Magne Furuholmen - Living With Ourselves (2025) Hi-Res

The album includes all 11 tracks listed on a-ha.com recently, but has a different running order. It opens with “Look how far we haven’t come” and ends with a cover version of TOTO’s “Hold the line”.

Living With Ourselves is released on Magne’s own label Passion Fruit Records, while the record itself was pressed at T-Time Vinyl Plant in Stavanger, Norway, where Magne and producer Bjarne Stensli are among the co-owners.

It’s 40 years since A-ha released their first album, and 20 years since Magne Furuholmen’s first solo album, “Past perfect future tense,” was released. To celebrate the many anniversaries, a limited physical release of Living With Ourselves was recently announced.

In 2022, after a second world tour with A-ha, Magne Furuholmen started writing new material and also went back to work on a couple of songs that weren't on the "True North" album. These songs didn't have a specific address or purpose yet - would it be new A-ha material, something in the apparatjik style, a movie soundtrack or some kind of solo project?...was it even an album?. Eventually, it started to feel like a solo album, and in the winter and spring of 2023, Magne Furuholmen self-produced 10 songs that felt quite personal to him.

Magne Furuholmen says: "On Living With Ourselves all the drums and bass were programmed and I was curious to see what our live band and Carl Oluf would bring to the tracks, so in June we packed up our gear and set up a workshop in my house in the south of France with my friend Bjarne Stensli as co-producer and engineer.

...The session ended up being a mix of many things. We spent 12 days recording, having lunch and enjoying each other's company - recording morning, afternoon and evening. There was also a hell of a lot of re-working - my original takes were sent out everywhere: through amps in the basement, the bathroom, the bedrooms, even up the chimney (!) to take advantage of the characteristic acoustics of the house, mics outside in the garden, found objects etc. The result was organic, as everyone worked not only as musicians and engineers, but also as a team of co-producers shaping the final result.

...After getting home and finishing the mixes I was fired up about releasing an album, but in October I got covid (for the third time), this time with the added bonus of lingering covid symptoms that lasted for 5-6 months and a broken rib from coughing, so releasing during that fall/winter just didn't seem possible. However, to start with I decided that staggering the songs later in the year, leading up to and after Christmas was the way to go, and recording a weekly podcast episode to go along with each song release..."