Take On Me
Throwback Thursday, 1985: released three times in about a year before it worked. The song never changed — the delivery did, at roughly 3,000 hand-drawn frames.
By Song Reviews · August 20, 2026
Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1985: released three times in about a year before it worked. The song never changed — the delivery did, at roughly 3,000 hand-drawn frames.
“Take On Me” failed twice before it worked, and the song itself barely changed in between.
a-ha put it out in October 1984 and it went essentially nowhere outside Norway. They re-cut it with producer Alan Tarney — tighter, brighter, that keyboard riff pushed to the front — and released it again to not much more. The third release, in 1985, arrived attached to a video: Steve Barron’s pencil-sketch romance, rotoscoped by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger across roughly 3,000 hand-drawn frames and four months of work, for three minutes and forty-eight seconds of pop song. It went to No. 1 in the United States that October.
That history normally gets filed under “the video made the song,” which undersells the song. What the video actually did was give people permission to take it seriously, because the record underneath is a stranger, sadder thing than its jacket suggests. The verse melody sits low and anxious. The chorus jumps a distance most singers would decline, up to the note Morten Harket holds at the end like he is settling an argument. The lyric is a request made by someone who already suspects the answer is no. Two commercial failures later, what everyone remembers is the leap.
Forty-one years on it’s still the video people mean when they say “the pencil-drawing one,” and one of the very few singles of its era that a room of people who weren’t alive for it will finish on your behalf.
Greatest of All Time. A case where the packaging is a masterpiece and the thing inside earned it.
Hero image: a-ha, 1984, by Sheila Rock, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.