“Take On Me” by A-ha is one of those enduring songs in history. In fact, by the end of this article, it’ll probably be stuck in your head again (sorry about that). Most retellings of how “Take On Me” came together treat the song as a single flash of genius – one band, one writing session, one finished product. But in reality, the song was built in pieces over several years, and one of the more interesting questions about it is one people rarely bother to ask: did the melody get written for Morten Harket’s voice, or did Harket walk in and figure out how to sing what was already there?
Before Harket: The Riff Had Its Own Life
The earliest version of “Take On Me” existed long before A-Ha did. Furuholmen and guitarist Pål Waaktaar were teenagers in a Norwegian band called Bridges, and according to Roland’s account of a 2014 interview with Furuholmen, Furuholmen came up with the riff when he was 15. Bridges kicked the idea around under a couple of working titles. “Miss Eerie” was one, “The Juicy Fruit Song” was another. The band never really figured out what to do with it. Furuholmen has said the riff “felt too much like a bubblegum ad“, and Bridges thought of itself as a ’60s-style psychedelic group. The hook was too bright and poppy for the sound they were chasing.
Bridges eventually disbanded. Waaktaar and Furuholmen went to London to chase a record deal, got nowhere in six months, and came back to Norway needing a singer. That’s when Harket, who’d been fronting a blues-soul outfit called Souldier Blue, came into the picture.
A Great Riff Waiting On A Voice
When Harket joined Waaktaar and Furuholmen, the musical skeleton of what would become “Take On Me” already existed. The riff, the chord progression in A major, the general shape of a pop song sitting on top of those things. But the melody Harket ends up singing, the part that makes “Take On Me” famous, didn’t exist yet in its final form.
The trio reworked the song into a demo called “Lesson One” before landing on the version we know, and according to the band’s own telling, the arrangement was deliberately rebuilt to put Harket’s voice in the spotlight. The stated goal was to unveil his vocal range. That octave-jumping chorus, the drop from A2 down low to the soaring E5 climax, the falsetto at the end: none of it is the sound of a singer adjusting to a pre-written tune. It’s the sound of a band shining a light on their vocalist’s incredible talents and leaning into it.
The riff and the harmony predated Harket by years. The melody was written around him. Anyone who’s ever tried to sing the chorus or butchered it at karaoke knows which of those two is the reason the song still gets played on the radio 40 years later.
The Harmony and Vocal Architecture of “Take On Me”
The song sits in A major at 169 BPM, with the verses moving through Bm7–E–A–D–E, the chorus through A–C♯m7/G♯–F♯m–D, and the bridge through C♯m–G–C♯m–G–Bm–E. Standard enough harmony on its own.
The vocal line is where the composition bends. Harket drops to A2 on the first syllable of “Take on me,” a note that sits in baritone territory, and by the time the final chorus arrives, he’s up at E5 in full falsetto. That’s well over two octaves inside a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. Rolling Stone called it “one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history.”
Harket’s own range has been rumored to cover five octaves, which he’s gently shrugged off over the years, but the live record speaks for itself. He hit the high note at Live 8 in 2005, he hit it again on A-Ha’s 2017 MTV Unplugged – Summer Solstice, and he was pushing 60 when he did the unplugged version.
Three Releases, Two Flops, and a Pile of MTV Trophies
Writing a great melody for a great voice wasn’t enough to make the song a hit. Not on its own. The first recording, produced by Tony Mansfield and released in October 1984, came out thin and overly programmed. It got to number three in Norway and flopped everywhere else. Warner Bros. brought in producer Alan Tarney for a re-recording that used a Roland Juno-60 MIDI’d to a Yamaha DX7 for the signature riff, a LinnDrum for the rhythm, and a Neumann U 47 microphone for Harket’s vocal, per Sound on Sound’s breakdown of the session. That version flopped, too.
It wasn’t until Steve Barron directed the rotoscoped music video, roughly 3,000 frames drawn by hand over 16 weeks, that the song finally caught. “Take On Me” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of October 19, 1985, its 15th week on the chart. It peaked at number 2 in the UK, held out of the top spot by Jennifer Rush’s “The Power of Love”. The video pulled in six MTV Video Music Awards in 1986, and in February 2020, it became the first Scandinavian music video to cross a billion YouTube views.
