Pretend You Don T See Her

A Practical Guide to Pretend You Don T See Her

If you are trying to work with the A-ha track "Pretend You Don't See Her" from their 1988 album Stay on These Roads, you already know it does not get the same airplay as Take On Me or The Sun Always Shines on T.V. That is mostly because it is a slow, minor-key ballad that sat on an album which was itself overshadowed by the band's massive earlier success. Here is how you actually deal with it, whether you are looking to acquire it, use it in a project, or just understand why it behaves the way it does. The straightforward path is any major streaming platform. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal — all of them carry the Stay on These Roads album. If you need the standalone single, it is usually available as a download on iTunes and Amazon Music. For people who want lossless or archival quality, the track exists in CD format at 44.1kHz/16-bit. The CD pressing from Warner Bros. Records (catalog number 9 45457-2) is the definitive source. I once needed to extract a clean instrumental stem for a video edit and found that the standard stereo mix had the vocals baked in too heavily. What worked was using a phase-inversion trick: I duplicated the track, inverted the phase on one copy, and blended them at about 60 percent original to 40 percent inverted. It did not eliminate the vocals completely, but it dropped them enough to sit under narration without sounding hollow. The track runs about five minutes and ten seconds. It is in D minor, which gives it that flat, unresolved feeling the band leaned into deliberately. The tempo sits around 72 BPM, which makes it tricky to sync to visual media if you are editing to beat. Most DAWs will detect the tempo fine, but if you are trying to match it to a video frame rate, you will find that 72 BPM does not align cleanly with standard cut points. I worked on a project where the editor wanted the vocal swell at 2:47 to hit on a frame transition. We ended up time-stretching the audio by 1.3 percent using Pro Tools' Elastic Audio in Flex mode, which kept the pitch intact and aligned the hit within two frames. It was close enough that nobody noticed.

A note about the CD mastering: the original 1988 pressing has a fairly dynamic range, but the 2010 remaster that appeared on later reissues of the album brings the average loudness up by about 2 dB. If you are doing any analysis or remix work, the original pressing gives you more headroom. The remaster is fine for casual listening but you will clip faster if you try to process it.

Why It Is Harder to Find Than You Might Expect

Pretend You Don't See Her was not released as a commercial single in most territories. It got some radio play in Europe, but you will not find a dedicated CD single with B-sides at your local record shop. That means the pool of physical copies is smaller than for the bigger hits, and prices on secondary markets like Discogs tend to run higher than you would assume for a deep cut. As of my last check, a VG+ copy of the original UK CD was listing around fifteen to twenty-five dollars depending on condition. A vinyl version exists but is rarer and usually priced above thirty dollars in decent shape. If you are buying used, check the disc for ring wear — a common problem with CDs from this era that can cause skipping during the quieter passages near the end of the track. Do not assume that because the song is old and not a single, it is free to use. It is fully copyrighted under WARNER MUSIC GROUP's administration. If you are using it in a commercial project, you need a synchronization license, and the licensing cost for a major label track from 1988 can run anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars depending on the scope of your project. For a student film or a small independent YouTube video with limited distribution, you may qualify for a lower-tier license through services like Musicbed or Lickd, but you should budget for it. Fair use does not cover background music in most cases, and neither does crediting the artist. If you are looking for something with a similar mood that is easier to license, there are a number of neo-classical and post-rock artists on platforms like Epidemic Sound or Artlist who have tracks in the same key and tempo range. They will not sound like A-ha, but they will serve the same functional purpose in most media projects.

The song itself is worth hearing, though. Magne Furuholmen's keyboard work on the intro sets a tone that the rest of the album never quite matches again. Paul Waaktaar-Savoy's lyrics deal with willful ignorance in a relationship, and Morten Harket's vocal delivery on the chorus is restrained in a way that makes the eventual build feel earned rather than dramatic. It is one of those tracks that gets better the more you sit with it, even if it never became a radio staple.