Foto-© Universal Music
Aurora lässt sich ausgesprochen gut in die Kategorie Fabelwesen einordnen. Eine Art mystische Fee aus den hohen Fjorden Norwegens wäre wohl passend. Eine Fee mit Biss allerdings, sanft und magisch und dabei ohne Scheu vor Konfrontation und schonungslos authentisch. Ein neues, und somit ihr drittes, Album soll noch dieses Jahr erscheinen. Mit Infos über die Platte zeigt sie sich momentan zwar noch etwas verhalten, die aktuelle Single Cure for Me macht allerdings definitiv Lust auf mehr. Der Inspiration dahinter und anderen Visionen und Lebensweisheiten lauschten wir gebannt via Zoom:
What inspired you to write Cure for Me?
Many things, quite many things. In general I was very inspired by the fact that the world is making us feel, so often, that something is wrong with us just because we are bit different. We’re all different and we’re all unique and we’re all these beautiful individual biologically designed beings that are not the same, but still the world is constantly trying to shame us for not being exactly the same as everyone else. It’s a very weird and abusive relationship we’re in with social media and sometimes even with our friends or with a partner or a parent making us feel like something is wrong with us. I think that’s so awful. And more specifically it’s about that in the world today we’re still allowing people to do conversion therapy against love. That’s just heartbreaking. And I was just imagining someone being told that who you are and who you are born as is so wrong that you need to be cured and healed from it. And that just broke my heart, so then I wrote Cure for me. Which isn’t actually a cure for me – it’s a strengthening anthem for whoever out there is experiencing this right now.
And that is what you do generally, isn’t it? Writing for others, about crises and big societal questions?
Yes, yes. I find it way more inspiring to write about the world. It’s so messy and chaotic and it’s really easy to find melodies in it and for it, I guess. That can be a calm counterpart. And I like making songs that feel like a counterpart to whatever it is that annoys me.
Do you ever feel overwhelmed? With so much going on you could probably write another 500 albums..
It’s definitely an eternal source of inspiration, the world and the people in it. It’s very overwhelming, but I think that we’re all overwhelmed by the world.
Can you share a bit about who you worked with on the video for Cure for Me and what the process was like?
All the music videos from this chapter, I wish to make with these beautiful people I met here in Bergen. I like keeping things.. hm see the minute I let someone into my artistic world, I feel like we belong together. I quickly feel connected with the people I let into my world. I try to stick with them as long as I can and I really like these people, so I think I’ll make many videos with them. I’m very excited, because I feel like it’s a very long and good relationship. It’s a guy called Sigurd Fossen and we directed the video together. He’s very respectful and clever and he gives a lot of room for me to get things exactly how I want. Obviously, cause I’m the boss. He’s also not afraid of letting me know if he disagrees, which is nice. It’s a hard balance to find in men, I think. To be both, very respectful, but also not afraid to be genuinely excited about something else. We made the video in Oslo. And we had to print out the floor ourselves, because I wanted it to be like from Alice in Wonderland from Tim Burton’s version. We actually made the floor and glued it, which took many hours. It’s very visually pleasing and symmetrical and I’m very happy with it.
If you gave your music a colour, which one would Cure for Me be and which one would your album be?
Oh, Cure for me would be a shade of green. See the one that’s on the bottle over there? A kind of wooden green. And the album’s colour, that’s a very good question. And in my head it’s descriptive. I think it’s too descriptive to reveal the colour of the album, but I will have to text you the when the album is closer to being released. It’s very obvious to me, I like the question a lot.
Okay that’s a deal then! I guess I thought of the question when I wondered how descriptive Cure for me might be of the album – or how much it is completely a piece in itself?
It is very connected to the album in its message and in its playfulness. I’ve been way more playful and not so serious all the time with this album. It’s very different sonically I would say. It’s kind of the outer part of the part of the album. It’s just more confusing, it doesn’t say anything about where I will go with the rest.
When you look back at All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend and where you are now, how has your music changed and yourself alongside it? Maybe evolved is a better word..
I’ve always seen my own music as a big timeline and I can look quite many years ahead and I have a certain idea of how I want my album to sound and the album after that. Even though my music is changing with every album, I know that it’s only temporarily. Because I already know my next step if that makes sense. This chapter is very different, it’s the most different chapter I’ve ever written, but it’s very fun. I’m using very different instruments, it’s a very organic album. It has a lot of humour and it’s very wild. It sounds a bit like .. oh you see I love it when you’re confused and when you don’t know understand anything. But it’s very different and it shows the light and the dark and heaven and hell.
I read somewhere that you love dancing wild at a rave and the next day you might sit in treetops listening to nature. That counterbalance seems to be a red line?
Counterbalance, yes exactly. That’s very true, I love doing that. When I do things like that I feel like I understand why we’re here. That’s the whole point, to do things like that. To explore the different extreme sides of life and loneliness and being surrounded by a lot of people. I love all of those different things, it makes life very exciting and it feels like being in love. But yes, I have often been very serious in my music, I write about sad things and about things I want to speak up about in the world and it has a lot of darkness and intense emotion in it. But I’m also the opposite of that as a person, so this is definitely the first album where I added a lot of my own personality. It’s interesting that you pick up on the thing that you read, because It’s very true that I added a lot of me, Aurora.
It’s so interesting as well that you say that, because the other albums are so uniquely you but you say it’s this album that makes you feel like you’ve added your personality in. Maybe you being so light has already added balance to the first albums?
Yes I think so. And they all feel like pieces of my personality, but this is the first time I’ve explored a new side that I mostly show to my friends or my family. So it’s a very personal part of my personality.
It’s about fulfilling all the parts in the end isn’t it? We’re not linear beings who just have one side.
And you know as a fellow female. We are so close to this everlasting magical source that should allow us to be everything at the same time. I guess we are everything in many way, we carry life. It’s very nice to be in touch with the everythingness being a woman. Or a trans woman.
You come across as such a fearless spirit, are you afraid of anything, Aurora?
No, I’m not. I should be more afraid. I’m a bit like a small dog, super tiny. I should be more afraid than I am, but I walk the streets and I think that if a man attacked me now I could easily bring him down.
It’s all about the right mindset woman!
I think I’m very strong, which I am.. I have very little fear. I fear sometimes people. We are the scariest thing on the earth I think. Sometimes big amounts of people can scare me, big crowds, can scare me. Which is funny because I face them all the time.
Is it graspable for you that Runaway, a song you wrote when you were 11 is suddenly going viral now?
It’s very strange. You had a nice way of phrasing the question, because I don’t think it’s graspable. That’s the exact word I’ve been looking for. It’s very ungraspable and that’s what I always find it hard to let my mood or happiness be effected by those things. They are truly ungraspable and impossible to understand. And also in my timeline, in my whole life, imagine how short that is. Internet fame is such an ocean and sometimes you’re on top of the wave and sometimes you’re not. The internet always has a new thing to love, it’s like the shiny ball syndrome. The internet is very much like that and therefore it doesn’t make any sense to be too bothered by the good or bad things that happen on there. I feel like the internet is very disconnected from the world, even though that’s how the world is connected to itself. I still feel like the internet is this whole other dimension that I find hard to understand.
That’s a nice way of putting it.. a different dimension. It literally is that, isn’t it? Floating around somewhere.
Somewhere, and you know it is just floating around somewhere. And all those numbers and evidence of Runaway being played it’s on there and if the internet disappeared, that would be gone as well. When you think about the people and they have let my song into their hearts and let my song be of comfort, then it’s very touching. Other than that it’s ungraspable and also quite meaningless I would say.
Can you remember writing Runaway?
Yes I can. It’s nice, I had such a sense of peace in my body and I remember the words and the melodies just floated out of me very fast. Some songs take years to finish and some songs take a second to write. Runaway was one of them, it just happened and I couldn’t write fast enough. It was very instinctive and beautiful and I was sitting in my childhood home on my piano and it was grey outside. A grey sky, but not wet. It was dry but just empty and grey. And I was looking out at the ocean, which is funny enough the first line: ‘I was listening to the ocean..’. It was very connected to what I was feeling in that moment. It was a really nice day and I remember being very overwhelmed after I wrote it and being like ‘wow, I’ve made this thing out of nothing and it’s mine.’ No-one could claim it or take it away from me. I felt like a mother for the first time. That’s when I understood for the first time, how happy it makes me to create music. It makes me so happy.
Do you still feel like that when you write? That it’s yours no matter what happens with it afterwards?
Yes I do, but slightly different. I think of it more like ‘ours’ now than I did before. When I was eleven, obviously I didn’t even want to be an artist. I had no idea in my mind that I would ever have to share the music with anyone. But now it is different. I feel the same happiness and excitement. I’m so happy that it exists and nobody can make it not exist. It’s more a feeling that I have something that belongs to the world and I can’t wait to give it back. I kind of just translated it into a song and then I feel like it already belongs to people and I just need to return it. So its different but equally as good.
We’re nearly out of time, so maybe a quick one. If you were an Aurora fan and the album was coming out, where would you like to listen to it? What’s the setting, where are you finding yourself?
Normally I would always say the forest, obviously. Or nature. But not this album. I would just walk down the streets wherever you are. Just walk on a road or a street and just go wherever it takes you and look around. I would recommend people to be moving and exploring and not sitting still. Listen to the album and look at the world and see if it reflects it or if it’s challenging it? The album is asking a lot of questions about things that are unfair or fair about our history and how we may or may not be using the mistakes of the past as a tool to not repeat those mistakes. Which most of the time we seem to not use sadly. It’s very much about the world and about the people and about those interesting good and evil forces that roam around us all the time. I would recommend just walking around in your city. And think of yourself as an alien maybe, that explores people and the world for the first time.
