And a little gesture to the queen of country, as far as I'm concerned: Tammy Wynette. And it illustrates in a way what we are doing in the ABBAtar concert in London, because we will have a live band but the original vocals.” Benny did a new backing track, so the band is new but the voices are old. There's been snippets on YouTube, but we thought it's a great song and it has very good vocals on it. “It's from '78 and it's never been released in its entirety before. It's a little flirt with the disco of the '70s, but other than that, I don't think that any of the old songs have had any impact on the new songs.” That's it at face value, but I see it as us, as ABBAtars, knocking on the doors of the fans: Please take us as we are now and don't shut us down.
And finally she gets the courage up to go and knock on the door. So she sits on a bench in a park and it gets dark. And she is going to come back and see if the guy will take her back. This is about a woman who has broken up and regrets breaking up. “At that time we were kind of getting the hang of what the ABBAtars would be.
And that would be great, because we want to own Christmas and New Year's Eve, like with 'Happy New Year'.” This could be played for Christmases to come. The stockings are hanging right there and then this couple wakes up. “Benny tells me he didn't think of it as a Christmas song, but I, the minute I heard it, I said it cannot be anything else. But somehow I'd come back to that little town and feel I have roots there.” I grew up in a small town and I left it when I was 20. And that's what I saw before me when I heard the melody: a village fair, but somewhere in Ireland. I lived in England for six years, between '84 and ’90, and I used to see these fairs that they had in the villages for the children. “It's a bit Nordic, but maybe more Scottish and Irish. Or haven't gone through-there's a lot left of it, as it seems-but there are more layers than that today in that lyric, but that I want the listener to find out by himself.” “When Benny played it to me, I thought, ‘This is really epic.’ It's about us and the bonds we have, about the loyalty we have to each other, and celebrating the fantastic career that we've gone through. Everyone should have an ABBAtar.” Take a chance on these stories behind the songs on Voyage from Ulvaeus himself. I bet you there are a lot of singers who will have these in a couple years. The rest of your body falls apart, but the cranium, they could take exact measurements, which they cannot with a video of Elvis. “The reason why it works is that we are still alive,” Ulvaeus says. While ABBA's legacy is long since assured, their ABBAtars could revolutionise the prospects for artists looking to secure career options beyond this mortal coil. “And then after a while we thought, why not record a couple more? And there was absolutely nobody breathing down our necks.” The result is Voyage-nine new songs and one resurrected from their original incarnation, fitting for a project that renders the very notion of the passage of time meaningless. “We asked the ladies and they were absolutely enthusiastic about going into the studio and trying their voices again,” Ulvaeus says. This unlikely occurrence started becoming more likely around 2018 when Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson wrote two songs, the cheekily self-referential “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down”, for possible inclusion in the show, and approached their former partners, singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. “I constantly have those moments when I think, ‘How the hell did this all happen? Why is it that suddenly on TikTok two million people are following what we are doing?’ It's weird.
But he’s actually referring to the fact that ABBA is releasing their first album of new music in 40 years, an event that bears little historical precedent. He could also mean their impending residency at a purpose-built arena in London in which all four members will perform as ABBAtars-painstakingly motion-captured renderings of their circa-1978 selves-with a live band, potentially until, or beyond, the collapse of civilisation. “Is there anybody?” He could be talking about the improbability of a Swedish pop group comprising two formerly married couples selling nearly 400 million albums worldwide and counting. “I don’t know of anybody who’s done it,” ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus tells Apple Music. It is the group's first album of new material in 40 years. Voyage is the ninth and final studio album by Swedish group ABBA, released on 5 November 2021.
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