Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Take On Me

Take On Me is one of the world's perfect pop songs, catchy, well-produced, nearly impossible to sing correctly and accompanied by arguably the best music video ever made (just don't argue with me about it, I'm very stubborn about it). It had a big hand in forming my musical tastes and is still easily one of my favorite songs ever made. The other day I found three early versions of this superjam and as you can imagine, I was pretty excited. Apparently the band released the song twice in different unsuccessful versions before they finally nailed it in the version we all know and love. I just love hearing this song as such a diamond in the rough with the production so stripped down and his voice so imperfect, but still holding such beauty and promise.

a-ha- Take On Me (Original Version)
a-ha- Take On Me (Early Tony Mansfield Mix)
a-ha- Take On Me (Unreleased Demo)

And how rad is that picture? Not only is somebody pretty proud of their butt, but I had no idea Hasselhoff was in the band.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

a-ha! is one of my favorite bands. I've seen them live twice, in 1985 and 2005.

Did you know about the fanclub-book/album that came out in 2005 (or 06)? I have those songs somewhere, the demo version of 'Take On Me' is there, as well as unreleased versions of other songs.

Thanks for posting this, made me listen to all my a-ha! stuff again.

Anonymous said...

And I think it was Morten Harket's butt that took control over the photoshoot. You can't stop that sexy awesomeness.

Anonymous said...

A great song. For a party I did a low-tech dnb version with some pendulum beats underneath. Did the job on the night...

http://www.mediafire.com/?yyv1y9bmmpy

Cheers - Ian '4Watt'

Paul said...

Thank you so much, I've been looking for the Mansfield version for forever!

Anonymous said...

haha thanks for reminding me how awesome aha is =)

Scot said...

That photo is out of control!

Anonymous said...

mega! never knew these existed! funny photo too made me lol. the one with the small face always reminds me of Craig in Bros - hes just a bit uncool, but therefore the cool one.

Anonymous said...

thank you so much...i grew up on this song!