AURORA celebrates 10 years of the album that introduced her to the world: "I'm really happy to live this life and be able to meet people in the way that I've gotten to do."

I’m a pop-culture writer covering everything from TV and movies, to music, Broadway, books, and games.

When I first listened to All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend, I had no idea how deeply I would connect to the album. I remember sitting in my college dorm in 2016, scrolling on YouTube, when "Winter Bird" popped up as a recommended video. AURORA's music introduced me to new styles, sounds, and perspectives, and I was completely in awe.

Ten years later, it was a true honor to sit down with AURORA to celebrate the album that started it all and the journey it's taken her on.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

AURORA: The moth has always been one of my favorite bugs since I was a child. I just love the way they look, and how they are like the more shy, under-appreciated version of the butterfly — less colorful, but also so colorful if you just pay a bit of attention.

I've always had a really big place for them in my heart, and for what the moth can symbolize; it can mean decay, it can mean rebirth, it can mean death. It can mean so much. So it was very important to me that the moth, and also the wolf, became the two animals to represent my first album.

BuzzFeed: Do you remember how you made the album cover?

AURORA: I found this woman who took all these amazing, ethical pictures of moth wings. I really loved that she mainly focused on moths while doing her art, rather than butterflies. So I was like, "We're going to do something with her!"

I always knew that I wanted to be kind of dull, you know, and gray and not so colorful on the cover. So we just wrapped me in all this weird fabric, and I had to make sure my feet looked like I was floating in the air. It took around an hour, I think, and then the nice lady edited the wings on after — but it's a real moth, and I think it's from Australia.

BuzzFeed: I remember the art really captivated me. I heard one song on YouTube, saw you were coming to NYC two weeks later, and we got to say hi after the show. I've been a fan ever since!

AURORA: That's so sweet! I love that we got to meet like that.

AURORA: When my management approached me in 2013, I didn't really know what to think. Back then, I wasn't sure about my art becoming my work or being shared. I just enjoyed doing it for me, because it made me feel heavenly. When I first became an artist, I had a hard time accepting the new open doors into my soul that now everyone can enter.

Then I realized that I'm also allowed to enter people's souls, and now I'm extremely happy that I chose to become an artist. I guess it's not something you really choose. It kind of just happens, doesn't it? 

I'm really happy to live this life and be able to meet people in the way that I've gotten to do. Music is so open and so honest and so raw. I hug strangers all the time, and that's such a beautiful way to live and meet humans. So I'm really grateful now, but it took me a while in the beginning.

AURORA: I remember it very well. I remember having a lot of fun. Actually, I think the first song I ever recorded isn't even on the album. 

I love producing, and producing my first album was the biggest love story of my life. I realized that I have this new opportunity to not only write and put emotions into words, but I can also shape the whole skin and clothes of the soul of my music. 

It's such an amazing world to live in, and I had a wonderful time. You can do anything you want when you're in the studio — you have all the sounds in the world, and you can create sounds that don't exist yet. It's utterly magical.

AURORA: I've been very lucky to travel around the world a few times. Especially going to new places for the first time, places like India, and China, and Malaysia, or the Philippines, I thought, "How can I go so far from home and be found by people?" It's very magical, and it's very enlightening. 

To travel around the world and meet people, you just learn so much about the world and the things people need — what people need to hear, what people don't need to hear. You learn what is true and what is not true. 

People out there in the world are constantly trying to divide us, but you see that it's not really possible. When you travel around and you meet people, you see it is impossible to separate humankind, because we are one. 

It's an amazing lesson to learn. I wish more people could visit each other to learn about our cultures and how similar we are, but also how many different struggles we have. It's absolutely breathtakingly beautiful.

AURORA: It is very sweet, and I feel very honored, especially when my music is used in movies and television. It's so nice to be invited into someone else's art, and especially movies and shows that have a message to them, that don't underestimate the audience.

I hope many artists out there can look at things like this and get a feeling that we are not in a hurry, and good things can happen all the time. Sometimes they just take a bit longer, and that's okay.

AURORA: I love the folk tunes. They mean a lot to me, because there's a history there, and a reminder that music is also behavior. It's ancient behavior, it's storytelling, it's culture being gifted to the younger generation. Folk tunes and ancient music are so important to me; it's the purest thing I know. 

I remember really fighting for "Winter Bird" to be on the album, because I really loved the folkiness of it. I remember the feeling I felt when I wrote it — many people know how it is to harbor that within you. It can be a cold and lonely thing sometimes. So it felt really good for me to have it on the album, because it felt really crucial. 

I remember it took a long time to produce. At first, I wanted just me singing with some kind of a plucking instrument, to make it feel like I'm singing to myself on my porch in the winter. But then it became larger and more produced with time.

AURORA: That was a really old song. I wrote that long before I quit school, and became an artist and all of that. I remember just playing it for [the label], because I was determined to make an album. I love albums because they're like books to me. So "I Went Too Far" came like an accident, almost at the very end. I was like, "What about this?" And then I just played it, and they were like, "Oh, this is really good!"

For the video, I remember being so high off the ground. I remember we woke up at like four in the morning, and then we finished filming at two am the next day. We filmed for maybe 20 hours. 

In the cave, where I'm shaking, it's because I'm so cold. It was glacier water, it was freezing, and that fell on me for hours. At the end, we had to stop the filming because I couldn't open my hands — I was climbing on the ladder, and they're like, frozen to the ladder. I was like, "I don't think I can actually get down!" It was a really long day, and a lot of physical, hard work. And I quite enjoyed it. (Laughs) It felt good for the brain, somehow.

BuzzFeed: The video came out amazing, so it was definitely worth it!

AURORA: I think that song is the most fun I had on any production on the first album. It was extremely fun to produce and make this world that is so dreamlike. 

It felt so easy and right to make, where it just has to sound like a dream, and it has to sound ethereal and beautiful. When you work on a song for hours a day, it affects you. If the song is very sad, like "Murder Song," it's hard to work on those for hours. It kind of makes you think that you're sad as well. 

I remember "Black Water Lilies" felt like a holiday because it was so bright. It felt so nice in between all the darkness of the rest of the album. It was very, very fun; I love playing that song live.

AURORA: I didn't find the original texts of my first album, which I do apologize for and speak about in the beginning of the book, but it did force me to kind of go for a big treasure hunt. I had to go to my childhood home and search my old room, and there was so much in there. It took a long time to look through all of it and to understand when it was from. 

All of a sudden, I'd find the very original lyrics to a song, and I'm like, "Oh, that's 'Winter Bird'!" It was really fun to look through all my notes and drawings, and it's also a book where I've written way more than in my other ones. There are many stories and reflections. 

When you're celebrating 10 years of something, it feels important to reflect, like, "Okay, what did I learn? What was good? How was that really? How do I remember it?" 

It was very touching, actually, reflecting and looking at all the photos that I haven't seen of myself, just like how small I was. I forgot that it was so hard in the beginning to be an artist, because now I adore it.

For any new artist that relates to that or feels, "Is this feeling going to pass? Is this going to get better?" Yes, it will! It feels good to be open about these things because it can be very weird to become an artist, and we're emotional people.

AURORA: I'm very excited! Our favorite, I think, is "Come Closer," but I am really excited for people to hear "I Drink the Light" or "In a Minute." They're extremely strange songs. We have so many fun things happening on this album, and it is definitely for people who like a bit more alternative and techno.

AURORA: Back then, the music industry was very like "radio this and radio that," and I remember thinking like, "I don't care about the radio (laughs). I just want to make something that I like and then make an album, and then immediately begin on my next album, because I love it."

I'm very proud that I was so young and had enough kind of "bone in my nose," as we say in Norwegian, to listen to what I want and do everything I can to make sure it feels like me.

It's nice with music that can just be music, whatever happens to it — as long as it reaches one person, that's all you can ever ask for.

Celebrate 10 years of All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend with AURORA's companion book, releasing March 12. Pre-save TOMORA's album Come Closer, available April 17.