Aurora is one of the most popular and richest Singer-Songwriter who was born on June 15, 1996 in Stavanger, Norway. Aurora Aksnes was born in the Stavanger University Hospital in Stavanger, Norway, on June 15, 1996. She spent her first three years in Høle, a small town where her parents, May Britt Froastad and Jan Øystein Aksnes, had lived for 15 years. In her house in Høle, Aurora developed her taste for nature, singing and ancient 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, near Bergen. 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. When she attended school, her sisters – Miranda (currently her makeup artist) and Viktoria Aksnes (currently her costume designer) – worried that she could be harassed by other students, due to her personality and “weird” way of dressing. “I used to be terrified of people who wanted to hug me,” she said. “I did not like to be hugged as a child. And I used to be terrified of one of my teachers at school, but then I met him a few months ago, and it was really nice. It’s weird how things change.”
Aurora is the only musician in her family. She started learning to play piano when she was six. “I really love classic 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 nine, when she had a better handle of the English language, she began writing songs. Her first original composition was titled «I Had A Dream», which referred to how hard the world can be. Songs such as Running with the Wolves, I Went Too Far and Runaway were written in this early stage of her life, with Runaway being written when she was 12. She has mentioned she was influenced by artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Enya, and the Chemical Brothers.
When All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend debuted, Aurora said that it was “the first album of many”. As of 12 May 2016, after coming back from her European tour, the singer announced that she was ready to begin writing and producing more material, which will form her second studio album. She stated in a Facebook event that she has fifteen demo songs and has written a thousand songs/poems. Since the announcement, Aurora has released “I Went Too Far” as a single. A music video for the track was released on 4 July 2016.
On 14 March 2016, Aurora made her American television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, performing “Conqueror”. Aurora soon after performed the track on Conan. On 25 July 2016 she performed her cover of “Life on Mars” on The Howard Stern Show. The following night on 26 July, she performed “I Went Too Far” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Aurora did not originally expect to perform music professionally, preferring to keep her music private: “I never really wanted to sing, or to be on the stage at all,” she said. “I just wanted to write, maybe become a doctor or a physicist or something of that kind.” When she was 16, Aurora performed a “really long and boring song about world peace” at her high school’s leaving ceremony and a classmate put the video online. Around the same time, a friend uploaded a track Aurora had recorded as a Christmas gift for her parents to SoundCloud. These two songs were discovered by a representative of Made Management, a Norwegian management company, who invited Aurora to visit their office for a meeting in early 2013. “At first I thought no,” she recalls. “But then my mum said I should think about the idea of sharing my music with the world because maybe there’s someone out there who desperately needs it. And that could actually be a good thing.” In a few hours, both songs received thousands of visits in Norway, which earned Aurora some recognition in her country, in addition to a fan base on Facebook. Aurora then set about working on her songwriting for around a year before giving her “first proper live performance” at a Norwegian music festival. “I don’t think I was born to be an entertainer, I used to really be afraid of playing live on-stage. Obviously it’s terrifying! But now I look forward to it every time. I’ve learned not focus on myself, cause it’s not about me. Now I only think about giving everyone the best experience. A magic moment.”
