- - Laufey Talks Music Education and Overcoming Genre Snobbery at Grammy Museum Chat and Concert

Chris WillmanAugust 22, 2025 at 12:46 AM

As a formally trained multi-instrumentalist and a pop starlet, Laufey has long seemed like the poster girl for everything the Grammys represent or hope to represent. (And by “long,” we mean the two years since her “Bewitched” album brought her to greater prominence, though her ascent seems like it dates back further than that.) So she was a natural fit for a return to the Grammy Museum this week, this time moving upstairs to the downtown L.A. facility’s slightly larger rooftop space. There, in conversation and song, she regaled 300 fans who had immediately sold out the space at an also-elevated price, all of them happy to catch her in the most intimate possible setting before she headlines two shows a block away at Crypto Arena this fall.

Her interlocutor for the occasion Wednesday night was Peter Asher, known for his record productions as well as being a member of the Beatles-adjacent ’60s duo Peter and Gordon. Laufey, a Berklee grad, shared how she has started a foundation to help out music students, while Asher shared some of his own music education appreciation, starting with having a mother who was an instructor back in England.

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“One of the ironies is that my mother counted among her students, oddly enough, George Martin,” Asher said. “She taught George long before I had any affiliation with the Beatles or anything to do with that — strange coincidence.” “Then if your mother wasn’t a music teacher, we wouldn’t have the Beatles?” Laufey wondered, before Asher demurred that he wouldn’t take it quite that far in assessing the impact of the band’s producer having sought out oboe lessons. (And therein followed the most interesting dissection of the oboe’s noisy place in the orchestra that any pop star has recently indulged in.)

Laufey was on hand to promote her third album, “A Matter of Time,” which comes out Friday, just beating the close of eligibility for the 2026 Grammys, at which she’ll again be a contender in genre categories — following her best pop traditional album win for “Bewitched” — with a shot at moving into the all-genre divisions this time around. And Laufey is nothing if not “all-genre” personified.

“The way I see it is like, I am a jazz singer, just as I am a classical cellist, but my music is a mix of everything,” the Icelandic-Asian-American performer said during the Q&A. Said Asher, “Listening to the songwriting, it’s clear you are an admirer of the work of Taylor Swift.” “Oh yeah, absolutely,” the 26-year-old responded. “I mean, growing up, I always said I loved jazz music, classical music and Taylor Swift. Exactly.”

As for the snobbery that would keep those worlds apart, “I come from that world — like, I’ve been that person,” she said. “I used to be such a classical music snob. I look back at my high school self: What was I doing? But you know, I think snobbery ultimately comes from a deep yearning (for) conservation. It’s like you want to protect the same thing. And it comes from love for that. I’m always like, we have the same goal here — to keep it alive.”

Laufey laughed about her unique form of rebellion in her musically sophisticated family. “I did choose cello because my mom’s a violinist, and I thought that if I chose a different instrument, she wouldn’t be able to teach me. That is why I play cello, but I was really wrong. She still taught me, and it was worse because I was like, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!'”

Her mother was no anti-pop snob, though… quite the opposite, Laufey pointed out. “My mom always thought I was gonna be a pop star,” she said. “This is the least Chinese-mother part of her.” Even though Laufey planned on being an economics major because a music career seemed so unlikely, she said her mother “wanted me to be delusional. Constantly. She always said, ‘You’re not delusional enough.'”

This desire for her daughter to loosen up went across more lines than just music. “I didn’t want to drink in high school,” she said. “And I have this distinct memory of her sitting at the dining table being like, ‘Is there something wrong with you? Do you have friends?’ And she said, ‘Just try it.’ I remember so well! And she always wanted me to jump and take big chances and I was like, ‘I think I need to study something practical.’ And my mom was like, ‘No, you’re a pop star. Go write. Make music.”

She also received encouragement from a Berklee professor, Mike Block. “He had stabbed and played with (the cello) at the same time, and I thought, ‘What? Are you allowed to do that?’ My Berklee years were just me being like, am I allowed? … He asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘you know, ‘I don’t know — I’m a jazz singer and a classical cellist, but I wanna write my own music.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you sing and play?’ And I’d never seen anyone sing and play at the same time. And he was like, ‘It is totally possible.’ And so I spent a year learning how to play chords on cello. And there weremany exercises and drills that wil haunt me to the day I die… But I remember thinking, ‘Oh wait, this isn’t only a classical instrument; it’s so much more than that. I can play chords on it, I can sing, and it’s actually not in the way of my breathing. So it’s a very versatile instrument.”

Still, she said in response to an audience question, her classical training did stand in the way of moving into pop, primarily in her own head, Block’s encouragement notwithstanding.

“It definitely hindered me at first because I had trained and was such a good rule follower and I was so used to pleasing my elders… You spend years and years and years playing the note, looking at your professor and them being like [shaking her head] or okaying it … So you create this system within yourself where you’re always waiting for validation before you move on. And that can be really damaging, I think, in creating your own music, because I think all innovative music, or all interesting music, comes from just going straight through that wall of questioning. So it was definitely really hard. It took me so long to understand that, that it was not that I could break rules and that no one was gonna judge me. Or maybe they did and I should just not care. And I really don’t think it was until this year, really, where I was just like, whatever.”

“Now when I have like a question in my head of whether I’m allowed to do it or not, I feel like I’m onto something… When I identify a rule now I’m like, how could I break this in an interesting way? So it takes a really long time, and it’s all confidence-based.”

Though much of the conversation focused on finding different ways to play the cello, Laufey spends almost all of the time in her headline concerts alternating between playing grand piano and electric guitar, as she did in a solo set that succeeded the Q&A at the Grammy Museum.

Among the selections she performed were several tracks from “A Matter of Time,” one of them yet unreleased. She assured the fandom they had not quite heard the full album, even if much of it was out there, authorized and otherwise.

“A lot of it’s leaked,” she said, “but no, I didn’t leak all of it. Some of it wasn’t me. It was like only half me.”

“I’ve only had mine for a couple days,” said Asher, insisting it wasn’t him.

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