Songfacts®:

• Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir spent her childhood between Iceland, Washington DC, and occasional visits to Beijing before completing her music studies in Reykjavik.
  
  After graduating in 2018, she decamped to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music, where she set about turning her cosmopolitan childhood into sound. "Forget-Me-Not" is Laufey's tribute to her home country.
  
  "This song sounds like a love letter to a guy, but it's a love letter to Iceland and about how I had to leave to chase my dreams," she told Rolling Stone.
• Laufey asks her homeland not to forget her. In the chorus, she sings in Icelandic.
  
  Gleymdu mér aldrei þó ég héðan flýg
  Gleymdu mér aldrei, elskan mín
  
  Which translates as:
  
  Don't forget me, even though I'm leaving.
  I love you. I'll love you forever
  
  Laufey first tried to write the lyrics in English but found the words rang false. "It felt like saying 'I love you' to someone in a different language," she explained.
• Laufey worked with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra on "Forget-Me-Not," drawing on traditional Icelandic folk melodies. "It was a very cathartic, healing song to write," she said.
• Laufey is hardly the first Icelandic artist to build music out of homesickness and volcanic landscapes. Björk has long made a career out of it, folding folklore and lava fields into songs like "Isobel," which draws her experience of moving from Iceland's wild nature to urban life, using magical realism to explore the tension between civilization and Icelandic wilderness. Her song "All Is Full Of Love" radiates a sense of ethereal homecoming, and the video for "Black Lake" was shot in Iceland and uses its caves, lava, and ravines to represent themes of pain, perishing, and rebirth.
  
  Sigur Rós are Icelandic landscape incarnate, with their sweeping, glacial anthems in Icelandic and Vonlenska (Hopelandic). Even Of Monsters and Men, who take more of a fantasy-folktale approach, set their music videos for songs such as "King and Lionheart" against Iceland's snow-swept and rocky vistas, telling sagas in pop form.