Song of the Day-My Love My Life

As a teenager, I was an obnoxious, smart alecky (smart assed?) know-it-all, totally full of myself. As I got older I started to gain the wisdom to realize all of the things I did not know. Hopefully I have become more humble and more willing to admit error.

One of the things I was wrong about was ABBA. The invocation of their name back in the 70's caused me to mutter darkly and say things like, "yeah Dancing Queen was a hit, but most of that crap didn't catch on here." A couple of things turned me around in retrospect. A couple of their songs became hits and I really started to look forward to hearing them on the radio (notably "Take A Chance On Me" which I found unbelievably catchy and tuneful). The other influence was recording artists such as Berkley's Marshall Crenshaw who recorded a version of "Knowing Me Knowing You" and vouched for the quality of their catalog. Hmmm....ABBA can't be all bad if Marshall like's 'em.

So I abandoned my Rock n Roll prejudices, picked up some collections and gave them a listen. What I found was...well, they were alright. More than alright. Their singles are for the most part, "hooktastic" and stick in your heads like good Pop music does. Their albums can be a challenging listen in the way that sitting down to eat the giant cotton candy that the cotton candy dude at Comerica Park sells to my kids can be challenging. It can be sugary sweet and the English lyrics, weirdly accented in places because they were singing the songs phonetically, can be off-putting. But I think you can put their singles, and more than a smattering of album tracks up their with anything the decade or even, the century produced. It's pop music, but "State of the Art Top Notch Pop Music" and worthy of a listen.

Here ABBA performs a ballad from their 76 Arrival album, the one with "Dancing Queen," "Money, Money, Money" and the great "Knowing Me Knowing You." The song is "My Love My Life" and it is obscure but again, great melody, great production and a fantastic vocal by Agnetha Faltskog. You remember the big solo hit by one of ABBA's singer's "Something's Going On" produced by Phil Collins. Well, Agnetha was the other one, the one who did not have a big solo hit.

It's probably true that the ABBA stuff sounds best in the midst of a mix of other artists, because you don't overdose on what can tend to sugary sweetness. But, like a lump of sugar or a piece of hard candy, it can be a sweet treat indeed!