All the Things I've Got to Remember

This week brings some gutting music news: Morten Harket, the lead singer of Norwegian pop trio a-ha, has revealed that he's been battling Parkinson's disease for several years. While treatment for the neurological treatment has been positive thus far (including the implanting of electrodes that have cut back the typical symptoms associated with the condition), it has cast doubt on his ability to sing in that distinctive, still-resonant high tenor that powered "Take on Me" to the top of the U.S. charts 40 years ago.

"I don’t expect to be able to achieve full technical control," he said in an article published to the band's website. "The question is whether I can express myself with my voice. As things stand now, that’s out of the question. But I don’t know whether I’ll be able to manage it at some point in the future.

“When we tune the frequencies and direction of the electrodes, it is also able to affect the region of the voice, but we’re not yet able to capture and control it," he continued. "The voice problem comes especially when I take dopamine supplements. If I don’t take dopamine, my voice settles down – but then the general underlying symptoms become more pronounced.”

To the layman, or the American chart-watcher, this may mean nothing. The accepted narrative, of course, is that a-ha burned bright and fast with "Take on Me," that synth-driven masterpiece that, at 2.3 billion streams on Spotify, is one of the 100 most heard songs on the app. The actual story is much deeper: not only did a-ha have one more Top 40 hit in America ("Take on Me" follow-up "The Sun Always Shines on T.V."), but remained a considerable force in pop outside our borders. In the U.K. alone, they've attained 18 Top 40 singles, the most recent placing in 2006, more than two decades after when America seemingly stopped paying attention. Their 1991 set at the Rock in Rio Festival attracted Guinness World Record-level crowds, more attendees than the year's other headliners: Prince, George Michael and Guns N' Roses.

While it often comes back to "Take on Me"—a 2017 recording for an MTV Unplugged special achieved its own virality—they are so much more than what one most remembers. You may approach the group (Harket and multi-instrumentalists Paul Waaktaar-Savoy and Magne Furuholmen) like Chuck Wepner, the bruising boxer who improbably nearly lasted a full bout with Muhammad Ali (in turn inspiring Sylvester Stallone to write the screenplay for Rocky). In actuality, they remain more of a Liston or a Foreman: those improbable and unlikely feats were stretched over years, not rounds.

I first discovered a-ha not through "Take on Me," but the next most logical point for someone of my cultural fortitude: "The Living Daylights," their title theme to Timothy Dalton's first film as James Bond. A No. 5 in the U.K., it bricked on American radio just two years after Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill" topped the charts. But listening back on 1999's The Best of Bond...James Bond compilation, I couldn't have cared less. (Years later, when my friend and fellow writer Dylan Roth ran a smart pop culture website, I participated in a college basketball-style bracket of Bond songs; all of us marveled as "The Living Daylights" advanced a shocking number of rounds, ultimately felled by "A View to a Kill" in one of the bitterest choices I'd ever make.)

Things deepened during my pivotal summer of 2001: MTV turned 20, and sister network MTV2, which operated purely on videos like the original iteration of the channel, was diving deep year by year. The innovative "Take on Me" clip, directed by Steve Barron and featuring groundbreaking rotoscoped pencil animation, galvanized my brain by its second chorus, when Harket and actress Bunty Bailey stand on opposite sides of a pane of glass that turns a comic world real and a camera pans around them, changing the landscape second by second and my imagination along with it.

In time, I found a CD that featured "Take on Me": Razor & Tie's Monster '80s collection, which scored my every car trip and lawnmower push through our yard. I would battle the roar of the engine with my attempt at Harket's piercing high note, and frequently forgot (as I still often do today) the lyrics, in this case an ironic line in the final verse: "You're all the things I've got to remember." When I found debut album Hunting High and Low in a mall record store, I was hooked on the atmospheric pep of "Train of Thought" and "The Blue Sky," or the gentle melancholy of "And You Tell Me" or the title track. Albums gave way to compilations—The Singles 1984-2004 particularly put things into focus for me—and I dreamed of a day when, perhaps, these albums would get the deluxe reissue treatment I already desired.

That dream would come true as I stood on line outside the Nokia Theater (now Sony Hall) in Times Square, all of 22 years old, ready to see a-ha's first New York date since the '80s. The trio were about to make their second farewell in the appropriately-titled Ending on a High Note Tour, but expanded Hunting and follow-up Scoundrel Days (1986) with scores of rare bonus tracks. It was an early assignment I gave myself for my website The Second Disc, and the love remained strong.

Oddly, while I adore their patchwork of hits and well-known singles—the latter-day "Analogue (All I Want)," massaged into a British Top 10 by Max Martin, is one of the Swedish producer's masterworks—I still don't own every a-ha album, nor have I even consumed them all on streaming. The group's last New York City show in my lifetime, a 2022 set at Radio City Music Hall that I also attended, previewed at least one selection from their most recent album, that year's True North. But it also featured a full, out-of-order set within a set featuring all 10 songs from Hunting High and Low.

I can't say how many people felt all those tracks in their bones the way I do: dramatic, synth-driven yarns of boy's adventure tales and dying to be different in a coffee shop and corridors of naked light. Ultimately, I don't think it matters. If they got chills to "Take on Me" the way the young and old still do today, it was all worth it. We may have heard the last new a-ha song, but I'll be coming for them anyway—and now, perhaps, you know why.