pål waaktaar

Pål on himself “I like to keep in the background. There are only certain kinds of people I can talk to, feel secure with. In any case, I’m definitely not the pop-star type. I lack some of the characteristics necessary in this business, like enjoying PR stunts. What’s important to me is creativity, musical ambitions. I’m afraid of mediocrity.”

Morten on Pål “Pål has unbelievable self-discipline and is a workaholic. He can keep working on what appears to be the same thing over and over again. While I go crazy when I have to go over a song hundreds of times, he can sit with it for hours, trying to find exactly the right mix to achieve the sound he wants. Pål is really the driving force behind a-ha. He’s one of the few real artists on the pop rock scene. It’s always exciting to hear what he’s written.”

Magne on Pål “Pål is the person who has meant most to me in my musical development and yet he’s the one person I find it most difficult to say anything sensible about. He has incredible will-power and a watchful eye, always searching for material he can use creatively. In a way, I have idolized Pål for years and I still depend on him to help me sort out my own ideas.”

Pål Gamst Waaktaar was born on September 6, 1961. His family moved from Tonsenhagen to Manglerud when he was one year old. He has one sister, Tonje, who is two years older than him. His father is a pharmacist, and his mother works for the telephone company. Both his parents are very interested in classical music, and regularly took Pål to concerts, operas and ballet performances when he was young.

Pål describes his childhood and youth as relatively easy. He was slightly better than average at school, but never managed to work up much enthusiasm for schoolwork. Early in life, his interests began to move in other directions, with music already taking an important role. When Pål began to play a wooden flute as a child, he immediately started composing his own melodies. He also loved drawing and was content to sit by himself for hours and pursue his own interests.

He didn’t like Manglerud School, and asked to be switched to Nordstrand, even when this one had a very conservative structure. In fact, Pål went to one of the very last all-boys’ schools in Norway.

“It was around that time that the sixties hit me. I wore wide bellbottoms, grew my hair long and put up Jimi Hendrix posters. At Nordstrand, the boys were all clean, crew-cut kids driving around in their rich fathers’ cars. Everybody else’s style was completely alien to me, and I had no desire to become like them. I’ve always wanted to be different,” he recalls.

Drawing took up much of his time. One teacher proved to be a mjor source of inspiration. She took Pål to art exhibitions and helped him with his drawings. The foundations for his interest in drawing were put down here. But drawing soon received competition from music. By the age of ten, Pål was composing tunes to poems. Up to this day, he remembers the melody to go with ‘Jeg synger en san om vinden’ (‘I sing a song about the wind’).

Then he heard the record of the musical ‘Hair’. He listened to it repeatedly and began to dream about playing keyboards. Instead, he ended up building his own set of drums and playing along to records. His friend Mags joined in and inspired by ‘Hair’, they decided to write their own rock opera. They locked themselves in and unraveled the wonderful world of melodies all by themselves.

Pål had girl problems, too. He was convinced that he would die a virgin! He would always fall for the unattainable ones. When he was thirteen, a girl developed a crush on him, and she had ten of her friends take turns visiting Pål at home, every day for three weeks. He was scared to death and started to stay away from home all day to avoid having to answer the doorbell. Pål was eighteen years old when he finally got his first kiss, and that was from Mags’ girlfriend. She was looking for revenge after an argument and so, to make Mags jealous, she kissed Pål right in front of him. But the romance with Pål only lasted three days, then she went back to Mags. After that experience, Pål became even more frightened of rejection and gave up completely… for the time being!

In high school, Pål was the typical ‘aspiring artist’ – sitting at the back of the classroom with his thoughts miles away. He barely graduated due to poor attendance, and Pål’s teachers nicknamed him ‘The Guest’.

He preferred to stay at home and make music with Mags. By this time, they had moved up to electric guitars and keyboard instruments. As their music became more and more advanced, so their friendship grew. They worked well together, but the friendship wasn’t always a peaceful one – it was characterized by keen competition between the two. One summer, they traveled through Europe and at one point they stopped speaking to each other communicating solely through song lyrics they wrote! But despite the quarrels their music kept them together – even after Mags’ family moved to Asker.

The house at Asker had more room for them to practice in, and Pål was up there almost every day – or at least every weekend. Pål’s music reflected his moods. He wrote all the lyrics for the Bridges album and everything centered on one subject: his frustration with love.

“That album is actually about my first real kiss, about how at last I felt like a member of the human race. About how relieved and happy I was that it had happened – that someone wanted to be with me. About how I had grown up to the extent that I had thought it was rotten to be alone and about my disappointment when I realised how little she really was involved, but how something in me had been awakened anyway,” Pål says.

Pål is one year older than Mags. Thirteen and fourteen years old, they decided they would finish their basic education and then go to England to get their big break. Already back then, they were convinced that they would be as big as the Beatles! Pål wanted to leave for London as soon as he had graduated, but he had to wait one more year for Mags.

That year, Pål didn’t really do much except waiting for Mags to graduate. Like Mags, Pål was a conscientious objector and so he didn’t do military service. It was then that Pål discovered literature and he began to eat and breathe Hamsun. At school, he couldn’t have cared less for the sterile literature classes, but now Pål suddenly realised what he had been missing – books! He was fascinated and bought Penguin Classics by the meter, English paperbacks being cheaper than Norwegian translations. He spent day after day sitting in Oslo cafés with his books.

Reading was only interrupted by writing new lyrics. He was confirmed in his fascination by the Doors. They had been strong, musically, but their lyrics proved to be even more powerful. Personal. Direct. That was how he wanted his lyrics to sound.

Pål’s notebook is his most important working tool. It accompanies him everywhere, day and night. This is where he sketches and records impressions, overheard conversations, interesting words from TV, ideas and observations. A lyric can start life as a few words on page 3, develop a refrain on page 15, be revised on page 33, and finished in book number 3, page 12.

“It has become a way of life,” Pål explains. “When you talk to people, you have to remember that every little snippet can turn into a song. So you sit there, ready to steal the one line that shines through. It’s the same when you read books, watch movies, or write letters. When I write lyrics in English, I feel it’s an advantage to be Norwegian, because I don’t see the language as a dull, grey mass, but rather as something exciting and full of possibilities. I can pick out ordinary words or phrases and make them sound new and interesting. For example, I can write songs like ‘Hunting High and Low’ or ‘Train Of Thought’, and English people will comment on their interesting or unusual titles, even though these are phrases that they themselves use all the time. Look at ‘Take On Me’. Most people have to think twice about the title before they get to like it. To me, to ‘take on’ somebody means to notice them and take time to find out what they’re really like. Take On Me almost becomes ‘Look! Here I am!”‘

The most recent inspiration for Pål’s lyrics has come from his relationship with Lauren, an American girl he met in London in the early days. Once more, he could pour his emotions into his songs.

“My contributions to the album Hunting High and Low are about being really in love for the first time in my life. They’re very romantic, but also realistic. I live in England, she lives in America, so there’s always this underlying fear that it can never last. I mean, months can go by without us being able to meet. All the songs on the album were written in an attempt to secure a place in her heart for me. I wanted to put so much of myself into her that she couldn’t live without me. I admit I used every musical trick in the book to get her to love me. Every single song is a prayer for attention… to Take On Me.”