The song that made Aurora want to become a musician
Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora has captured the world with her ethereal stylings. Merging folklore with electro detailing, haunting echoes and angelic vocals, her music is hypnotic. The musician has a heavenly way about her, much like the artist who first inspired Aurora to make the step into music.
Born in Stavanger, Norway, Aurora has been singing and dancing since childhood. Surrounded by all the Norse gods and mythology of her homeland, Norway is rich with folklore. Full of stories about epic gods and the power of nature, all of those myths seemed to find their way into Aurora’s writing. On her 2015 debut EP, Running With Wolves, the sparse and haunting track ‘Runaway’ shot her to success.
After working on the John Lewis Christmas advert soundtrack in December 2015, her cover of Oasis’ ‘Half The World Away’ solidified her one-to-watch status. However, a songwriter very different from the Gallagher brothers first inspired her to pick up an instrument and a pen. Introducing the track on Spotify’s 10 Songs That Made Me podcast, she announces it as “the very song that made me want to be a musician” before pressing play on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’.
“I find this song incredibly beautiful,” she adds, “And I love the story.”
The song’s storytelling abilities captured Aurora’s intrigue: “I think exactly that’s the point that made me fall in love with this song and made me feel inspired by this song,” she said. “It tells a story and it taught me that I could use music to tell stories as well as provoke emotions. It really put the first seed in me. I really felt like I could label myself as a storyteller as well as an artist and musician.”
Aurora admits to “rarely writing personal” songs, so Cohen’s ability to look behind himself inspired her. “The way Mr Cohen writes about both the small things and the big things are really inspiring to me,” she said, adding: “I love that he writes personal but also from the eyes of the observers which I like to do.”
The narrator watching Cohen’s Suzanne and writing her story without implementing himself in it too much got stuck with the singers. “You can write about the people you see and the world around you,” she said. “I think that’s very beautiful to capture, something you’re just watching.”
Aurora remembers the first time she ever heard the Cohen classic, storing it as a core childhood member. “I was around eight years old, and it was raining, and it was really cold outside, and I was walking home from school. I was really wet when I finally reached our home,” she recounts.
‘My mother was making something that smelled sweet, it might have been a pie or something, and ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen was on,” she continues. “I remember understanding what the essence of a home was and I understood that this must be the purest feeling of being safe and warm even though I was cold and wet,” she adds, “I’ll never forget how that song, together in that moment, made me feel.”
A song attached to a beautiful memory that planted the seed of Aurora’s own rich storytelling style, ‘Suzanne’ means a lot to the artist, who says, “It’s the most magical song ever.”
