Day 47 (May 5): a-ha - The Sun Always Shines on TV (Friends Week!)

Hunting High and Low Expanded Edition' Coming in November | a-haAgainst all odds, Friends Week has reached its second day. I know, I have more than one friend! This is a joke I will continue to make, because weak self-deprecation has always been my speciality. Sorry, therapist.

Today's song of the day comes from the mind and also the voice of Sasha, my very cool internet friend. Sasha asked me to "take good care of her child" (the song), and I am going to do my best with that. The child/song is a-ha's "The Sun Always Shines on TV" from 1985's Hunting High and Low, You know, the one with "Take on Me", and the other songs that are not that.

I would be lying if I said that my exposure to a-ha had gone any further. 80s music is a weird and baffling thing to me, and my taste in it is overwhelmingly mainstream, so to go for even a slightly deeper cut is revolutionary and frightening. Thankfully, this is not a difficult song to listen to. Those synthy, mildly anti-consumerist boys knew what to do! Ah, to puncture the bubble of capitalist optimism whilst working sneakily within the system.

It must have been so reassuring just to know how to write songs like that, know they were good, and know that people would like them. It's like, there's an art to it, but there's also a structure. It allows me to imagine I could have been a new wave artist in another life, even if that is a stupid thing to believe. Probably wouldn't have been as good as these guys, but it's nice to believe false things every now and then.

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