ABBA blog

Thoughts and observations on the Swedish foursome

How did the emotional content in Björn's lyrics for ABBA develop during the course of the group's 10-year career? The lyrics sentiment analysis in ABBA On Record will provide an answer.

ABBA On Record contents - 04 Lyrics sentiment analysis

published April 02, 2019

This is the fourth of six daily instalments, describing the contents of the upcoming book ABBA On Record - Packaged Promoted Reviewed. Day seven, Friday 5 April, is when pre-ordering starts.

In addition to the discography, which constitutes the main part of the book (detailed in Saturday's blog post), there will also be five further sections. This is the third of these appendices:

04 LYRICS SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

Back in 2015, when I had just started writing ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions, I was contacted by an ABBA fan who works in statistics and data analysis. He told me that thanks to a recent development in the software he was using, he had been able to analyse ABBA's lyrics and how they developed over time, from an emotional perspective and from various different angles. He showed me a graph, and it was absolutely fascinating.

The idea was to include the results of his analysis along with my essay about Björn's lyric writing in ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions, but it was one of several sections I had to abandon because of space restrictions. I am very happy to be able to feature it in the upcoming book. The fan, who wishes to remain anonymous for the time being, is doing more work on it, and I'm convinced this will be a valuable inclusion in ABBA On Record.

Note: The above content description is subject to minor changes and adjustments.

Stay tuned for the next instalment in the "ABBA On Record contents" story, to be published tomorrow.