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Sigrid says her single Fort Knox is “one of my favourites that I’ve ever made”
You might be surprised to hear an artist who’s performed on some of the biggest festival stages in the world describe themselves as an introvert.
But popstar Sigrid insists that’s what she is.
The Norwegian singer-songwriter first burst on to the scene as a teenager.
By the time she was 21, she’d performed at Glastonbury, Roskilde, Reading and Leeds festivals and been named BBC Music’s Sound of 2018.
She was the second-youngest artist to snag the title after Adele, who was 19 when she topped the 2008 list.
Despite all this, she says performing didn’t come naturally.
“I was very shy growing up, you would not find me on a stage,” she tells BBC Newsbeat.
“I really wasn’t made for it in many ways, but I fell in love with playing the piano.”
Sigrid remembers her parents being called to school to collect her because her crying during a group performance was disturbing other children.
But the piano gave her a safe space.
“Piano is more of an introvert instrument,” she says.
“It’s the type of instrument where you’re facing away from the crowd, you’re looking into the piano.
“I just disappeared into that world and I was singing into the piano.
“I wasn’t singing out into the room and it felt safe. It felt like I was creating my own world there.”
‘My first email was to a record label’
Since then, Sigrid says, being on stage is “probably the place where I feel most confident and most myself”.
“What I love about live music is that I’m in full control, I don’t like having a lot of faffing around me,” she says.
“I just want to do the thing.”
Sigrid describes her upcoming third album, There’s Always More That I Could Say, as an “energetic extrovert album with introvert lyrics”.
She’s just dropped Fort Knox, her second single from the record, which she says gives a flavour of that energy.
“I feel like I’ve released a lot of myself in this,” she says.
“It’s a song that’s quite angry, but a joyous rage. Sometimes it can feel quite liberating to just release the energy.”
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The singer says the new album is an “energetic extrovert album with introvert lyrics”
Looking back, Sigrid thinks she “had a crash-course in growing up”.
“I wrote my first email to a record label,” she says.
The singer – full name Sigrid Solbakk Raabe – enrolled on a politics course at uni but dropped out after three weeks to pursue her music career.
Sigrid says the year leading up to her breakout single, Don’t Kill My Vibe, was “the best education I could have ever got”.
“I got trained to finish a song every single day,” she says.
She was travelling between London and her home in Norway, spending five days a week writing music.
“You’ve got the pressure of ‘we’ve gotta have some bangers here, we’re in the pop industry’,” she says.
“But the point was to just finish something.
“It was very stressful doing that for seven years, song after song after song.
“It makes you blur the lines between music creativity and content – quantity over quality.”
For her new album, Sigrid says she changed the process with her producer to take the pressure off.
Much of it was written in parks and coffee shops, rather than churning out material in a studio.
And she believes this new way she makes music really shows on the new record.
“Sometimes a song needs to marinate for a year, six months, it can take some time,” she says.
“I’ve never had this much fun recording an album before.”
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