Laufey Enraptures the Hollywood Bowl in Show With the LA Phil: Review

If a team of aesthetically attuned scientists was able to reverse-engineer the perfect Hollywood Bowl act, they might have come up with the 25-year-old Icelandic-Chinese-American sensation who goes by the singular name of Laufey. No one would actually think to come up with such an impossible checklist, but she fulfills it anyway: A chanteuse who would have seemed at home on the same stage in the 1950s, yet who appeals to a young demographic in the 2020s. A multi-instrumentalist with chops on electric guitar, piano and cello. A romantic with a great sense of swooniness that feels apropos for a summer date night. And, maybe most importantly: plays well with Thomas Wilkins and woodwinds.

Some are to the manor born; along those lines, Laufey is to the Bowl born. Her triumphant debut at the venue Wednesday night, with backing by a Wilkins-led LA Phil, seemed pre-ordained probably from the point she issued her first EP just three years ago. It seemed especially obvious after Laufey did what seemed like a test run in the summer of 2023, playing with the Philharmonic across the ravine at the much smaller Ford amphitheater. With a zealous following that had already outgrown the term “cult,” she already could have filled the Bowl by the point she was doing the Ford 11 months ago. Actually, headlining the Bowl this year for just one night felt kind of like an underplay, too. It sold out so instantaneously — and even the nosebleed-iest resale tickets were going for such a premium — that it seemed clear Laufey could have done a three-night stand.

Yet she’s still flying under the radar of at least some of the music industry, let alone the general populace, even with a Grammy win this year, sold-out shows from the Hollywood hills to Radio City Music Hall, and an IYKYK level of hysteria among her youngest and truest believers. Maybe that’s almost as it should be, for an artist whose throwback-style sound will not be for everybody. Would Brigadoon seem as special, if the whole world turned out for its sporadic occurences?

Although Laufey usually tours with a small band, and lately a string quartet, this wasn’t her first time playing with an orchestra even this month. On the previous Friday, she’d performed with the Chicago Philharmonic at Lollapalooza, marking the first time there’d ever been a symphonic performance at that festival. But west coast Laufey-ites definitely got the better end of the stick, at least volume-wise. While she was only able to get 15 numbers in out in Chicago, she was able to do a full “evening with” appearance in L.A. — duplicating the full 15-song orchestral set from Lolla for the show’s second half, but prefacing it prior to intermission with an additional 11-song warmup set with her usual combo.

It was largely a case of saving the best for last, or at least for Act II, but the first set provided a nice glimpse of some of Laufey’s most youthful songs, including some she might have already outgrown in the extremely short distance between her early 20s and mid-20s. “Slow Down,” she explained, is a song she rarely plays anymore, but was especially appropriate for playing a show in what is now her hometown, L.A. — written when she moved into her first post-parental, post-Berklee apartment here and was worried that life might already be moving too quickly. (Apparently she got over it.) Song titles like “Everything I Know About Love” and “Dear Soulmate” reflect a kind of knowing naivete, or aspirational approach to romance, that the Laufey of 2024 might already be past, but doesn’t have too far in the rearview mirror to revive. Most charmingly in this first segment, she brought out her twin sister, Junia, who it turns out is not only her graphic designer/doppelganger but also a fierce violinist in her own right — for “Best Friend,” a sweet testament to their bond that brought out some fun mugging on both their parts.

That could’ve just about been a reasonable headline set in itself, but most of the real practical magic was reserved for the Phil-augmented set, for which Laufey traded her black skirt and white go-go boots for a more extravagant, pretty-in-pink outfit that could be made out from the Bowl’s back rows (and possibly space). This set opened with her most overtly nostalgic and “cute” number — “Dreamer,” the lead track from her 2023 “Bewitched” album — before Laufey mostly settled into the kind of languid, lovelorn material that has been her finest stock-in-trade. She’s got a lot of torch songs in her arsenal, and there is nothing like the LA Phil at its most understated to throw just enough tinder onto her unrequitedness to create a beautiful blaze.

Laufey can also do songs of requited love, too, and has enough years under her belt now to speak from experience with those. Into that category fell the surprised-to-be-in-love “Valentine,” which the color-coordinated Bowl crowd requited by holding up phones lit in red as much as in white, to the singer’s delight. But hersongs about feeling shut out of love are just so good that you can hope those weren’t just a phase for her. One of the wonderful things about Laufey is that some of her melancholy ballads feel timeless and demographic-less, while others — maybe the majority of them — have lyrical phrases or references that tie them to the sensibility of a woman in her 20s in the present day and age. It’s kind of like Frank pining for Ava, if you can imagine Frank and Ava as university students fretting over the impossibility of love between completing their theses.

Laufey very much has a Taylor Swift side to her, or at least a Keely Smith-meets-Swift side. The biggest outlier so far in her still-slim catalog is “Goddess,” the subtitle song to her recent “Bewitched: Goddess Edition” deluxe package. Performed with Laufey at the piano, it had the singer wailing rather frankly — to the point of using a not-very-nostalgic F-word — about her experience of feeling used, in a romantic relationship, as a celebrity, and it was the one number of the night in which she deliberately inserted a catch into her otherwise flawless alto, for visceral effect. This song provided a possible glimpse into Laufey’s future, if she chooses to pursue a rawer emotional sensibility that some young music fans know all too well.

But from that wrenching number, Laufey went right into the lightest-hearted song of the whole night, a short, sprightly cover of the Jimmy Van Heusen classic “It Could Happen to You” that had her setting instruments aside to dance across the stage. Assuming the abrupt juxtaposition was purposeful, it was Laufey’s way of establishing her breadth in a nutshell… and maybe also her way of reassuring her fan base that getting a little darker with her confessional material will never crowd out her love for Great American Songbook-style stuff, whether it’s covers or her own original takes on that.

Highlights included any of the several numbers that ended with Laufey moving from center stage over to a waiting seat at a cello for a soloing coda. When she sat at the piano, that meant the audience stood a good chance of getting something that leans toward her classically trained side, like “Promise” and “California and Me.” (It feels good to have material that evokes the baroque but also mentions Melrose Avenue.) When she’s playing her electric guitar, that often means everyone is about to get something with the slight tinge of a bossa nova — or a very overt stab at one, as with the closing “From the Start.”

Demographics are a fun thing to discuss at a Laufey concert… and they were a little different at the Hollywood Bowl show than other appearances she’s done in L.A. At many of her gigs, she has inspired Swiftie-level screaming between songs, and some loud singalongs during the numbers. And for someone who is so steeped in the classics of the ’40s and ’50s, her audiences have been, somewhat surprisingly, almost entirely comprised of under-30s and especially under-25s. In southern California, at least, you could count on a crowd that was not only youthful but at least half-Asian, many of them virtually cosplaying as Laufey, aping her signature stylishness. A big element of that was in evidence at the Bowl; at one point, looking around as the crowd filed in, it seemed as if every fourth young woman or so had a telltale bow in her hair, which is not something you see at any old L.A. gig.

But at the Bowl, there was something unusual and different also in evidence: old people. (By which we mean, over-30s, and yes, even a good proportion of over-50s.) It’s always been our contention, going back to our review of last summer’s Ford show, that elder demographics would love Laufey, and probably already do like her records — but that they might never get a chance to get into her shows, if it’s more trigger-happy Gen Z fans snapping up all the tickets the moment they go on sale. Here in Hollywood’s most venerable venue, though, there is an older crowd that had first crack at claiming the box seats — and apparently they’d developed enough affection for Laufey, too, that they weren’t about to give them up, even if there were young fans eagerly willing to spend several times face value claiming them on StubHub.

So Wednesday’s crowd had the slightly odd effect of being a bit more subdued in the front half than the back half. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: Much of Laufey’s material does call for hear-a-pin-drop silence. It was just funny hearing more of the roars in other moments emanating mostly from the rear. And when it got to the point in “From the Start” where Laufey’s audiences inevitably shout along with her exclamation of “blah-blah-blah,” that was definitely louder up the hill.

But it’s a fine thing if the AARP crowd has an opportunity to enjoy Laufey, too, especially those who have a trained ear for the kind of pre-rock classics that this once-in-a-generation talent is drawing upon for her own music. Sorry, Gen Z — you can’t keep hoarding these old-fashioned sounds to yourselves forever.

Laufey’s setlist at the Hollywood Bowl, Aug. 7. 2024:

First half (band only):
Above the Chinese Restaurant
Street by Street
Second Best
Haunted
Everything I Know About Love
Slow Down
Dear Soulmate
What Love Will Do to You
Best Friend
Misty
Like the Movies
Letter to My 13 Year Old Self

Second half (with LA Phil):
Dreamer
While You Were Sleeping
Falling Behind
Let You Break My Heart Again
Fragile
Valentine
Beautiful Stranger
I Wish You Love
Promise
California and Me
Goddess
It Could Happen to You
Bewitched
Bored
Love Sick
From the Start