Tragic Details About ABBA

There's innate and upbeat happiness to ABBA's music... isn't there? No, says Bjorn Ulvaeus. He told The Guardian in 2014 that happiness was purely the result of the voices of Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog. "The music of ABBA is not happy," he said. "It might sound happy, in some strange way, but deep within it's not happy music. It has that Nordic, melancholic feeling to it. ... I do think that is one of the secrets about ABBA. Even when we were really quite sad, we always sounded jubilant."

Some of ABBA's biggest hits came out of their most heartbreaking tragedies. Ulvaeus and Lyngstad gave some examples: If "The Winner Takes It All" was the story of the one divorce, "When All is Said and Done" was the story of the second — and yes, they confirmed it was written about Lyngstad and Benny Andersson's split, and no, it wasn't easy to sing. "It was not always easy to continue recording," Lyngstad admitted in the interview.

Ulvaeus went on to say that some of the best songs he and Andersson wrote for ABBA came out of their darkest times. He says that after the couples split, he was haunted by the realization that at the end of the day, they were alone with their own thoughts, and alone in dealing with what they were feeling. And tragedy? That's feeling alone, even when you're surrounded by people.

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