Hey there, this is Brian and Simon, welcoming you to So the Jaker on songwriting.

Joining us for episode 302 is a Norwegian pop dynamo, possessed with a formidable voice,

not to mention an uncanny knack for a killer hook.

Her third studio album, There's Always More Than I Could Say, produced with longtime collaborator

Ashel Solstrand, has just landed, and we met with her in

London for an illuminating chat all about the record and the creative process behind it.

It's our great pleasure to welcome the delightful Sigrid to the show.

Our guest was born in 1996, the youngest of three kids, and grew up in the tiny fishing village

of Ullison, on the west coast of Norway.

Both her elder siblings were musical, and her mum and dad played a lot of records at home, via which Sigrid was exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, later discovering the likes of Adele, Colplay, Bombay Bicycle, Club, Arctic Monkeys and Lichie Lee. Initially quite a shy kid, she first caught the performing bug when she appeared in a production of 1001 night at the tender age of six. She took piano lessons from the age of seven,

later picking up the guitar around her mid-teens. When she was 16, Sigrid wrote her first

original song, Son, at the encouragement of her brother Telef. Remarkably, that very same song ended up

as her first single and was

playlisted on Norwegian National Radio. After completing high school, Sigrid moved to Bergen,

where she began studying comparative politics at university, only to quit after a month to concentrate

fully on her music career, promoting herself on the city's local scene while performing at

corporate events to pay the rent.

Her hard work and tenacity paid off and before too long she'd acquired representation and been

snapped up by Ireland Records, largely on the basis of her song Don't Kill My Vibe, which would go

on to become her first hit single and the title track of her first EP released in 2017.

The following year, Sigrid won the BBC Music Sound of 2018 poll, and 12 months after that,

her sparkling 2019 debut LP, Sucker Punch, topped the charts in Norway and debuted in the UK

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