Swedish music has successfully and indefinitely engrained itself in the contemporary music scene, with the country producing some of pop’s most prolific producers and singers. But in all likelihood it would have been much, much different without the Nordic juggernaut that is ABBA.
The quartet made up of Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, ruled the international music market for a decade with the group’s European-inspired disco hooking listeners from Stockholm to Stockton, and Malmö to Melbourne.
ABBA were a glorious rarity in pop — an act that over time grew more accomplished and more ambitious with their sounds, arrangements and lyrics.
Even as romantic, inter-group tensions put strain on the quartet, the results were brilliant pop tracks that boast a deeper, fascinating story. Today, ABBA songs define a golden-age of disco and early dance music, but the Stockholm singers represent much more than feel-good floor fillers, as is evidenced by their remarkable you-really-didn’t-mind-waiting-did-you? comeback with 2021’s Voyage opus, which was almost the year’s biggest physical album if it wasn’t for that pesky Adele.
In a BBC Radio 2 interview with DJ Zoe Ball to mark the LP’s release, the fabulous Frida was asked about the process for deciding who will sing lead on an ABBA song…
“You know. we actually go into the studio and rehearse first, so usually we sit in the control room and go through the lyrics and the keys, and as we know I’m a mezzo soprano — maybe I’m even lower nowadays — and Agnetha is a soprano, so as Benny writes the songs in very big range vocally, it kind of shows itself when we start to sing, and who is the better one on a song.
“But I must say to Agnetha’s favour that she is an absolutely wonderful storyteller, she has something magical in her story telling, which I unfortunately do not have the same way, or maybe that is good because that means we kind of sing the lyrics and the songs in different ways. And as the fans always call it when we come together – the third voice – is very present. And if I don’t feel comfortable with a song, and I know that this would be perfect for Agnetha, then I just say it. We are very honest with each other – I would never do anything that I know that maybe I wouldn’t do so well as Agnetha can.”
So without further ado, to mark Agnetha Fältskog’s birthday — Pats, she’s 72! — here are a Perfect 10 of ABBA songs that showcase her enchanting, expressive and sublimely emotive voice that have undeniably stood the test of A-time.
Disillusion (1973)
Who else would put a song called Disillusion on their first album? Right from the get go, the world should have known from the start how dark ABBA could get. Melancholy in message, yet sparklingly delivered, Disillusion is a good example of how crystal clear Agnetha’s diction is, and how bright her voice sounds — even in a song as forlorn as this — adding inflection and her impeccable interpretive skills to render the appropriately “disillusioned” vocal. And, of course, how this super early ABBA song seemingly portends what was to come in the Fältskog/Ulvaeus marriage.
The track is from their nascent Ring Ring record, and is, remarkably, the only songwriting contribution from Agnetha to feature on any ABBA LP, though they hadn’t actually settled on that palindrome moniker til later. As an accomplished pianist, our favourite blonde composed the melody, and it’s assumed co-author/then husband Björn Ulvaeus either wrote or guided the lyrics. However, journalist and lyricist Bosse Carlgren is credited for supplying the words for the earlier Swedish version, Mina ögon. The title translates as My Eyes and would eventually surface on Fältskog’s solo album Elva kvinnor i ett hus, itself sporting a Roxanne-ish title which is Swedish for 11 Eleven Women In One House.
I’ve Been Waiting For You (1974)
With their outré outfits and glam stomp, Waterloo brought ABBA their first taste of international fame when it won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden. Employing a dense Wall Of Sound of the Wizard variety, it was one of the first upbeat pop songs to win the competition, and the title song from the group’s second studio album. They tried to replicate its catchy thrash with the less successful So Long, but in a case of right-single-wrong-side, buried away on its B-side was the charming ballad I’ve Been Waiting For You.
Anticipating Blondie’s later One Way Or Another, the subject matter is somewhat stalkerish, with Agnetha making such confessions as “I feel you belong to me, someday you will agree” to an unrequited love interest that may be running a mile right now. That’s the downside of early ABBA, I guess: as he was still getting to grips with writing in English Björn’s lyrics could sometimes be a little bit off. Either way, ‘Waiting’ showcases the Swedes’ brilliant ability to jump from power-pop belters to sweetly sincere soothsayers.
SOS (1975)
One of the earliest ABBA classics, SOS is the one that was highly praised by many of the band’s peers. In particular, John Lennon, Ray Davies and Pete Townshend publicly stated their esteem for the song, which announced a new sophistication in the group’s production. Indeed, Björn said that SOS was the key moment in which ABBA finally found their pop identity after three years of trying. And it becomes clear in the song’s brilliant progression of a tender, minor key on the verses, led by Fältskog’s heartbreaking alto, before jumping to its anthemic, major-key chorus.
The touches of sparse synthesizer and keyboard elements only further set the song’s ominous tone that sees Agnetha sounding on the verge of tears before passionately pleading to her lover, “The love you gave me / Nothing else can save me, SOS.” The group’s performance of the track on American Bandstand is credited with a surge in ABBA’s popularity in the US, and helped the single reach the top 20 on the Billboard chart and top 10 in the UK. SOS is also the only charting hit in the States in which both the title and the name of the artist are a palindrome.
My Love, My Life (1976)
An almost impossible choice, really. The epochal Arrival is a veritable powerhouse of an album, stuffed full of memorable melodies from the joyous boogaloo of Dancing Queen to the wintry heartbreak of Knowing Me Knowing You, via the plinky plonky cabaret Money Money Money — gold digging never sounded so good! Tough call then, so I’m not going with any of the omnipresent hits and instead I’ve decided to highlight a delectable deep cut: the sweetly enchanting My Love, My Life.
Showcasing Agnetha’s plaintive vocal stylising, the ballad is a worthy sequel of sorts to I’ve Been Waiting For You. Sappy and sentimental? Dang it, what’s so funny about being sappy and sentimental when you can pull it off with such sincerity and such twisted, yet heavenly vocal melodies? For what it’s worth, Meryl Streep gave a heart-wrenching rendition of the song in Mamma Mia 2: Here I Go Again.
The Name Of The Game (1977)
The one where ABBA got their funk on. With that Stevie Wonder-inspired opening, great riff and undeniably soulful hook on a half pop, half-rock corker, and arguably one of their most profound compositions on the subject of lurve. The Name Of The Game is an important standout in the awesome foursome’s discography that simultaneously proves their versatility and represents the quartet’s knack for dreamy and romantic choruses.
It’s also multi-textured and multi-part — by now ABBA’s songwriting team of Andersson and Ulvaeus were making bets on how many different, yet equally catchy parts they could incorporate inside a single song. The fact that both Fältskog and Lyngstad had solos as well as duelling on a clutch of simpatico backing vocals makes the entire combination extremely memorable without being cheesy.
I’m Still Alive (1979/2014)
Many ABBA fans will have been too young or too unlucky to see the band perform in their 1970s heyday, yet the quartet never really wanted to bother with performing live at all. They would have preferred to be a Steely Dan-like studio band, content to stay at home in Stockholm where they produced their intricate multi-layered music at Polar Studios during working hours so that Agnetha could get back to her kids, Björn could tag along (perhaps unwillingly), Benny could relax in the knowledge of a job well done, and Frida, possibly the only member of the group frustrated by this arrangement, could ponder what might have been.
At least someone had the foresight to capture their limited live recordings for posterity because 2014’s belated Live At Wembley Arena goes some way to proving that ABBA could be masters of the studio and the stage. The centrepiece of the group’s final tour, it’s evidently a complete concert from the final of six nights they played at the London venue in November of 1979, and what would turn out to be ABBA’s last full-length concert on English soil. Commercially the band were on a roll, with half a dozen Top Ten hits in barely 12 months, and to sell out that many Wembley shows in those days was no mean feat – only the 1976 incarnation of David Bowie had achieved it that decade.
The obscurity of this record of ABBA’s final tour is also a totally unique recording: the only opportunity to hear I’m Still Alive — as with Disillusion, the music being composed by Agnetha, sung with lyrical help from Björn. Not only that but this pretty country-tinged piano ballad ballad features the “little blonde girl” tinkling the ivories, and serves as a defiant victory lap of sorts before she walked out on her hubby a few weeks later, on Christmas Day no less. It goes without saying that this striking composition shows off Agnetha at her vulnerable, yearning best and would certainly rival other classic ABBA love songs had it been given a single release at the time.
The Winner Takes It All (1980)
So, to The Winner. With her vocal being recorded just just weeks after her divorce from Björn, Agnetha puts in an incredible performance on The Winner Takes It All, ABBA’s first release of the 1980s. Despite its difficult subject matter, Agnetha has said publicly many times that this is her favourite ABBA song of all time. Benny Andersson too. What am I talking about — it’s many people’s favourite ABBA song. With its brutal depiction of the bitter end of a relationship, The Winner Takes It All has an overwhelming aura of sadness and pain. But although many chose to believe it was written to reflect the divorce of members Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, Ulvaeus himself says the song is largely fiction and only depicts the experience of a break-up. He stated there was no winner or loser in the end of their marriage.
Indeed, ABBA perfected the kind of bittersweet solemnity that only two newly parted couples in a supergroup could manage. But let’s talk about that magisterial musical motif: Benny wanted a French chanson meets variété française arrangement with a subtly changing circular approach with strings supervised by the band’s bassist Rutger Gunnarsson. It worked. The fabulous if somewhat funereal ballad was the lead single from the group’s seventh studio album Super Trouper and was their penultimate chart-topping 45 in the UK, preceding the same title track and topping the British charts for a fortnight in August 1980 before being thrown on the pyre by David Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes. The Winner Takes It All was also one of only four Top 10 hits for the group in the US, though it did become the second ABBA song to reach the top spot on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart after Fernando.
One Of Us (1981)
One of the most melancholic ABBA songs that represented the underlying relationship dramas circling through the quartet’s time together, One Of Us was inspired by Benny and Björn’s recent divorces to their band mates Frida and Agnetha, the latter of whom turns in a stunningly emotional performance here on the quartet’s last chart-topping single in most of the world (though only reaching No.3 in Britain).
With its use of Italian schmaltz mandolins to hammer home the point, the sixties-styled ballad marked a darker shift in the group’s later material, while blending uplifting harmonies on the heartbreaking chorus (“One of us is crying / One of us is only / Waiting for a call… / Wishing she had never left at all”) to encapsulate the emotional depth baked into Abba’s history. Featuring Agnetha setting up home as a single woman, the accompanying music video was, as with the majority of ABBA song promos, directed by acclaimed Swedish film director Lasse Hallström — known for his work on Cider House Rules, and My Life As A Dog, for which he earned a Best Director Academy Award nomination.
The Day Before You Came (1982)
One of the band’s lesser known singles from the post-imperial phase of their career, The Day Before You Came is a masterful six-minute monologue that was too long for radio and too off-kilter for audiences, but provided ample evidence of the foursome’s musical evolution and newfound adventurousness.
The Day Before You Came is ABBA at their wrist-slitting best. In fact, it also sounds like a band that’s already split. All you hear is Benny’s Yamaha synths as proggy electronic flutes flutter moth-like… (always great recyclers of their own material, the ber-der-ber riff is on loan from minor work Should I Laugh Or Cry, the 45 flipside to One Of Us) and Agnetha’s tour de force ‘solo’ vocal not singing, just saying the story—Björn had instructed his former wife to sound bored, so she did—in plainly plaintive spades. It’s so poignant, so perfectly nuanced, that the track is a masterpiece of melodrama rivalled only by The Winner Takes It All in the heartbreak stakes, and the ambiguity of the lyrics coupled with the song’s unconventional structure give the whole affair a haunting, almost ominous sound,
The LP which The Day Before You Came was attached to, the double disc overview The Singles: The First Ten Years, had given the quartet their eighth No.1 album as a working entity, but it was patently obvious that the days as a mighty hit making machine were over for this Nordic colossus that had completely dominated the pop world in the second half of the Seventies. All in all, it was the Swedes’ last masterpiece. Well, for almost forty years anyway.
Don’t Shut Me Down (2021)
A while ago I rated this song of the year and ABBA Voyage’s ultimate pearl. Because, yes, as Smash Hits would have said, the European canon is back, back, BACK! Euphoric, exuberant and brilliantly emotive, Don’t Shut Me Down was the second of two songs previewed prior to the release of their shock comeback, album No.9. It’s also one of only three tracks on Voyage to feature Agnetha singing lead.
With the quirky, knowing lyrics (only Björn could rhyme ‘frustration’ with ‘transformation’) occasionally echoing The Day Before You Came, the narrative seems to be simultaneously about having changed as a person (“I’m not the one you knew”) but also the band reforming with an introduction to the ABBAtar concept: “And now you see another me, I’ve been reloaded (yeah!).”
I think all ABBA fans had a profound emotional reaction to this song, but especially the immortal moment at 1:26 when you hear Agnetha and Frida (now and then) combined to create the beautiful alchemy that is the third voice of ABBA. All this time later and I still marvel at how happy/goosebumpy/joyous that moment makes me. After 40 years it was way beyond what anyone expected. Phew!
I’m ready for the concerts now, Mr DeMille.
Steve Pafford
