“Take On Me” and How Tones Change as Lyrics Age

A-ha’s seminal 80s hit holds a powerful dichotomy of meaning

Image from music video for a-ha’s “Take On Me,” directed by Steve Barron, produced by Limelight Productions, and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.

In case the clarification is needed, this piece is 100% serious and the previous song review was 110% satire. Writing them back to back was a fun challenge.

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One of the most interesting components to language is the way that tone can change the meaning of a sentence. The inflection placed on individual words can alter the meaning of the entire interchange that it’s a part of. Where emphasis is put in the phrase, “I didn’t say he stole the money” famously opens it up to seven distinctly varied interpretations.

The same is true of music. Often times, the bright and jubilant nature of a song can enable people to skip obliviously over its lyrics. Even the melodies we recite as children can fall victim to this effect. I spent years sing-songily repeating the rhyme:

Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down

without knowing its dark and plague-related origins.

And even younger than that, there was something strangely pacifying about the softened words:

Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

When my parents used to sing the words, they never once conjured images of dead infants. They were no more than the delicate notes of a lullaby that sent me drifting off into a fantastical realm of dreams and creation.

Throughout the world of music, there are many more examples of the cheeriest and propulsive songs being shaded by dour, melancholy lyrics. Perhaps no clearer display of this effect exists than Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.” Boasting an upbeat rhythm and a catchily whistled chorus to match, it’s shockingly easy to miss that the lyrics detail a school shooting.

Depending on the rendition and the artist singing it, songs can begin to take different tones and stir different emotions than they did when initially written. Tears for Fears’ original version of “Mad World” is an upbeat, new wave track with a driving, electronic rhythm.

The Gary Jules cover of the same composition, by contrast, is a slow piano ballad that shines a sober light on its haunting and soulful lyrics. The cover is by and large considered such an improvement over the avenue taken in the initial release that even Tears for Fears have begun taking that more ballad-oriented approach to the song instead.

One poignant example of the different directions that the same lyrics can take can be found in A-ha’s “Take On Me.” Practically synonymous with the most danceable rhythms of the 80s, it’s a song whose intricacies are easily missed.

In the words:

We’re talking away
I don’t know what I’m to say
I’ll say it anyway
Today is another day to find you
Shyin’ away…

there’s a deep uncertainty and vulnerability embedded. Left by themselves on the page, they evoke feelings of doubt, longing, fear, and hesitation. But there’s a wonderfully discordant effect to the airy, lively, and synth-driven song they’re transplanted on top of. And there’s a powerful poignancy and mystery to the musical decision to allow the lyrics to stand in such bold defiance to the melody and harmony at hand.

Driving home this dichotomy further is the buoyantly innovative and award-winning music video accompanying it. But there’s a striking ambiguity and potency to the notions buried beneath both the video and audio:

So needless to say
I’m odds and ends
But I’ll be stumblin’ away
Slowly learnin’ that life is okay

In that second image, there’s something I cherish in the thought of stumbling our way through this confusing world. I love the idea of never quite gaining our footing in this life, but gradually growing to understand that that’s okay — knowing how much there is to know and knowing we never will.

The energetic chorus, too, unceremoniously imparts some of the song’s most biting pathos with the lyric:

I’ll be gone
In a day or two.

Listened to in passing, the words are heard but don’t quite register. But they speak succinctly of life’s fleeting moments. And in conjunction with the song’s prior stanzas, the soaring vocals impart a reason to follow passions without the fear of consequences.

There’s also a powerful and poetic openness to the lines:

All the things that you say
Is it life or just to play my worries away?
You’re all the things I’ve got to remember
You’re shyin’ away.

To me, there’s a deep pain buried within the words. After that final verse, lead singer Morton Harket delivers the most sonorous and emotive take on the chorus yet, but this time with an altered lyric.

In a transcendent falsetto, his words return once more to the idea of impermanence, stating simply: “I’ll be gone in a day.” The words essentially stand as the final lyric of the song — wholly distinct from the echoing repetitions within the rest of the fade out. And while a subtle shift from earlier and one that’s easy to miss, it’s hard not to see a pointed intention behind the change and the artists’ symbolic awareness of life’s transience.

In 2017, “Take on Me” found new life when A-ha performed the song acoustic. In a performance on MTV unplugged, the three original band members revisited the hit song and shed new light on the lyrics’ deeper underpinnings with their more reflective take. The diametrically opposed approach to the same song is practically unrecognizable. And in its changed tone, it capitalizes on the images of mortality that are present only in lyrics within the first.

Over three decades after it was initially released, there’s an inescapable pang built into Harket’s words this time around. They’re nostalgic, yearning, raw, gentle, honest, and subdued.

In its stripped down essence, and performed by the musicians who catapulted the song to fame nearly 35 years prior, the lyrics carry a blow that new artists’ renditions of old songs can scarcely impart in such an earnest form. Were it sung the same way but by a different band, a sublime quality would be lost.

But while tender and intimate from beginning to end, the composition concludes with an air of hope so elusive many listeners may miss it. Even while each member is decades older — and with years full of scars and memories to show for them — the final lyrics of the first version are replaced once more by “in a day or two,” rather than just “in a day.”

The distinction is imperceptible enough that hardly anyone could notice it. But in granting themselves that symbolic extra “day,” it marks an inconspicuous reprisal of the emotional high points in their earlier rendition. In that simple addition of “or two,” the song makes an optimistic return to form.

With the words reintroduced, the lines exude a maturer understanding of mortality. They display an optimism in the face of dwindling days and a rejection of the naive fatalism that decided the final words of the previous iteration.

The 1984 version of the song lays brooding lyrics underneath a cadence of ecstasy and excitement. But the 2017 revisit does just the opposite. It conceals the more joyous messages of the song with its slow tempo and minor chord progression. But in its last words, a familiar note of hope is quietly reintroduced into the melody. It sounds wistful, sober, and forlorn. yet when considered in their full context, the words impart a certain whimsy — an acceptance of uncertainty.

The 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II appeared to pay subtle homage to the band’s 2017 rendition in a quiet moment between scenes of chaos. In a game filled with grating violence, it stands as a rare and magical reprieve. It allows the iconic pop band’s music to take on more dimensions still.

As A-ha broaches life’s later years, it’s difficult not to hear a new weight in the words of that overplayed 80s hit.

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This article was originally published on Medium.

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