FEATURE:
When All Is (Almost) Said and Done
ABBA’s The Visitors at Forty
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A matter of weeks after ABBA…
put out their latest album, Voyage, we are about to mark the fortieth anniversary of the album that preceded it. The Visitors was the last album from ABBA - or that was what people assumed at the time. Released on 30th November, 1981, many would have guessed, after such a gap, that the Swedish icons were not going to come back with any more music. Going out on a real high, a lot of bands do not release such fantastic music when they are near the end. ABBA were, seemingly, in peak musical condition in 1981. There were tensions between Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. The couples were either divorced or finalising the process. Because of that, the music on The Visitors has a darker tone than previous ABBA work. With such emotional damage and strain within the ranks, it is amazing that The Visitors sounds so complete, worked-through and consistent. It is not like they went into the studio, recorded the songs very quickly and left it at that! Even with ABBA at the point of breaking, the production and performances are amazing. I wanted to source an article that looks into the album’s recording and the differences between The Visitors and the previous release, Super Trouper:
“On November 30, 1981, ABBA’s final studio LP, The Visitors, was released in Sweden. The album was the sound of a group coming to terms with their marital splits and the prospect of life after ABBA. In this feature we take a look at the making of the group’s most controversial piece of work.
On March 16, 1981, Björn, Benny and their four trusted backing musicians – Lasse Wellander, guitar, Rutger Gunnarsson, bass, Ola Brunkert, drums and Åke Sundqvist, percussion -– entered Polar Music Studios together with engineer Michael B. Tretow to start work on the first batch of backing tracks for ABBA’s eighth studio album. Only five months had elapsed since they completed work on their previous LP, Super Trouper, but ABBA was no longer the same group. Just four weeks before these initial recording sessions, Benny and Frida had announced their decision to go their separate ways, just like Agnetha and Björn had done in 1979. Thus, the group that had once consisted of two couples was now made up of four colleagues, sharing a sense of respect for the professional capacities of each member, but not socialising very much outside the recording studio.
Frida in the video for When All Is Said And Done. Although ABBA often wanted to avoid making their private feelings public in their music, at least in an overtly literal way, the past few years had seen a change in attitude in that respect. Two of the songs recorded during the initial sessions for the new album were certainly coloured by recent events within the group. ’When All Is Said And Done’ dealt expressly with the split between Benny and Frida, exploring the inevitability of their separation. Frida handled the lead vocals, and Björn, who wrote the lyrics, made sure that she felt okay with the subject matter. Frida assured him that she was only eager to get this chance to express her true feelings. ”All my sadness was captured in that song,” she later recalled.
But Björn didn’t stop at exploring the feelings of his fellow band members at this time, he also did some private soul-searching. The lyrics for ’Slipping Through My Fingers’, also recorded during the first sessions for the new album, pondered the conflicting feelings of parenthood. The direct inspiration was seeing his seven-year-old daughter Linda walk off to school one day. ”I thought, ’Now she has taken that step, she’s going away – what have I missed out on through all these years?’” No doubt, his feelings acquired another level of depth, considering the fact that Linda and her younger brother Christian no longer were living under one roof with both their parents. The lead vocalist on the song was, of course, Linda’s mother, Agnetha.
Kicking off the sessions with feelings of sorrow and regret certainly put its mark on much of the album. There were exceptions: the bizarre story of a man answering an ad in the personal column, placed by a girl and her mother, as depicted in ’Two For The Price Of One’, performed by Björn himself, was one. The other was ’Head Over Heels’, the story of a high-society lady dragging her exhausted husband to parties and in and out of boutiques, sung by Agnetha. Although it was eventually issued as a single, it was one of ABBA’s least successful seven-inch releases since their breakthrough, perhaps proving that the group were now only truly convincing when they explored darker territories.
One Of Us was the major hit single from The Visitors; here is Agnetha in the video.The album sleeve was photographed at the studio of artist Julius Kronberg. The first single off the album was the Agnetha-led ’One Of Us’ – ABBA’s final major worldwide hit – which dealt with a woman wishing that she could patch up a dead relationship, a divorce story that paralleled ’When All Is Said And Done’. Elsewhere on the album, darker subjects such as cold-war era threats of world destruction were explored in Agnetha’s ’Soldiers’, while the Frida-sung title track, ’The Visitors’, dealt with the fate of dissidents in the Soviet Union of the time. The closing selection, ’Like An Angel Passing Through My Room’, was a woman’s solitary musings, featuring only Frida’s voice accompanied by a very bare synthesizer arrangement. Bleak, indeed.
Sessions concluded with a mixing session for ’Soldiers’ on November 14, but by then the concept for the album had already been created. As usual, ABBA’s trusted sleeve designer, Rune Söderqvist, was the man behind the artwork. After giving the matter some thought, Rune came up with an ”angel” concept. The ”visitors” of the album title might very well be angels, he thought, and besides, the album included a track entitled ’Like An Angel Passing Through My Room’. The next step was to develop that concept into an idea for the album cover. ”I knew that the painter Julius Kronberg had painted a lot of angels in his time,” Rune recalled, ”so I located his studio – at the Skansen park [in Stockholm] – which contained several of his paintings.”
The album sleeve was photographed at the studio of artist Julius Kronberg.Together with photographer Lasse Larsson – who also shot the Super Trouper album cover –Rune Söderqvist assembled the group in the cold, unheated studio, and arranged a picture of them with a giant painting of an angel as backdrop. For the first time on an album cover, the members were depicted as separate individuals rather than a close-knit group. The physically chilly environment and the general sense of fatigue at being ABBA no doubt contributed to the mood at the photo session. ”We might not go on working with this forever,” Björn remarked at the time. ”We’ve emptied ourselves of everything we’ve got to give.” Indeed, the following year the group released only two further singles of newly recorded music before going their separate ways.
For Björn and Benny it was no longer creatively challenging to go on working within the ABBA concept. One track on The Visitors underlined their ambitions for the future: ’I Let The Music Speak’, with vocals by Frida, was structured very much like a theatrical number. Björn and Benny had long been thinking about writing a full-length musical, and during 1981 those thoughts were closer to being realised than ever before. The Visitors was released on November 30, 1981 and just two weeks later, Andersson and Ulvaeus had a meeting in Stockholm with lyricist Tim Rice – famous for his work with Andrew Lloyd Webber – discussing a potential collaboration. These initial talks eventually resulted in the musical Chess. ”If ABBA hadn’t recorded ’I Let The Music Speak’, I guess we would have used it in Chess,” Björn reflected later”.
When some bands change directions and release music that has a very different sound and feel, critics can go off them or hark back to the older days. The Visitors reached the number one spot in Sweden and the U.K. It also performed really well across Europe (hitting the top spot, among other nations, Belgium and Germany). This is what AllMusic observed in their retrospective review;
“ABBA's final album was recorded during a period of major personal shakeups, principally in the decision by Benny Andersson and Frida to follow the same route to divorce that had already been taken by Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog. Both male members of the group would soon remarry, but at the time, despite all of these changes in their circumstances, The Visitors was never intended as ABBA's swan song -- they were to go on recording together. That may explain why, rather than a threadbare, thrown-together feel, The Visitors is a beautifully made, very sophisticated album, filled with serious but never downbeat songs, all beautifully sung and showing off some of the bold songwriting efforts. The title track is a topical song about Soviet dissidents that also manages to be very catchy, while "I Let the Music Speak" sounds like a Broadway number (and a very good one, at that) in search of a musical to be part of, and "When All Is Said and Done" is a serious, achingly beautiful ballad with a lot to say about their personal situations -- even "Two for the Price of One," a lighthearted song sung by Björn Ulvaeus about answering a personal advertisement, offered several catchy hooks and beautiful backup singing. "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room" ended the original album on a hauntingly ethereal note, but not as any kind of larger statement about the quartet's fate. The intention was to keep working together, but Andersson and Ulvaeus' growing involvement with their stage project, Chess, prevented any further work together by the group beyond three songs, "The Day Before You Came," "Cassandra," and "Under Attack" -- they're all present as bonus tracks on the 2001 remastered edition (in gatefold packaging), along with the orphaned B-side "Should I Laugh or Cry" from the same sessions as The Visitors, and only add to the appeal of the original album”.
Prior to wind things up, there is a Pitchfork review that I wanted to put in. I cannot find a bad review for The Visitors! It is an album that so many people have connected with:
“ABBA's music on The Visitors is more pristine and ambitious than it had ever been, its themes darker, its personal politics more tangled. Both of the band's couples had divorced, but the men were still writing lyrics for the women to sing-- meaning it's easy to see a cruel edge in tracks like "One of Us", in which a woman regrets her new independence over a typically gorgeous melody. All of this has made The Visitors a perennial critic's favorite. It's the record on which the wintry melancholy of "late ABBA"-- whose sadness had bubbled under their music almost from the start-- could finally dominate.
But things are never quite so simple. The original nine tracks that make up The Visitors are no less uneven than any ABBA full-length; in fact, the weakest songs are a snapshot of their foibles as a group. They had a long dalliance with musical theatre-- the pomp-pop fantasia "I Let the Music Speak" is their last and most bloated attempt. "Two for the Price of One"-- a hokey story of a failed threesome-- calls back to their earliest, goofiest records. "Slipping Through My Fingers", about the impotence of watching your kids grow up, is a great example of how the group had come to pitch records at adults, but in execution it's pure schmaltz.
The highs, though, are astonishing. The title track is a snapshot of life in a totalitarian state, full of justified paranoia and exhausted fatalism: "I hear the doorbell ring" it begins matter-of-factly "and suddenly the panic takes me." The music lurches between seasick synth-pop and nervous disco flourishes, with Frida Lyngstad's raga-infuenced vocals rolling uneasily on top. It's five years and a musical lifetime since this band sung "Dum Dum Diddle", but for all its distance from ABBA's traditional sound, "The Visitors" never gives up on catchiness. This is grown-up, risk-taking pop, but always pop nonetheless”.
Forty years after the release of The Visitors, we still do not know whether ABBA will record any further music, or whether they have ended things with Voyage. I guess many people felt that back in 1981. It goes to show, when it comes to the Swedish band, you can never predict…
WHAT they will do next.