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 Herway.

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 Run Away. 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 Run Away became a huge hit on TikTok.

As of this recording, between YouTube and Spotify, Run Away 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 Run Away.

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 this space and time to kind of dream yourself away.

So I just sat down at my piano and played and I wrote.

When I started writing Run Away, I had a story quite clear in my mind.

When I was younger, I struggled quite a lot with understanding people around me, especially the part where people kind of lie about their current state of mind,

because we like to pretend that we're happier than we are.

I feel like people fear to open up about whatever troubles us.

So I just wanted to write a song about how we run away with our emotions rather than to face them and ask our family and friends for help.

It becomes so much easier once we share what lies within us, because then we realize that it's perfectly normal.

But we never get the chance to ever understand that, because we never tell anyone about what's going on inside.

And I guess I just thought about that quite a lot as a child, for some reason.

I remember the day I wrote Run Away, I was listening to the ocean, the very first line of the song.

I was listening to the ocean.

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