Life is scary right now but you’ve got to live it

S‘I like Lego but I’m cool. It’s important not to take yourself seriously all the time’

igrid is riding high in the charts, comfortably making the top ten in Ireland, the UK and elsewhere after this month’s release of her second album How To Let Go. In her native Norway, it went straight to No.1, equalling the feat of her debut Sucker Punch in 2019.

Radio-friendly electropop songs such as Strangers, Don’t Feel Like Crying and her 2017 debut single Don’t Kill My Vibe have been streamed hundreds of millions of times.

She will feature as one of the top attractions at many festivals this summer leading into an arena tour which will come to a close at Dublin’s 3Arena on November 24.

It’s lucky then for fans of the Scandinavian pop sensation that her parents’ attempts to persuade her to take up piano as a child were successful.

‘When my parents moved into our home in Ålesund [southwest Norway] there was an old black upright piano in the house,’ the 25year-old says.

‘They tried to get my brother Tellef to learn to play it but he preferred guitar. They tried again with my sister Johanne but she preferred singing – she has an amazing voice, by the way. They tried with me and luckily I liked it.’

Her grandmother began teaching her piano when she was seven and she started singing and writing her first songs when she was 13. Her brother introduced her to the piano-driven music of US singer Tori Amos and Sigrid says she was an important early influence.

‘Tori Amos was like my childhood hero. Cornflake Girl is one of my favourite songs,’ she says.

‘I love the way she plays piano like a rock star, with attitude, like she was a guitarist shredding a guitar solo. I’ve always played piano very loud, sometimes my family got a bit annoyed with me because I was like slamming it.’

Although Sigrid says that she wants to make music that people want to get up and dance to, her songs, particularly those on How To Let Go, often carry a positive message to her mostly teen audience – to be the best version of themselves that they can be.

The song Mirror, she says, is a good example of how she marries an irresistibly catchy melody to her affirmative message in the lyrics. She cites the line ‘I love who I see looking at me in the mirror. Nothing compares to the feeling right there in the mirror’.

‘I want my songs like Mirror to say something of importance.

‘It might be only after a few times [hearing it] that someone realises, “Wow, that’s something to think about”.

‘It’s not like every day I wake up and think, “I’m the f ***** g s**t,” she says affecting a cooler-thancool tone. ‘Sometimes I do. But today, for example, I’m making a Lego flower bouquet but I’m cool. I like Lego but I’m cool. It’s important not to take yourself seriously all the time. It’s fine. We all have our insecurities but it’s fine.’

High Note, the closing song on the album, muses on her own mortality and if people think that she, her fans and people of her generation in general don’t do this often enough, then they need to think again.

‘I also say in the song I know I’m too young to be thinking about this but I can’t help it,’ she says. ‘Me, my peers, we are very aware of what is going on in the world. With the pandemic and climate change and the political situations everywhere you do reflect on mortality.

‘Mortality is a natural part of the cycle of life. We are born and we will pass away. That is the cycle.’

She says she realises it is all a ‘bit scary’ but that she is trying to find peace within the song.

‘The idea for the song came about after I visited my brother who is studying at Cambridge now and I saw this really interesting art installation there,’ she says.

‘It’s like a clock with a big monster, an insect, like a locust literally eating time [the Corpus Clock was inaugurated in 2008]. It is to remind people to enjoy life and take risks and be curious of other cultures and yourself, and it sounds cheesy but just live life.’

■ How To Let Go is out now. Sigrid plays the 3Arena on November 24.

Riding high with her new album, Sigrid wants us all to go easier on ourselves

‘The pandemic and climate change make you reflect on your own mortality’