"Ever since I was little I always wanted to be a pop superstar,” Anna Lotterud starts, chatting to Dork from her studio thousands of miles away in Oslo. Though she doesn’t believe it, Anna’s dream is quickly becoming a reality.
As one-half of Norwegian-Kiwi duo Anna of the North, she met Australian producer Brady Daniell-Smith after moving to Melbourne to study. “He was performing an acoustic show, and I was in the audience,” she begins, telling the story of their chance meeting. “It wasn’t planned at all, it just kind of happened. I play guitar and piano and, in his break, I sang a song because my friends forced me to…”
Peer pressure turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though. After hearing Anna sing, Brady approached her and asked if she’d like to make music together. Soon after that, Anna of the North – “Brady came up with the name, jokingly, while I was sleeping and it just stuck… he was in another time zone” - was born as a way of exorcising the demons of their love lives.
After uploading their dreamy synth-pop breakthrough ‘Sway’ onto SoundCloud, Anna woke up the next morning to thousands of plays and interest from record labels. “I have no explanation, it just happened!” she remembers, having made the track by playing around with production in Garage Band and borrowing a microphone from her dad. “We just put it up there and BOOM.”
Growing up in Norway, Anna’s musician dad was the DJ in the family: “Whenever I wanted to play music in the car it was always his CDs; he was actually quite selfish,” she jokes. Phil Collins, Toto and a lot of 80s music would play on the stereo, but Celine Dion had Anna’s heart. “I had all her albums and knew almost all of her songs; I love her - proper power pop,” she remembers. “The 80s influence has carried on to be a part of our album.”
