2024-09-20 06:44:10
She became famous for the dreamy and urgent voice that sounded in the movie Frozen II and inspired the American Billie Eilish. On this year’s album What Happened to the Heart, the Norwegian singer Aurora deals with the relationship between emotions and mind, disconnection from human nature or climate change and life on Earth in general. Next Saturday, September 21, he will present the album live in the Fortuna Sports Hall in Prague.
The artist, whose full name is Aurora Aksnes, first smelled music when she was six years old, when she discovered a piano in the attic of her parents’ house. She immediately fell in love with it and soon began composing. At the age of nine, she learned English well enough to write lyrics.
It sounds like a story about a child prodigy, but the singer doesn’t see it that way. She considers herself a girl who can play everything and nothing at the same time. He still has his voice as the most beloved instrument.
Aurora is a natural introvert and likes to escape into a fictional world. When he goes on tour, he is said to take several books with him; she is afraid that she would finish one and be left without a sight. For some time, music was also a purely personal matter for her. She recorded her early work as a CD gift for her family so that she would not have to perform in front of them. That’s when her mother motioned for her to continue. She was convinced that her daughter’s music could one day help someone.
It seems incredible that she wrote her best-known track to date, Runaway, which has over 928 million plays on Spotify alone, as an eleven-year-old for a school project. Recently, the song even experienced a minor renaissance on Instagram and TikTok. The musician says she understands why people still like her so much. He considers her honest and genuine. It was this composition that inspired the creation of the American star Billie Eilish, whose artistic styling and expression differ significantly from her Norwegian colleague. They still cheer each other on.
Death and the afflicted planet
However, the twenty-eight-year-old Aurora is much further along in her work today than when she composed Runaway as a schoolgirl. Despite her angelic voice and ethereal appearance, she often ventures into dark places in her music. For example, she is fascinated by death. “Death is the only thing we know for sure will happen and the only thing we have in common. We will face death several times in our lives. I think losing someone close to you is one of the greatest pains a person can experience. And we need more medicine for this grief because it’s too painful. I want to make music that can be just such a medicine for grief,” she said on the German music podcast Sinus.
The theme also appears on her fifth studio album this year, which she will present in Prague. For example, in the song Starvation, for her the most important of the whole album, she asks: Why do we have to die first to see the light? The symbol and main theme of the recording is the heart, which can be perceived, among other things, as a pulsating expression of life. The title of the record could be translated as What happened to the heart? and it is decorated with a silver anatomical representation of this organ, which the singer holds in her hands. Silver Heart also appears in video clips and visualizations.
Aurora at the Metronome festival, 2023 | Photo: Honza Mudra
The initial impetus for the creation of the album was mainly emotional – two years ago, Aurora was not feeling well, according to her words, she had to bury her own self and be born again. Then she began an honest search; he says he’s a nerd. She explored how Western culture has related to the heart over the millennia. “The ancient Greeks thought it was a portal to the divine and represented the interconnectedness of the world. Before we knew the true purpose of the heart, we thought of it as the center of emotion and intuition. Then came Aristotle who said it was a pump, followed by Plato who said the heart makes blood. Little by little we reduced it to its purely biological function,” she told music magazine The Forty Five.
For the Norwegian musician, the perception of the heart as a mere pump is an analogy to the general pragmatism of today’s society. “We do everything for greed and for money, mass consumption, capitalism. There is war everywhere, genocide is going on in Gaza, water is flooding the land and flowers are blooming in Antarctica. The planet is simply in a mess. We are destroying our land, treating animals, women and each other. We stopped being led by the heart,” he fakes his gloomy view of the present.
It is climate change that worries Aurora a lot. He loves nature and refers to it as one of the main inspirations since his first more famous songs like Runaway or Running With the Wolves. She comes from the village of Os by the Bjørne fjord, which was her favorite scenery that inspired her to create. Thanks to a phenomenon known professionally as polar amplification, climate change manifests itself more dramatically in the vicinity of both Earth’s poles.
Another impetus for the creation of this year’s album was provided to Aurora by a two-year-old open letter from Brazilian indigenous activists called We Are The Earth. A lack of compassion and seeing emotions as a matter of the mind, not the heart, according to Aurora, is causing society to harm the planet. “It’s our nature to be kind and caring. We’re able to do so much for the people we love, and it’s so pure. But we ignore nature and become bitter,” she told the culture magazine Junkee.
The music video for the song Runaway by Aurora has over 650 million views on YouTube alone, and another 928 million views on Spotify. | Video: Decca Records
With elves, not fairies
For Aurora, there is no music without politics. According to her, such art is boring. For example, in the electronic, even club ending of the track My Body Is Not Mine, there are cries of “ceasefire now” or “immediate ceasefire” with a reference to the events in Gaza. “Bob Dylan taught me to be able to talk about the political happenings in the world with ease, funny or harsh, depending on what I want,” she explained.
Aurora’s work is often very political, she expresses herself in it, for example, about the events in Gaza. | Photo: Honza Mudra
Already on the first album All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend from 2016, when she was only 19 years old, she paid tribute to the victims of the massacre on the Norwegian island of Utøya, where 69 people were shot in July 2011, in the ballad Little Boy In The Grass. Including Aurora’s love at the time. “I finally got over it all,” she sings in the song’s chorus, but at the same time she wonders when she will finally heal. “When the last tree falls and the rivers are poisoned, we’ll find that money can’t be eaten,” reads the song The Seed from 2019. In the video clip, footage of Aurora alternates with footage of student climate strikes.
Perhaps this is also why the label of a fairy is too simplistic for an artist. British music journalist Andrew Trendell also spoke out against her. In a review of her latest album for NME magazine, he wrote that, like the Icelander Björk, Aurora has also received the somewhat condescending moniker of “another ethereal Nordic fairy”. But “she dances more with sprites than with fairies,” the author objects.
Probably thanks to her fairy-tale demeanor and appearance, discussions about what kind of creature the musician actually is, often appear in the fan community as well. For example, under videos on YouTube, some write that he is definitely “the spokesperson of the Earth itself” or “an extraterrestrial being sent to us to tell us an important message”.
Aurora is coming to the Czech Republic for the sixth time as part of the autumn European tour; she brought her show to the Colors of Ostrava festival in 2016 and 2018, the other performances were held in Prague. In less than a month, Aurora’s second book will be published, which, like the album, is called What Happened To The Heart? and is meant to represent a deep dive into her creative process. It is a reproduction of the singer’s personal diary, as well as photographs and her own artwork. “The book contains all the thoughts that came to me when I asked what happened to my heart. I was in a dark place and the world was perhaps even worse. So I looked for light in the only thing I could – in music. I hope it touches you,” he invites to read.
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