The Life of Aurora Asknes Before The Capital Letters:

Aurora Aksnes was born in the Stavanger University Hospital in Stavanger, Norway, on 15 June 1996. She spent her first three years in Høle, a small town where her parents, May Britt Aksnes and Jan Øystein Aksnes, had lived for 15 years. In her house in Høle, Aurora developed her taste for nature, singing, and traditional clothing, such as long skirts and hats. Later the family moved further north in western Norway, to a house in the woodlands of the Os mountains, a remote municipality in Hordaland close to Bergen where she grew up. Aurora has described this place as “There are almost no cars, and the roads are small and bumpy, and there are lots of trees everywhere; it’s very quiet, and the internet is bad.” She has also compared it to the fictional land of Narnia. She has two older sisters, Miranda, a make-up artist, and Viktoria, a fashion designer. Aurora is the only musician in her family. She started ma- king music when she found her parents’ old electric piano in her attic. “I really love classical music, and when I found this piano in the attic, I just started pressing the keys and trying to figure out my favorite classical songs. I started to make melodies that I recognized. There was something special about being able to play just by yourself – something about the emotion in it made me want to continue playing.” At age 10, she began writing her own songs. Songs such as “Running with the Wolves”, “I Went Too Far” and “Runaway” were written in this early life. She was later convinced by her mother to sing about her, who told her that her music could help other people. Her first single, “Puppet,” was released in December 2012. Besides classical music, she has mentioned she was influenced by artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Enya, as well as The Chemical Brothers and melodic metal.

Given her tendency to interpret very intimate lyrics in her native Norwegian, Aksnes writes her songs in English. But ever since the release of her EP Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1), she’s been adding lyrics in her own “emotional language” to alter the atmosphere and significance of his interpretation.

Although Aksnes has stated that she wants to write her songs to help relieve her followers’ suffering and to defend “weird” people and show “how special they are”. Aksnes claimed that she included the sound of the ocean, the sound of rain, and her embracing a tree in

All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, which is typical of her music’s use of natural sounds. The ocean is