ABBA blog

About this time a year ago, the printing of my book ABBA On Record – Packaged Promoted Reviewed had just begun. Exciting times! A year later, the book itself feels no less exciting to me.

There was so much I wanted to accomplish with ABBA On Record, one subject being to tell the background story of each of their single releases on the Polar Music label. You never know exactly what you're going to find as you start your research, but I was pleasantly surprised that there were so many stories attached to the singles, and that the choice of which track to release was often less than straightforward.

Take, for example, Knowing Me, Knowing You, pictured here. In hindsight it seems so obvious that this should be the third single from the Arrival album – following Dancing Queen and Money, Money, Money – but according to contemporary press reports and interviews, there were several other candidates: Tiger, When I Kissed The Teacher and My Love, My Life among them. More than anything else, perhaps, this just illustrates how chock-full of single candidates Arrival was.

Or take the conundrum of why Eagle was never released as the third single from ABBA – The Album in the UK and the US. All this happened such a long time ago that I wasn't able to arrive at a certain truth on this subject, but through carefully studying vintage documents and press reports, as well as interviewing record company people who were there at the time, in ABBA On Record I am at least able to come up with a few plausible theories.

There is also a section in the book about how ABBA would ask trusted people at certain record companies for their opinions on which tracks should be singles, and here I feel we finally get some proper insight on how this process would work. Finally, there is the subject of the single sleeves, which have their own story to tell, and, again, I was surprised that I was able to say so much about them: after all, design of the single sleeves was rarely a priority for Polar at the time. But just dig a little – or quite a bit, as was sometimes the case – and you will come up with so many interesting facts.

The above barely scratches the surface of all you will learn about ABBA's single releases in ABBA On Record. Not to mention everything else that's in the book: the album sleeve design stories; the Michael B. Tretow Tapes chapter; the making of the Voyage album; and much, much more.

Learn more and order your copy at abbaonrecord.com.