Get your bows ready, slip into your most charming attire, and add a touch of festive flair with some adorable stockings—because A Very Laufey Holiday is coming back to town. Hurrying down the chimney is Iceland's third best-known musician (after Björk and Sigur Rós) Laufey and her rendition of the Christmas classic "Santa Baby."

This edition of "Santa Baby" adds to Laufey's ongoing A Very Laufey Holiday project, where each year, the winger adds a Christmas song to the album. It started in 2021, with "Love To Keep Me Warm" (featuring dodie), followed by "The Christmas Waltz" in 2022, and "Christmas Dreaming" in 2023.

"This is a story of a nice and naughty girl... as you might have guessed, our tale begins here, on this very stage," Bill Murray quips as the narrator in Laufey's "Santa Baby" music video. There's a whimsical puck to the visual. A hint of a Wes Andersonian fancy, if you ask us. American Ballet Theatre's principal dancer, Isabella Boylston, performs with an ensemble of dancers with a choreography by Alex Wong (So You Think You Can Dance; The Greatest Showman; Smash).

A Very Laufey Holiday will be available on vinyl for the first time, featuring her "Santa Baby" cover. The box set has an expandable design, allowing more addition of Laufey's holiday covers and originals in the coming years. A Very Laufey Holiday is available as a limited edition box set online.

In keeping with the festive vibe going, Laufey's debut concert film, Laufey’s A Night at the Symphony: Hollywood Bowl will hit the cinemas and IMAX theatres for a limited run from 6 December. Filmed in Los Angeles and directed by Sam Wrench (Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour), Laufey performs with the renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. The film offers a rare, behind-the-scenes perspective on this unforgettable concert.

For more information and ticketing details, click here.

Even though he has never been musically trained and doesn’t play any instrument, Teo Chee Keong (or CK as he’s known to friends) seems inexplicably drawn to music. There were the salad days of listening to Rediffusion in his mother’s kitchen; his father’s cassette tapes that were near to being worn out from constant play. “Boney M and ABBA... the disco stuff, you know?” CK specifies.

Eventually, like the revolutions of a vinyl on a record player, it all comes back full circle with his vinyl obsession starting in 2012, rather late in life, CK admits. Accompanying a friend to Zenn Audio Electronics, CK saw Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind. Even without a turntable, CK was besotted with the band and the album cover. So he bought it. It was priced at SG$70, a pretty penny in those days. “But I love it so much,” CK enthuses. With his prize in hand, CK felt that he had found the Holy Grail but he would not know how fragile a vinyl would be. Leaving Nevermind in his car for a day resulted in the disc getting heat warped. “I had to get it flattened again,” CK laughs. 

Nevermind may have started the collection but securing a turntable less than a year later to listen to it was the catalyst. “Once I had the means to play a record, I started buying more. I was still staying with my mother and every day, there would be records delivered to my house.”

His vinyl collection didn’t stop growing. In 2013, while holding on to his day job, CK opened a record store with Eugene Ow Yong called Vinylicious. The store was the first local record store to introduce Record Store Day in Singapore. In some way, this invigorated the vinyl-collecting culture in the country.

His vinyl collection is how CK reconnects to key moments in his life when he’d listen to the radio. “I’d listen to Casey Kasem’s America Top 40 on Redifussion religiously. Whenever I play his records now, Casey’s voice would come on and I’m back to my teenage years.”

It is a formidable form of time travel. For many, a scent or a photograph can unlock a flood of memories. For people like CK, who have a stronger auditory sense, a piece of music can transport them to the moment when they first listened to it.

Aside from a live show, when it comes to the listening experience, the vinyl medium presents more dynamism. Analogue music gives a richer sound; there’s a warmth to it. “CDs and Spotify can’t create that experience. Vinyl does,” CK says.

In his Punggol flat, an entire room is set aside for his record collection. High ceilings made it possible for CK to install custom-made shelves (the design was cribbed from someone else’s collection that CK once came across). The cost of the furnishing? In the ballpark of SG$18,000.

Fully stacked, there is a system to his catalogue. One section houses music from the ’80s. Next to it are his jazz records—one that’s instrumental, another that features vocalists. Another part features genres like funk and soul and classic rock. Yet another is segmented into either the ’90s or the 2000s... it’s a complex directory that only CK knows how to navigate through.

Some collectors are adamant about only acquiring original pressings but CK is non-plussed. “If I have SG$1,000 and if I’ve to get either one SG$1,000 record or several hundreds of records that are reissues or not rare, I’ll get those.”

He does have some grail items and many of them are precious in his sight. His record obsession has infected his son as well. “He’s musically inclined,” CK says. “He even introduced a few musicians to me like Eminem and Måneskin. He saw [the latter] in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2021,” CK says with pride.

It’s a collection that’s still growing. CK ponders if he should start selling some of them soon. So, what happens when his vinyl collection is no more?

“You mean when I don’t have it with me?”

He looks sad for a moment as though the image of empty shelves in a high-ceilinged room is triggering.

“When I grow older and nearing the end, I can accept the fact that I can’t take it with me. But if for some reason, my collection were to go missing or disappear, I think I might fall into depression.”

Photography: Jaya Khidir
Art Direction: Joan Tai
Photography Assistant: Danial Mirza