Take On Me

The song began in Bridges, where Waaktaar and Furuholmen wrote it at 15 and 16 under the name Miss Eerie. Harket thought it sounded like a Juicy Fruit advertisement. It was reworked as Lesson One and then as Take On Me. Waaktaar said the verse came first, with the lyric taken from a book he had at school, and that he later grew unhappy with the chorus and wrote one that gave the song an emotional pay-off. Furuholmen supplied the synth riff.

The first version, produced by Tony Mansfield, came out in October 1984 and reached number three in Norway but did not chart in the UK. Alan Tarney's re-recording flopped on its first UK release too. For the third try Warner Bros. invested in a new video directed by Steve Barron, built on rotoscoped pencil-sketch animation by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, in which a woman in a cafe is pulled into a comic. In the United States the video was out a month before the record, it had wide exposure on MTV, and the single went to number one on the Hot 100 in the issue dated 19 October 1985. It reached number two in the UK, behind Jennifer Rush's The Power of Love. In Norway it went to number one a year after its first release. The video won six MTV Video Music Awards in 1986 and reached one billion YouTube views on 17 February 2020.

Harket sings across more than two and a half octaves, from an A at the start of the chorus up to an E at its end, and Rolling Stone noted it as having one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop. Billboard staff ranked it 26th on their 2023 list of the 500 best pop songs. Covers include Reel Big Fish (1998), A1 (2000), Weezer (2019) and a remix by Kygo (2015). Pitbull's Feel This Moment samples its riff. a-ha open their Hunting High and Low shows with it. At Live 8 in Berlin on 2 July 2005 it was the second song, and Harket asked for a break when his in-ear monitor failed.