One day in early September, the text alerts on my phone went wild. Over and over, up popped the Guardian story about ABBA: two new songs streaming, a new album due out in early November, and a spectacular upcoming concert event. Technological wizardry had created avatars of the four members of ABBA: Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson. Digital versions of them in their 1979 prime would perform with a live 10-piece band in a specially-built arena in London. My husband, my brother, my brother-in-law, and a few friends who knew me during my tween years of ABBA obsession were all sending me the news. How mind-blowing that after 40 years—40 years!—Agnetha, Frida, Björn, and Benny had come together to make music once again.
“A light in the darkness!” I exclaimed to my friends as I forwarded the article along. The group had first announced the concert and arena in 2018—information I had somehow missed—but it had all been postponed due to COVID-19. It was exciting and surprising news. ABBA had more or less disbanded around 1982 and in subsequent years had expressed little interest in reuniting, even when their music was suddenly everywhere again in the early 1990s: in Erasure’s EP of Abba covers, Abba-esque, in the films Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and in the stage production and film of Mamma Mia! Even when they had been offered one billion dollars to get back together and tour. Just before learning of their reunion, I had finally watched Mamma Mia! for the first time as well as ABBA: The Movie, with its live performances and backstage scenes I’d never seen before. I guess I was priming myself for the new album without even realizing it.
I hopped onto YouTube and watched/listened to the two new songs, “Don’t Shut Me Down” and “I Still Have Faith in You,” dozens of times. I loved them both, especially “Don’t Shut Me Down,” on one level about a couple reconnecting after many years but primarily a reflection on the foursome’s long absence and readiness to return to the public eye: “When I left, I felt I’d had enough / But in the shape and form I appear now / I have learned to cope and love and hope / Is why I am here now.” It’s a beautiful song about healing, growth, and renewal. It’s also ABBA reminding their fans that they haven’t been frozen in amber for 40 years, that in many ways, they’ve moved on, they’re different. The song lifted my heart. And then I didn’t really think about the ABBA reunion anymore.
Until, after a couple of weeks, it was all I thought about—including while lying awake at night, the ABBA songbook running through my head. I began watching the four-minute promotional video of their new project, “ABBA Voyage: The Journey is About to Begin,” over and over. Clips of the four of them in the recording studio and in performance-capture bodysuits for the creation of their avatars sent chills up and down my spine. So did footage of crew members in ABBA t-shirts dancing and cheering as a five-week concert essentially played out before their eyes.
I was in. I mean, in! I ordered merch from the ABBA Voyage website. I ordered the 40th anniversary edition of ABBA Gold. I bought the definitive biography, ABBA: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, by Carl Magnus Palm. I haunted the ABBA The Museum online shop and joined the waitlist for the sterling silver ABBA necklace (update: ordered and received). I ordered more merch. And I began playing my ABBA LPs for the first time in decades. I was shocked to see I didn’t own their first album, Ring Ring, and promptly ordered it on CD. It contains a few clunkers amid the hits, but as a completist, I had to have it.
Meanwhile, the two new songs made their way into my bloodstream. Agnetha’s and Frida’s voices still sounded incredible, and of course, unmistakable. In fact, the women wouldn’t agree to record a new album, the story goes, until they got into the studio and made sure they could still sing. They could. As Björn said in an interview, Voyage is the follow-up to The Visitors, their last studio album, and it was as if the 40 intervening years had never happened, it all came together so seamlessly and organically. The three videos associated with the new record were racking up millions of views on YouTube as well as comments from people all over the globe. Young and old alike were ecstatic, in tears, nostalgic, rejuvenated—all of them thanking ABBA for such a miraculous gift during these terrible days of deadly disease and political upheaval. ABBA was back, their music bringing a glimmer of hope, and bringing our divided world together.
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I can trace my love of ABBA back to the sixth grade, when my friend Staci Corson gave me the Super Trouper album for Christmas. She handed it to me, and I unwrapped it, in the girls’ bathroom on the second floor of our school. (Staci’s tastes ran differently; she had recently bought AC/DC’s Back in Black.) Of course, I already knew and loved ABBA’s hits, like “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me,” but Super Trouper ignited my full-blown ABBA mania. When the needle dropped and I heard those remarkable voices singing in harmony, lightly, gently as the title song begins, I was enthralled. Soon, I amassed all ABBA’s studio albums and three greatest hits records and played them incessantly. My brother texted me not long ago that one of my nieces had begun listening to ABBA and that he was having flashbacks to our childhood.
On a cold, snowy day in November 1981, I walked the mile or so to the Notre Dame Bookstore with my friend Cece to buy The Visitors. I had been waiting for it for months. In pre-internet days, and before the independent record store Tracks had opened in South Bend, Indiana, how on earth did I know about record release dates? I had subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine for several years by that point. My friend Mia had given me a gift subscription for my 10th or 11thbirthday, and I (or, I should say, my mother) had kept it up. Surely that was how I knew. Anticipating the new album was exciting as was bringing it home, tearing off the shrink wrap, and playing it in my bedroom while reading the liner notes and scrutinizing the cover image. That’s how I listened to albums then: with full attention and no distractions. It was magical. I feel sad for kids who don’t have that experience today—who can’t sit and listen to music, let alone their thoughts, for thirty seconds without interruptions from smartphones and social media.
Why did I become utterly fixated? What did ABBA mean to me then, and what do they mean now? It’s hard to pin down. Who can explain precisely why a particular sound, tone, melody, or lyric lights a spark in us, makes us jump up and dance, or wallow and cry, or burrows deep in our hearts and takes root? I love music. I’ve listened to music for hours every day my entire life, but I’m not a musician. I can’t speak knowledgably about chords, arrangements, four-tracking, or overdubs. All I can do is play the music and ride the ensuing emotional waves.
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Listening to ABBA today evokes nostalgia for earlier, simpler times. When no one I loved had died yet. Before I struggled with anxiety, insomnia, and impostor syndrome. When I would come home from school, head up to my bedroom, flip through my crate of records, and play Waterloo, The Album, Arrival, Voulez-Vous, and all the others, often with Mia by my side. I remember she loved “Nina, Pretty Ballerina.” Towards the end of sixth grade, my friend Jenny and I made up a dance routine to “Super Trouper” and performed it in the school talent show, singing into microphones, although I’m sure the volume of the record drowned us out completely, and mercifully. We wore matching outfits, and we had slept with wet hair in braids the night before so that the next day, our hair was wavy and fluffy. We must have looked absurd, but we sang our hearts out, not yet plagued by the crippling self-consciousness of later teendom.
A couple of years ago, I learned through my grade school alumni newsletter that Staci Corson had died. I found her short obituary online. It gave no cause of death, which always strikes me as ominous. She had been a nurse and had requested that any donations in her name be made to a pet refuge, reminding me of how much she had loved her dachshund, Ginger, when we were kids. The obituary carried a picture of her from high school, as if no time had passed at all. I knew her father had died a few years previously. I asked my grade school’s alumni director for Staci’s mother’s address and sent her a sympathy card, not even sure she would remember me. I told her that Staci had been a true and loyal friend to me during those middle school and early high school years, when allegiances among friends can turn on a dime. I’ve been flooded with memories of her since news of the ABBA reunion broke. I wish I could tell her how wonderfully she changed my life that long-ago day when she kindly and unexpectedly gave me Super Trouper.
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Throughout those ABBA-obsessed years, I loved upbeat songs like “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” “Dancing Queen,” “Take a Chance on Me,” “Hole in Your Soul,” “Voulez-Vous,” and so many, many more. I would turn up the volume and sit on my bedroom floor next to my record player, or at the dining room table when using the downstairs turntable, reading the liner notes or just staring off into space, listening intently. I cringed a bit at the likes of “King Kong Song” but found something to love in almost all their tracks. Even as a 12- or 13-year-old, I could also appreciate the darker, more melancholy lyrics in so many of their songs that belied their sunny beat. Fading love, break-ups and divorces, the passage of time, missed opportunities, feeling lost and alone, losing self-confidence: these are the through-lines of “SOS,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “One Man, One Woman,” “Slipping Through My Fingers,” and “The Winner Takes It All.” At times, I was an anxious kid, a bit introverted. Maybe that accounts for the appeal such lyrics held for me.
“Chiquitita” sent tears streaming down my face, all the hundreds if not thousands of times I listened to it: “You were always sure of yourself / Now I see you’ve broken a feather / I hope we can patch it up together.” I would sing along and try to belt out the lyrics of the chorus along with Agnetha and Frida, but my voice would crack, and the tears would flow again even though the song promises a return of happiness: “You’ll be dancing once again and the pain will end / You will have no time for grieving.” As I cranked ABBA Gold in the car recently, the Chiquitita Effect proved as powerful as ever.
“Happy New Year” slayed me recently as well given its current 21st-century backdrop: the horrors of the Trump years, the devastation of the pandemic. “No more champagne / And the fireworks are through / Here we are, me and you / Feeling lost and feeling blue.” And later: “Seems to me now / That the dreams we had before / Are all dead, nothing more / Than confetti on the floor.” In yearning tones, the chorus urges us to remain hopeful: “Happy new year, happy new year / May we all have a vision now and then / Of a world where every neighbor is a friend. / Happy new year, happy new year / May we all have our hopes, our will to try / If we don’t, we might as well lay down and die / You and I.” All right, I thought. I’ll try to have hope, even though every time I glance at a screen, there’s another ghastly bit of news lying in wait. Climate change, oil spills, police brutality, rising authoritarianism, over a million dead from COVID-19 in the United States alone. And maniacs with access to assault rifles slaughtering children in their classrooms. Unbearable.
I turn to ABBA these days not to escape reality but to feel a bit of relief—to enter various scenarios that make me think and wish and imagine. Take “Eagle,” for instance. Who wouldn’t want to soar through the sky with eagles—to experience such exhilaration and freedom, to learn from their primordial wisdom, to “fly over mountains and forests and seas”? “Move On” proposes a more feasible means of living life to the fullest, calling us to accept change and never despair: “Like a roller in the ocean, life is motion / Move on / Like a wind that’s always blowing, life is flowing / Move on / Like the sunrise in the morning, life is dawning / Move on / How I treasure every minute, being part of, being in it / With the urge to move on”—lovely and inspiring lyrics in the midst of chaos and pain.
Other songs dabble in ambiguity, such as “The Day Before You Came,” in which the singer/persona reflects on her predictable life. “I must have lit my seventh cigarette at half past two / And at the time I never even noticed I was blue . . . It’s funny, but I had no sense of living without aim / The day before you came.” Someone has entered her life and shaken up her routine, presumably for the good—but the beat and backing vocals suggest something darker—menacing, even, at least to my ears. Then there are the songs I got wrong—so wrong—when I was young. I assumed “The Visitors” was about paranoia or fear of alien invasion—little green men at the door. I later learned it was protesting the oppression of Soviet dissidents. The record was banned in the Soviet Union.
***
A few years went by, and other groups and musicians superseded ABBA in my heart, especially the Who and David Bowie along with Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Cure, World Party, INXS, R.E.M., the Smiths, and so many more. I have since learned that revered rock stars were also under ABBA’s spell. Pete Townshend told Björn he thought “SOS” was the greatest pop song ever written. Apparently, John Lennon thought the same, and the Sex Pistols’ original bassist, Glen Matlock, admits he lifted a riff from “SOS” for “Pretty Vacant.” Sid Vicious was a fan and rushed over to Agnetha and Frida in an airport once. He was drunk. They were startled. Björn and Benny joined U2 on stage in Stockholm once for “Dancing Queen.”
My friends and I lived and breathed music. We went to Tracks at least once a week, scanning the chalkboard announcing new and upcoming releases, asking the clerks about music playing on the sound system that had caught our ear, and flipping through the imports bin. Remember the imports bin? Back at our houses, we played our albums—then our cassettes, then our CDs—for the rest of the day. We talked about bands, we made mix tapes for each other, and we plastered our bedrooms with posters and pictures carefully cut out of Rolling Stone and Creem. I never denied my love for ABBA—never betrayed them in that way—but I listened to their records only rarely during that time and then less and less until ABBA Gold brought it all roaring back. Released in 1992, it didn’t find its way to me until the early 2000s.
It’s telling, though, that as the years rolled by and I brought almost all my vinyl to various record stores for cash or trade, I never considered letting my ABBA albums go—and praise be, because I cherish them. Well done, younger self! When I reached for Super Trouper recently after so many years, I laughed at the battered condition of the cover. Inside, the sleeve had been handled so many times—the record slid in and out so many hundreds of times—all the seams had split, and I had mended it with carefully applied and folded Scotch tape. Upon inspection, I saw that all of my ABBA albums’ sleeves bear the same DIY repair.
Sometimes, listening to ‘70s and especially ‘80s music takes my breath away, I’m so overcome with nostalgia. I have never wished for a moment that I was back in grade school or high school, but I struggle with the crazy-fast passing of time. How can my husband, my siblings, my friends, and I possibly be in our 50s, with gray hair, arthritis, and cancer surgery scars, not to mention all the heartaches accrued over the years? How can my parents possibly be gone? Sometimes, I put photographs of them away because looking at them, and living without them, leaves me desolate. Then I feel guilty or silly and take the pictures back out and enjoy seeing their faces beaming out of the frames. Then I put them away again, and the cycle goes on.
It’s different with ABBA. Although their music instantly transports me to the comfort and security of my childhood bedroom, to my mother humming the songs while going about her day, I don’t feel sad or wistful. Quite the opposite. I feel calm and exuberant all at once. I feel at peace and deliriously happy listening to their music. ABBA was always with me—with us—even if I didn’t realize it. I’m overjoyed that I’m around for their reunion, ecstatic that I got to tear the shrink wrap from a new album and drop the needle once more—dancing, jiving, and having the time of my life.
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. She has published personal essays, poetry, and literary criticism in a variety of venues and has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She is an English professor at Georgetown College and past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
