So it’s a mystery and will remain a mystery.”
I know that we played it to a publisher in France and a couple of other people we trusted and as far as I can remember they liked it very much. “Why did we decide against it? In hindsight, I don’t have a clue. “That puts it in between ABBA the Album and Voulez-Vous, and it would have been included in the latter had we not decided against it.” Ulvaeus said. The song is reminiscent of the band’s mid-70’s output.īand member Bjorn Ulvaeus admitted he had to rely on Wikipedia to find out when the song was first recorded, but he says the listing of September 1978 “sounds about right.”
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Most of the song was recorded back in 1978 when the band were working on their Voulez Vous album, but it was not completed when the band felt it didn’t fit into the overall feel of the disco charged record.Ī tiny portion of the song was included on the band’s Box Set release a few years ago, and tribute band Arrival have previously released a full version of the tune. Just a Notion was originally recorded back in 1978 but will feature on the band’s forthcoming album Voyager. But then its lyric talks about the futility of writing an ode that’s worth remembering, which leaves an odd note, especially when we’re talking about a band whose songs are known around the world.ABBA have shared a brand new song. At least Voyage’s finale, Ode to Freedom, hints at a grand, closing statement, pastiching and stretching a phrase from a waltz in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Including tracks such as the rejected 1978 single Just a Notion (a reminder of early, jangly Abba glam, but nothing more) and Bumblebee (a naive attempt to say something universal about climate change) makes you doubt their quality control. Ulvaeus recently said these songs were written “absolutely trend-blind”. Keep an Eye on Dan offers another miserable monologue from a pining divorcee, spoiling its fantastic mixture of Visitors-era iciness and Voulez-Vous-era disco propulsion. Now four decades have passed, and one can’t help but despair at the chorus of I Can Be That Woman (“You’re not the man you should’ve been / I let you down somehow”) and that’s after its terrible lyrical twist about a female her husband is sleeping with, who turns out to be … a dog. One of Us and Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) are two Abba songs among many featuring a fraught woman desperate for any man to pop along and quick-fix her loneliness. The overall effect doesn’t prompt folkloric nostalgia, but mild nausea.Īdmittedly, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson have never been the most enlightened lyricists on the feminism front. The Celtic-leaning melody in the intro recalls Abba’s incursions into other global settings, such as the Mexican battlefields in Fernando, or the Spanish-Peruvian musical moodboards of Chiquitita. She’s spent years waiting for him to return, we’re told presumably she’s oblivious to the existence in Ireland of train routes, driving tests or text messages. When You Danced With Me tells the story of a girl left behind in Kilkenny when a boy she loved “left for the city”. It is, admittedly, a little cheesy, but its tenderness still feels triumphant.īut rather than reflecting poignantly on the past, much of the rest of Voyage feels terminally stuck there. The second verse’s soft drum rolls (by Per Lindvall, veteran of Super Trouper and The Visitors) are among many fine, musical details that urge the women on. The opening, elegiac string phrase yearns for resolution throughout, before returning wistfully in the song’s final bars.
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An epic example of the “bittersweet song” Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog refer to in the lyric – in their different, yet still lovely, older voices – its meditation on how to confront and own the ageing process is precision-tailored, in glistening silver thread. It begins with I Still Have Faith in You, the other taster track released in September. And so it is hard to reckon with the disappointment that Abba’s ninth album delivers, as it prefers to languish in often bafflingly retrograde settings. Its impact was unexpected and exciting and it became Abba’s first Top 10 hit since 1981, charging Voyage with the promise of forward motion and glamour – qualities that felt wildly attractive in our messy, mid-Covid times. In September, one of two album taster tracks, Don’t Shut Me Down, fulfilled this brief exquisitely, morphing from vulnerable Swedish noir to piano-and-horn-propelled pop-funk.
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