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Tag: Morten Harket

  • Pop Rock International! Morten Harket “Scared of Heights”

    Morten Harket: Still Falsetto-riffic!
    No disrespect to R.E.M., but there may be no band break-up that got me in the gut harder than a-ha’s. We all remember a-ha, of course, for “Take On Me.” But it surprises a lot of people to find that the band, long celebrated as one of the 80s greatest one hit wonders was actually a two-hit wonder here in the U.S. (you mean, you don’t remember “The Sun Always Shines on TV”, a Top 20 hit in 1986?), and that they continued touring and recording for most of the next 25 years, racking up hits in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia with singles every bit as glorious as their “one hit” – songs like “Forever Not Yours” (which boasted a great Noah’s Ark-inspired story video), the orchestral confessional “Shadowside”, and the driving, gothic “Celice” – not to mention “Summer Moved On”, a later-career falsetto-and-Spanish-guitar masterpiece, or their moving farewell single “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”.

    a-ha “Forever Not Yours” (2002)

    A-ha – Forever Not Yours (Clip) by Meubal

    They might not have gotten any play here, but each of the four studio albums a-ha released since 2000 is worth the import price you have to pay to obtain them, so, yes, it was incredibly sad for me to see this band call it a career at the end of 2010. I’ll take some solace that all three of these guys had already established interesting solo careers prior to the band’s break-up, and that the band’s dissolution is giving them time to give those endeavors more energy.

    Lead singer Morten Harket is first out of the gate with a new solo album. Out of My Hands is the fifth solo record by Harket, and his third English-language release (following 2009’s Letters from Egypt and 1995’s Wild Seed). He’s previewing the album with a pair of singles. In February, there was the lovely, driving “Lightning” which you can listen to below. And then, last week marked the premiere of the video for the second, a song called “Scared of Heights” that finds Morten indulging his falsetto maybe just a tad too much. The song’s fruity melody and even fruitier video (which features a lot of slow motion hair-ography – thank you for that, Glee – while Harket preens at the roof’s edge of a green-screen skyscraper) are an embarrassing reminder of some of a-ha’s not-so-great moments. Morten’s voice just works better on sadder sounding songs.

    Morten Harket “Lightning” (2012)

  • Winter Doesn’t Quite Move On: Morten Harket Feels My Pain


    Here in Wisconsin, we have a sort of love/hate thing about winter. Back in college, I remember walking to work in bitter cold, with icicles forming in my facial hair and the inner workings of my Walkman freezing to a crawl so that my mix tape sounded like a 45 played at 33. Those mornings are too sad to contemplate further, but as miserable as I was, it also gave me an opportunity to feel all stoic and rugged and butch. For us Midwesterners, the quiet endurance of an extreme winter season is both a burden and a source of pride. Suffice to say that even as May heads into June, there have been frost advisories in America’s Dairyland. Wednesday night, I mowed my lawn in a winter coat. So when they start opening the garden centers at the Home Depots and Shopkos and Wal-Marts, we flock to them like mosquitoes to bug zappers, ravenous for the color green – ravenous for color at all.

    Of course, it could be worse. We could be in Norway. (Actually, many of us are Norwegian.) And the Norwegian trio a-ha captured the poetically fleeting nature of a northern summer gloriously in the video for their 2000 reunion single “Summer Moved On” (which they debuted at the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Concert). The band will always be best known for their 1985 hit “Take On Me” (and its video), but, even though it wasn’t a hit on these shores, “Summer Moved On” successfully re-established the band as an international pop force, and may, in fact, prove to be just as enduring and classic as their first hit. Both lyrically and musically the opposite of their signature hit, “Summer Moved On” is a languorous contemplation of a relationship’s final days which culminates with cascading strings and Morten Harket’s dramatic falsetto plea to “Stay… don’t just walk away” – how does that man hold his notes? – the song is accompanied by a video depicting a rocky ocean beach strewn with light-starved people waiting for the dawn of what proves to be an excruciatingly brief day.

    Since their reunion, and in between the members’ various side projects – primary songwriter Pal Waaktaar and his wife Lauren Savoy record together under the name Savoy and in 2004 Magne “Mags” Furuholmen recorded a solo album with members of Coldplay – a-ha have released four very good albums (available in the U.S. only as imports) including the double-live set How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head, with a new as-yet-untitled record scheduled to come out this fall. In the meantime, Morten Harket has revived his solo career with a brand new studio album called Letter From Egypt, his first full-length, English-language studio album since 1995’s lovely Wild Seed. The album’s advance single is a typically sweeping ballad called “Movies” (a cover of fellow Norskies the Locomotives’ “My Woman”) which was a top 10 hit in Norway earlier this year. Check out Morten (as hunky as ever) performing the song at last year’s Nobel Peace Prize Concert to an audience which included Al Gore. The album’s second single, the slightly more upbeat and far less engrossing “Darkside” was released in Europe in May.

    http://www.myspace.com/harketmorten

    -P. Lorentz