Work on the group\u2019s 1981 album The Visitors had been tense and frosty. By now, the two couples \u2013 Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad and Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Falkskog were both divorced, and though no major announcement had been made, they had quit touring.<\/p>\n
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Early 1982 saw Benny and Bjorn start work with Tim Rice on a musical project that would eventually become Chess, Frida recorded a solo album with Phil Collins producing and Agnetha spent some time with her children.<\/p>\n
Initially, it seems that Benny and Bjorn thought they could work on the musical concurrently with Abba and, in Spring 1982, the band were back in their own Polar studios in Stockholm, recording a new album that at this stage was tentatively titled Opus 10 (though confusingly it would have been their ninth).<\/p>\n
But only three tracks came out of these sessions \u2013 You Owe Me One (which was eventually issued as the B-side of their final single Under Attack) I Am The City and Just Like That. The latter weren\u2019t issued until the 1990s.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven when everything is working great, you have these \u2018down\u2019 moments every now and again, so at first you don\u2019t take it as a sign that you\u2019re getting tired of the whole thing,\u201d Ulvaeus said later. \u201cIt\u2019s only after a while that you notice that every time you go into the studio, it gets harder and harder.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was clear that something wasn\u2019t clicking and a new studio album just wouldn\u2019t happen in 1982. So instead, the group agreed to another greatest hits package, but with the addition of two new tracks, to be released that autumn.<\/p>\n
The group returned to Polar studios in early August to record those new songs \u2013 Under Attack and Cassandra. But Bjorn and Benny were aware that neither constituted great comeback singles for the band and they required something stronger. They decided to do something that they\u2019d hardly ever done in the history of Abba and write something right then and there in the studio. Using a Yamaha<\/a> GX-1 synth and its built-in drum machine, Benny soon had the outline of a song, and within an hour, he and Bjorn had written the melody and given the track a working title: \u2018Den lidande f\u00e5geln\u2019 or \u2018the suffering bird\u2019.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Michael Tretow, the engineer who worked on nearly all of the group\u2019s records, recalled gating the sound of Benny\u2019s Yamaha and thus creating a sequencer effect, which let the beat of the snare drum determine at what moments the synths would be heard or not. It gave the track a mechanised, circular rhythm, which gave his partner an idea for a theme.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n Bjorn then went home and set to work on the lyric. He had an idea of an ordinary woman recounting the things she must have done on a day before her destiny suddenly changed. Talking to Abba biographer Carl Magnus Palm, Ulvaeus recalled that: \u201cI already knew that the melody was such \u2013 from a technical point \u2013 that the lyrics had to be constructed so that they would lead up to the \u2018day before you came\u2019 in the melody.<\/p>\n “Then, when I got the idea for a theme, I wrote down all the everyday incidents and things I could think of that would happen to someone leading a routine kind of life. It was very difficult from a grammatical point of view to get it all to fit together, because it would all have to be logical, there was no place for any hitches.\u201d<\/p>\n ABBA – The Day Before You Came (Video) – YouTube
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