After ‘Big in Japan’ and ‘Sounds Like a Melody’, ‘Forever Young’ is the third symphonically interpreted single release from Alphaville’s new orchestral album ‘Eternally Yours’ and will be released on August 26, 2022. In their sequence, the three newly produced singles repeat the authentic order of their original releases in 1984. This backward look at the beginning of the band’s history marks the starting point for a new “classical” chapter of Alphaville, which will be heralded with the release of ‘Eternally Yours’ on September 23, 2022.
Talking about a song like ‘Forever Young’ is both easy and difficult. “You can’t say it’s Alphaville’s biggest hit. That would be an understatement,” says Marian Gold, who co-wrote ‘Forever Young’ with Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens in 1982. The song’s international impact, with innumerous chart entries around the globe time and again, is impressive. However, such facts do not even begin to hint at the true significance of the work. “‘Forever Young’ is now reflected in the subconscious of perhaps more than a quarter of humanity,” says the lead singer nearly 40 years after the song’s first release. The relevance of the composition is also reflected in the list of cover versions, ranging from Interactive’s dance version to the rap-German Schlager combination of Karel Gott and Bushido to the global stars Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Thus, the timelessness of ‘Forever Young’ proves itself in manifold ways and offers pause for thoughtfulness even today: “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?”
The symphonic layout of the original, whose opening harmonies seem to paraphrase Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D, make it a treasure trove for arranger Max Knoth, who worked with Gold to produce the orchestral version. It’s a unique combination of grandiosity, boundless naivete, delusions of grandeur and “the ambiguity of the text,” as Gold explains it. “‘Forever Young’ is played at weddings, at funerals, at birthdays, there’s really no honorable occasion where it can’t be used and where the song wouldn’t provide an elemental statement about it. Why is that? I think because mortality and immortality are not contradictions.”
