the only way forward is to embrace what is possible now, no matter what. I think being able to embrace a tool like this in a way that’s beneficial and able to get artists paid is great.
Jordan, how did you get acquainted with Lauv, and why did you feel he was the right artist to mark your first major collaboration?
Jordan “DJ Swivel” Young: We’ve done a lot of general outreach to record companies, managers, etcetera. We met Range Media Partners, Lauv’s management team, and they really resonated with Hooky. The timing was perfect: he was wrapping up his Asian tour and had done the biggest show of his life in South Korea. Plus, he has done a few collaborations with BTS. I’ve worked on a number of BTS songs too. There was a lot of synergy between us.
Why did you choose Korean as the language that you wanted to translate a song into?
Lauv: Well, in the future, I would love to have the opportunity to do this in as many different languages as possible, but Seoul has been a place that has become really close to my heart, and it was the place of my biggest headline show to date. I just wanted to start by doing something special for those Korean fans.
What is the process of actually translating the song?
Young: We received the original audio files for the song “Love U Like That,” and we rewrote the song with former K-Pop idol Kevin Woo. The thing with translating lyrics or poetry is it can’t be a direct translation. You have to make culturally appropriate choices, words that flow well. So Kevin did that and we re-recorded Kevin’s voice singing the translation, then we mixed the song again exactly as the original was done to match it sonically. All the background vocals were at the correct volume and the right reverbs were used. I think we’ve done a good job of matching it. Then we used our AI voice technology to match Lauv’s voice, and we converted Kevin’s Korean version into Lauv’s voice.
Lauv: To help them make the model of my voice, I sent over a bunch of raw vocals that were just me singing in different registers. Then I met up with him and Kevin. It was riveting to hear my voice like that. I gave a couple of notes – very minor things – after hearing the initial version of the translation, and then they went back and modified. I really trusted Jordan and Kevin on how to make this authentic and respectful to Korean culture.
Is there an art to translating lyrics?
Lauv: Totally. When I was listening back to it, that’s what struck me. There’s certain parts that are so pleasing to the ear. I still love hearing the Korean version phonetically as someone from the outside. Certain parts of Kevin’s translation, like certain rhythm schemes, hit me so much harder than hearing it in English actually.
Do you foresee that there will be more opportunities for translators as this space develops?
Young: Absolutely. I call them songwriters more than translators though, actually. They play a huge role. I used to work with Beyonce as an engineer, and I’ve watched her do a couple songs in Spanish. It required a whole new vocal producer, a new team just to pull off those songs. It’s daunting to sing something that’s not your natural language. I even did some Korean background vocals myself on a BTS song I wrote. They provided me with the phonetics, and I can say it was honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever recorded. It’s hard to sing with the right emotion when you’re focused on pronouncing things correctly. But Hooky allows the artist to perform in other languages but with all the emotion that’s expected. Sure, there’s another songwriter doing the Korean performance, but Lauv was there for the whole process. His fingerprint is on it from beginning to end. I think this is the future of how music will be consumed.
I think this could bring more opportunities for the mixing engineers too. When Dolby Atmos came out that offered more chances for mixers, and with the translations, I think there are now even more opportunities. I think it’s empowering the songwriter, the engineer, and the artist all at once. There could even be a new opportunity created for a demo singer, if it’s different from the songwriter who translated the song.
Would you be open to making your voice model that you used for this song available to the public to use?
Lauv: Without thinking it through too much, I think my ideal self is a very open person, and so I feel like I want to say hell yeah. If people have song ideas and want to hear my voice singing their ideas, why not? As long as it’s clear to the world which songs were written and made by me and what was written by someone else using my voice tone. As long as the backend stuff makes sense, I don’t see any reason why not.
On Tuesday (Nov. 7), Timbaland walked back his recent misogynistic statement about Britney Spears after a furious backlash against the producer for comments he made in an interview last month in which he said frequent collaborator Justin Timberlake should have put a “muzzle” on his one-time girlfriend Spears.
“I apologize to the Britney fans, and her,” Timbaland said somberly during one of his regular live TikTok chats while reading a comment asking him about his attitude towards women. “Yes, ‘you know about respecting women? Hell yeah!”
Rolling Stone reported that Timbaland additionally said, “I’m sorry to all the Britney fans, even to her. I’m sorry, because muzzle was — no, you have a voice. You speak what you want to speak. Who am I to tell you what not to speak? And I was wrong for saying that. I was looking at it from a different lens and what I am is a reconcile person. I’m not a person who takes sides.”
The reaction came after Timbaland took questions from the audience during an Oct. 29 live interview with 9th Wonder at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in which someone asked about the renewed interest in JT’s Tim-produced “Cry Me a River” in the wake of Spears’ best-selling tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me.
The 2002 song from Timberlake’s first solo album, Justified, is widely seen as a reaction to the singer’s split with Spears — down to the casting of an unfaithful blonde woman who looks eerily like Britney in the video — and when asked about the song during the chat last month, Timbaland said, “She going crazy, right? I wanted to call and say, ‘JT, you gotta put a muzzle on that girl.”
Spears and Timberlake dated from 1999-2002, and Britney delves into aspects of their relationship in the memoir, including an abortion she underwent while they were together. “Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young,” she wrote, adding, “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
In the book Spears also notes that the “Cry Me a River” video featured a “woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain” and that the media attention to the video for the song that Timbaland co-wrote and co-produced turned her into a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy.” In reality, she added, she was broken-hearted and “comatose in Louisiana” while JT was “happily running around Hollywood.”
Spears fans were furious after the Timbaland comments surfaced, slamming the producer for his sexist statement. At press time it did not appear that Timberlake — who has kept a low profile during the run-up and roll-out of the Spears book — had reacted to either the original Timbaland statement or the apology; Spears also appears not to have posted a reaction to either comment.
Tori Kelly is fresh off a successful tour and a new EP Tori, and the star sat down with Billboard‘s Rania Aniftos to reflect on her past few months. Thankfully, the 30-year-old singer says she’s “feeling really good” after she was hospitalized back in July for blood clots in her lungs and legs. “It totally […]
Fans of The Beatles are getting gift after gift this month, starting with the arrival of the yet-unreleased song “Now and Then” late last week and followed by a cheeky Peter Jackson-directed music video for the track. And later this week, expanded reissues of the group’s greatest-hits compilations — known as the Red (1962–1966) and […]
Magic Johnson is loving his role as a co-owner of the Washington Commanders — especially since the NFL has gotten a healthy dose of Taylor Swift lately amid her budding relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news While appearing […]
Britney Spears fans have put Timbaland under fire after a recent misogynistic comment. The producer, who is a frequent Justin Timberlake collaborator and has worked with Spears, was dismissive of the “I’m a Slave 4 U” singer during a recent panel interview. “She going crazy, right?” Timbaland asked the reporter when it was noted that […]
