SOUNDTRACK: AURORA-Verftet Online Music Festival 2020 (April 20, 2020).
In April 2020, Norway’s Verftet Music Festival streamed an online concert:
Get ready for Verftet Online Music Festival, Bergen’s largest virtual concert festival, where we can enjoy great music together. We want to turn despair and frustration into innovation and positivity, and invite everyone to a digital festival experience out of the ordinary – right home in your own living room.
Aurora played a 45 minute home concert for Verftet which you can see online.
The show starts with her at the piano (an unusual sight), playing the lovely ballad “Animal Soul.” Then the drums start and Aurora and her band play a fantastic cover of the Massive Attack/Liz Frasier song “Teardrop.” It sounds pretty cool on piano and even though Liz Frasier’s voice is unique in the world Aurora sounds terrific.
“Warrior” sounds very different from the recorded version, because it’s still rather quiet (although louder than the other songs). Silja Sol has taken over piano and sings absolutely gorgeous harmonies. Hearing the song stripped down shows what a powerful song it i
“All Is Soft Inside” opens with quiet echoing guitars and features more great backing vocals from Silja. Although when Aurora sings a capella for a few beats it shows how great her voice is. This song is really terrific.
Then she says something very Aurora: “I’m itching on my bum but I don’t want to do it on camera, can you just film Magnus while I scratch my butt.”
Followed by some sage advice for pandemic times: “Its okay to be worthless, no not worthless, unproductive… we don’t have to do more than just exist sometimes.”
“Through The Eyes Of A Child” is a beautiful with just her and Silja on the piano. The a capella verse with the deep and high harmonies sounds wonderful. The song builds with the rest of the musicians adding in the guitar and drums.
“The River” grows bigger but is still restrained. As is “Queendom,” her huge dance hit. But even in this stripped down very it is still catchy and super fun.
“The Seed” is a wonderfully dark and powerful song. For this quiet version, Silja plays quiet echoing guitar and the song builds into an intense climax (which is still quite restrained compared to the original). But we can’t overlook the deep vocals from Magnus on the drums.
The set ends with a beautiful cover of The Beatles’ “Across The Universe” a song that will “take us away, a dreamy song… a perfect world… a beautiful hippie paradise.” It’s a lovely gentle cover with amazing harmonies from Silja.
[READ: July 20, 2021] “After the Movie”
This is a very dark story. It’s about Ed, a writer and filmmaker whose recent books have flopped.
He and his wife had just come back from the movies and his mood was foul. He went to bed without saying good night to the kids. Instead of falling asleep, he found himself sitting up and crying,
He genuinely considered killing himself. He had no money coming in, they had borrowed against the house. They had nothing left. He was nothing,
Muldoon had called him this afternoon from Amsterdam.
Ed sat in bed and remembered back to when he was trying to perk up his friend Muldoon who was then having a similar slump. Ed encouraged him to hang in there. And look at Muldoon now.
A few years later, Muldoon’s short film won an Oscar and his big films earned millions.
Muldoon was complaining about the head writer on his new film. The guy was a hack who sat around doing nothing but earning $125,000 a week.
Ed gasped, he couldn’t help blurting out, Jesus just give me a week of that. But Muldoon shut him down saying ‘hate it.
Muldoon and Ed grew up playing football together. Their lives had been parallel for many years. Muldoon evidently needed it to stay that way–to pretend that Ed wasn’t struggling.
I absolutely don’t understand that and his attitude toward his best friend is terrible.
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