There is a sound at the front of this one that you have heard even if you have never sat down to listen to a-ha. Eight notes on a synth, bright as a vending machine, and then Morten Harket’s voice comes in over the top and the whole thing lifts off. It is the kind of pop song that feels inevitable, like it arrived fully formed and conquered on contact.
It did not. Almost nothing about this song went the way the clean, finished version makes you assume. The road from the idea to the record people actually fell in love with was long and embarrassing and full of doors closing. By the time the world heard it, the band had already lived several disappointments most acts would not survive.
Start with the hook itself, those eight notes. They have a backstory the people who made them were not proud of for years. The riff was not new when a-ha used it. It had a past life, and a name its own authors used to wave it away. They thought it was lightweight. They were not trying to write the song that would define them.
The most familiar pop song of its decade, and almost nothing about it is what it seems.
Then there is the video, the one everybody pictures, the pencil-sketch world and the hand reaching out of the comic. You assume you know how it was done. You are almost certainly wrong. The look of it has nothing to do with the technology of its moment; the method behind it is much older and much stranger, and it cost a kind of patience that does not exist in pop video anymore.
And then the part you only learn by trying it. Put the song on at a party, wait for the chorus, watch the room reach for that high note and miss. Everyone sings along until the exact moment they cannot. There is more going on in that chorus than the singalong lets on. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world. It is one of the least easy things a pop singer has ever been asked to do.
A vending-machine riff nobody respected. A video built the slow way. And a chorus that invites you in and then leaves you standing there. The most familiar pop song of its decade, and you have been getting most of it wrong.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“The song that made a-ha was an overnight smash.”
It failed twice first. The recording everyone loves is the third attempt. The 1984 version sold around 300 copies and reached UK No. 137. A hit-maker re-recorded it in 1985, and it flopped again. Nothing about the song changed after that. Warner Bros simply put the same recording behind a new video, and the third time, the world finally heard it.
“That synth riff is one of pop's most beloved hooks.”
It nearly went in the bin. By Magne Furuholmen's own account, he came up with the riff at fifteen, in a band he played in before a-ha, and the others nearly threw it away, as he told TV 2 Norway in 2014. It survived into an earlier song he wrote with Pål Waaktaar, known as the Juicy Fruit Song, which became Lesson One. Furuholmen calls the riff super catchy. For a while, the hook everyone can hum was a scrap his bandmates were ready to lose.
“That cutting-edge video was a triumph of new technology.”
It was made the way silent films were. The pencil-sketch look comes from rotoscoping, a hand-tracing technique from the early 1900s. Artists drew over the live footage frame by frame, roughly 3,000 frames, by hand, over about sixteen weeks. The most futuristic-looking video of the MTV era was built with a method older than sound in cinema. Every line in it was drawn by a person.
“You've sung along to the "Take On Me" chorus a hundred times.”
You almost certainly didn't hit it. Rolling Stone called that chorus one of the hardest in pop to actually sing. Morten Harket moves across more than two and a half octaves: the line starts on his lowest note and climbs all the way to a falsetto peak at the top. What feels like a singalong is one of the steepest vocal climbs in pop. Most people are quietly faking the high note.
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