Take on Me

All the things I’ve got to remember.

Today, I published a Song Exploder episode about “Take on Me” by A-ha. It was the first song that I ever called my favorite song, and my love for it has remained constant over the decades, so I jumped at the chance to do an episode about it—and that was before I knew how deep and how surprising its backstory is.

I’m thrilled about this episode, and I hope you’ll listen. The story also stirred some strong feelings in me, and I wanted to share them here.

I think “Take on Me” is an ideal song for Song Exploder, because it’s so well known and beloved that it feels like a song predestined to be a massive hit, but the truth couldn’t be further from the case.

Forty years ago, in October 1985, “Take on Me” hit #1 on the Billboard charts, but its story began back in Norway in 1981. It was so jarring for me to hear the earliest version—before it was called “Take on Me,” before the band was called A-ha, and before singer Morten Harket joined the lineup. The roots of the song are clearly in there, though: the vocal melody in the verse and the infectious synth line.

Even after Morten and his operatic falsetto became part of the band, they made another three versions of the song over the next four years. “Take on Me” was released in the UK twice—two different versions of the song, both of which got very little notice. Finally, it was released in the US, along with its famous music video, and it took off from there.

I find myself a little overwhelmed by learning this story and then relating it in the Song Exploder episode. I started thinking about the things that I love that, shall we say, came out of the oven underbaked. The first season of Seinfeld. The first season of Parks and Recreation. The first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These shows all took a while to find their footing and their tone, and their audience.

Nowadays, I’m surrounded by the feeling that most things you make and put out into the world are going to go unnoticed. It doesn’t matter how much you care; it doesn’t matter how much work you put into it. The attention economy runs on a scarce commodity. And the prevailing wisdom of the age is that you just have to keep throwing things out there and hoping that something sticks. Produce more and more in hopes that people out there might connect with what you’ve made, and pray to the algorithm gods that they’ll even put it in front of them in the first place.

I’ve felt that disappointment with something as small as a post on social media, and as large as an album that I poured years of my life into. As I start to get ready to release my next album, I can feel the dread gathering around my heart like pericardial fluid, a foreboding sense that it will come and go without reaching anyone. And it’s exacerbated by the sense that the window you have is so small.

Part of the reason why first seasons of television shows come to mind is in part because of my experience with making the first—and only—season of Song Exploder on Netflix. My collaborators and I took a while to figure out how to make it, and we eventually learned by actually doing it. When we finished the last episode, in the summer of 2020, I thought we’d finally cracked something. But we never got the chance to put everything we learned from the first season into practice by making a second season. It wasn’t an expensive series to make, but Netflix didn’t want to continue on. Part of the problem, I can only imagine, is that the company had undergone major restructuring, and the execs who greenlit our show were no longer involved. But part of the problem was that it simply wasn’t an instant hit. The CEO of Netflix had a strategy: to greenlight more shows (in 2020, they released over 100 new series across scripted and unscripted), but also to cancel more shows. As a result, the platform is full of shows with only one season. So many stories left half-told, cliffhangers that will never be resolved. So much potential that went unfulfilled.

So when Paul Waaktaar-Savoy of A-ha told me how “Take on Me” first came out in 1984—and flopped—I was amazed. Because, from here in the future, I knew that wasn’t the end of the story. There were music industry professionals who decided to give them another shot. More significant to me, however, was that the band members themselves decided to keep going with the same song.

I don’t know what the net balance of my feelings are. On one hand, I am incredibly inspired by the determination, faith, and tenacity that was brought to bear on behalf of “Take on Me.” On the other, I mourn the fact that we no longer seem to live in times where something like that could happen.

Or am I wrong? Have I been too conditioned by my own narrow range of experiences? Do young people feel the invincibility that A-ha had? That maybe I felt, long ago? The chorus of “Take on Me” ends with: “I’ll be gone in a day or two,” and that’s how I feel about everything I put out into the world. But maybe there’s still a chance for art to live longer than that.

— Hrishikesh

ps. Part of my long history with the song: in 2010, I was asked to contribute to a compilation of bootleg remixes of pop songs. This is back when I made music under the name The One AM Radio instead of my own name. Of course, I chose “Take on Me” for my remix.

pps. Shout-out to the sweet high school coming-of-age show Everything Sucks!, which I composed the score for, which was canceled after one season on Netflix.