ABBA : the complete recording sessions - revised and expanded edition

In 1966 two young men from Sweden wrote and recorded a song entitled ‘Isn’t It Easy To Say’, marking the beginning of a songwriting partnership that has continued to this day. As the 1960s drifted into the 1970s, they started making recordings with two female singers (who later became their wives), a working relationship that would last until 1982. During that period the foursome recorded a collection of songs which heralded one of the most successful recording careers the world has ever known and claimed a unique place in the history of popular music. That quartet was of course Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, better known as ABBA, and this book is the story of those people and their recordings. Based on extensive research and countless hours of original interviews with all four members of ABBA, their engineer Michael B. Tretow and many of the musicians that played with the band, ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions recounts their story through the music they created together. Beginning with that very first mid-1960s recording session and tracing the formation of the group through their first tentative collaborations, Carl Magnus Palm takes us on a fascinating journey through ABBA’s sensational career. He recounts the full story behind such hits as ‘SOS’, ‘Dancing Queen’, and ‘The Name Of The Game’. He reveals the facts behind ABBA’s final years and such classics as ‘The Winner Takes It All’ and ‘The Day Before You Came’, as well as many lesser-known and unreleased tracks. This is the dream book for anyone interested in how ABBA managed to create a body of work that still reaches into hearts of music lovers everywhere. This revised and expanded edition of ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions comes 23 years after the book was first published. In the interim, the author has continued researching ABBA’s music, unearthing plenty of unknown or long-forgotten facts. More pertinently, he was authorised by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, and the group’s record company, Polar Music International, to listen to all available mix tapes of ABBA’s music still in the archives, something that wasn’t possible for technical reasons back in the mid-1990s. These tapes reveal many hitherto unknown facts about how ABBA’s music was created, and the process by which the group worked their way through their songs, trying out and discarding many ideas along the way. The author has also conducted many new interviews for this revised edition of ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions, talking to people who’ve never or rarely been interviewed about their work with ABBA, including more than a third of the children who sang on ‘I Have A Dream', the backing band and the engineers behind the Miami-recorded backing track for ‘Voulez-Vous’, the musician who was the last non-ABBA member to play on one of their recordings – and many more! Re-written from the ground up, this new edition of ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions is a completely new reading experience, with four times as much text as the original 1994 book.