You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Aurora is a singer and songwriter from Norway who released her first EP in 2015 when she was 19 years old.
It featured the song Runaway.
And after it came out,
Aurora went on to win Norwegian Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Pop Artist.
And she played the voice of the North Wind in Disney's Frozen 2.
This year, six years after that debut EP came out,
Aurora's song Runaway became a huge hit on TikTok.
As of this recording, between YouTube and Spotify,
Runaway has been streamed over half a billion times.
In this episode,
Aurora looks back at how the song first began and how it evolved over time from the demo to the final version.
My name is Aurora.
I was around 11 years old when I first started writing Runaway.
I was living very happily in my childhood home.
It's on the west coast of Norway and it's very nice here.
It's very quiet.
You really have the space and time to kind of dream yourself away.