Five years ago, Laufey knew who she was.

“Or at least I knew the many different people I was,” she says. “What I didn’t know was who I was as one person.”

The daughter of an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother, Laufey grew up studying classical cello in Reykjavik. Then she went to Boston’s Berklee College of Music and learned to sing jazz standards. All the while, she says, “I loved musicals, and I loved Taylor Swift. I always wanted to find a way to blend these worlds together, but I just didn’t have any example of an artist that had done it.”

So she did it herself. During the pandemic, Laufey started writing songs — swoony, old-fashioned love songs with tricky melodies and jazzy chord changes — and performing them on TikTok, where she quickly built an audience of retro-curious zoomers. Her debut album, 2022’s “Everything I Know About Love,” hit No. 3 on Billboard’s jazz albums tally; the next year’s follow-up, “Bewitched,” topped that chart and won a Grammy for traditional pop vocal album.

“I think I’m the youngest winner ever in that category,” the 25-year-old says, “which is funny because I’m not that young.”

This interview with Laufey has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: You’ve spoken about the interplay between technique and musicality. How does charisma or star power figure into your skill set?

A: It sounds so self-complimentary to even indulge in the thought of my having that. But yeah — I look at other musicians, and you can see who has that star quality.

Q: Who has it?

A: I think Chappell Roan has it. I think Olivia Rodrigo has it.

Q: You accompanied Olivia to the premiere of her concert movie in October. How’d you two meet?

A: She just texted me out of nowhere from an unknown number: “Hey, it’s Olivia Rodrigo. I’m such a fan of your music. Can we hang out sometime?” I was like, “What?!” I literally texted my whole team because I thought maybe it was spam. That’s one way to get me: “Yeah, here’s my address.” Then we just hung out. We’re both half-Asian, half-white — we’ve always had this kind of mixed identity. And anything that I’ve gone through this year, she’s gone through on a very exaggerated level. It’s been really lovely to be able to check in and hang out and not feel crazy.

Q: Does the beauty of your singing voice ever feel like a limitation? Can you use it to express something ugly?

A: It’s funny that you mention that right now, because I’m in the process of working on my next album, and I’m grappling with exactly this. All of my music, whether it’s sad or happy or sarcastic, it’s still woven in this very mellow kind of beautiful singing style, which is the way that my voice most naturally comes out. But I’ve been toying around with the different emotions that I can evoke with my voice on this next album.

Q: I watched a very long YouTube video about you where a jazz guy breaks down why you’re not a jazz musician, and one of his points is that you don’t improvise.

A: I actually do improvise more than people think — I improvise on cello, I improvise on piano. It’s just the vocal bits that I don’t improvise in concert as much. But it was always difficult for me, because coming from classical music, you’re very bound to what’s on the page. There’s no improvisation in classical music — it’s about learning the repertoire, not creating the repertoire.

Q: What do you make of criticism like in that video?

A: If you want to hear conversations from these communities — jazz communities and classical communities — where they’re analyzing my music and ripping it apart, I’m like, “That sounds fun — enjoy it.” I respect those communities so much. I don’t know if they respect me as much in return.

Q: Does that hurt your feelings?

A: I’m a people-pleaser, so of course. But my music didn’t become popular because I’m a jazz musician or a classical musician. I love that music, and I know to my core that I understand it. But the whole reason I have a career is because I didn’t put myself in one of those boxes. People are like, “But it’s not jazz!” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not.” I never claimed that it was.