Laufey – Bewitched: The Goddess Edition

My love affair with contemporary music, with keeping up with the latest releases, lasted for a fairly short time in my life – from when I got my first clock-radio in 1972 to about 1985. That’s about when I got so sick of the horrible offerings of commercial radio in Syracuse at the time that my tastes ran off in different directions and I largely gave up regular radio listening and happily lost touch with the zeitgeist. It was no better when I lived in Albany – radio was uniformly formulaic, repetitive, and filled with stuff I just didn’t want to hear. I found more new music I was interested in by reading about it than hearing it on the radio – so I lost touch with the times. As is obvious from my writings here, I often discover acts years after they were popular, and that’s fine. It doesn’t help them much commercially, but it keeps me sane to be disconnected from the current trends. That’s why so few of the new records I write about here are actually of recent vintage.

Every now and then I get to put in a short shift at my friend’s record store – which would absolutely have been my dream job when I was 19 or 20. And when I do, I take the opportunity to expand my boundaries a little bit. I’ll see something on his promo shelf and, having no idea what it’s going to sound like because I do not keep up with things even in this age of streaming (I don’t stream), I punch it into the store’s system and give it a listen. Most of the time, it confirms my suspicions that the music is for someone but not for me, and I skip on to something else, having at least an idea of what the artist actually sounds like.

I saw the cover of “Bewitched” over on the promo shelf and figured when I hit the play button I’d get some breathy indie pop princess singing about the things that typically torture twenty-somethings – which is fine, but I haven’t been twenty-something in thirty-something years, so it doesn’t usually resonate.

I was very wrong. Those first notes hit – then that voice. And I realized, this is … traditional jazz pop? But really, really good? Instantly, I was asking myself, “do I really, really like this?” Then my friend came back to his store and I had to ask, and he said, “Oh yes, she’s legit.”

I brought it home and warned my wife I’d be putting on something a little different – listen, it was all funk all the time back in May 2024 when I got this – and she hesitated a bit but then the album really launched and she was in. And while it took until the fourth side to get to it, “Bored” really sealed the deal.