Sound & Vision: Aurora on the Influence of Nature and Native Culture

KEXP: The word "hunting" comes up in three of your songs on this album and most prominently in the song "Animal." And I love this line that you sing: "You're hunting for love / Killing for pleasure / lost in the concrete jungle." What does this lyric mean to you?

Aurora: Well, I do have a lot of love for humankind but on some days, I feel a bit frustrated and on that day, I didn't feel particularly happy about the way we people treat each other and the animals and the women and the men and also the planet. I felt a bit frustrated. And I think I was far away from home. I was in a different place. I think I was in L.A. which must be the city that is the most different from the place I am from. And I was just kind of writing about the eternal hunger we have for everything. We're such strange creatures. We keep hunting for love, we can't get enough of it, and we keep hunting for it. We kill for pleasure. It is also kind of drawing a line to the fact that we are not so different than animals. We put ourselves on the top and we say that we're the most intelligent species on Earth and in many ways we are, but we are more like animals than we think. 

KEXP: There's many moments on this album where you seem to have this deep connection to nature. Can you talk about the song "The Seed" and the story you're trying to tell in that song? 

Aurora: "The Seed" is very much inspired by Native American culture actually and you know that the music in there and the way I sing is very native to Norwegian culture as well. And it's quite an aggressive song, I must say, but I think it's important sometimes that certain messages are carried with a certain kind of force or strength. And I'm very, very passionate about the earth and the nature. I believe it's the one thing that can really help people and really give us some space from ourselves and from everything that makes being a human very hard. Nature can give us that space to just exist and be. It doesn't ask anything of us and still we ask everything of it and we give nothing back and we even forget to say thank you to everything Mother Earth does for us. I made this song "The Seed" many many years ago and I felt like, soon the time will come when the world is really ready for this song to be released and I'm very happy how in time, with everything that is happening right now and especially in the young generations people are really doing something with the school protests and it's just really really inspiring. But yeah the song is inspired by the fact that we cannot eat money which is quite an obvious statement but still we act as if we can and we act as if it's the only thing that we need in life. And still you know to this very day it's riches and some of the richest people on the planet are the ones that benefit the most of everything that is ruining the planet. It's time for them also to make a choice for the better.