Forever Young

Forever Young is the debut studio album by German synth-pop band Alphaville. It was released on 27 September 1984 by Warner Music Group. Four singles supported the album, "Big in Japan", "Sounds Like a Melody", "Forever Young", and "Jet Set". The album charted well, hitting the Top 20 in six European countries and reaching number 1 in Norway and Sweden. Alphaville followed up with their second album in 1986 with the release of Afternoons in Utopia. The album was re-released in a "super deluxe" edition in March 2019. Background The band released the single "Big in Japan" before the album had finished recording, and its success surprised the band and label. Said the band, "'[Big in Japan]' beamed us up into showbiz heaven, half of the album was still to be written. So, while we were in the middle of composing and arranging the residual songs, we were sort of overtaken by our future selves. … Once we wore tattered jeans and sweaty leather jacks … now we were homeless millionaires living in hotel suites and airports." Their sudden and unexpected success affected the rest of the album. In 1986, singer Marian Gold recalled that he "bought an album of an unknown British band named Big in Japan. As you know, there's a considerable musical market in Japan. If you wanted to become famous, what you should do was to form a hard rock group and then release an album over there; it would definitely sell well... so the story went ... The statement fitted well to my storyline about a couple of drug addicted lovers and moreover provided the title for the prospective song." The first three tracks the band recorded were "Big in Japan", "Seeds", which was released as the b-side to "Big in Japan", and "Forever Young", which was originally recorded as an up-tempo track. The band was not happy with the fast version of "Forever Young", and recording of the track had come to a halt while the band figured out what to do with the song. It was producer Andreas Budde who suggested turning the track into a ballad, which is how the song was released.