Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus: The Songwriting Duo Behind ABBA

In May 2022, two Swedish men in their mid-seventies opened a custom-built arena in London's Olympic Park for a concert that had been five years and a reported nine-figure sum in the making. Neither of them walked on stage. Instead, digital avatars of their thirty-something selves, built from roughly five weeks of motion-capture filming and around 160 cameras, performed songs the two men had written half a century earlier, to an audience that had, in a lot of cases, not been born when the songs were new.

That's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus's ABBA Voyage, and it's as strange and specific a career milestone as any songwriter in this series has managed. It's also a genuinely useful data point about the two of them as writers: the songs turned out to be durable enough to outlast the idea of the two men who wrote them standing on a stage at all.

Two Swedish hit-makers become one songwriting factory

Andersson and Ulvaeus met in June 1966, each already a working professional in Sweden's pop scene, Andersson as keyboardist for the Hep Stars, Ulvaeus as a member of the folk-pop group the Hootenanny Singers. They quickly wrote their first song together, "Isn't It Easy to Say," recorded by the Hep Stars, encouraged by Stig Anderson, a music publisher and manager who ran Polar Music and who would remain a key third voice in their songwriting, and eventually a credited co-writer, for years afterward.

The personal side of the story ran alongside the professional one almost from the start. Ulvaeus met singer Agnetha Fältskog in 1968 and married her in 1971, with Andersson playing organ at the wedding. Andersson met singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad, known as Frida, in 1969, and the two were together for years before marrying in 1978. By 1972 the four of them had become ABBA, and Andersson and Ulvaeus settled into a writing method that stayed largely fixed for the next decade: retreating to a cottage on the small island of Viggsö in the Stockholm archipelago, near Stig Anderson's own place, where Andersson worked out melodies at the piano first and Ulvaeus, increasingly writing English-language lyrics himself rather than leaning on Anderson, built the words around what Andersson had found.

Winning Eurovision, then building a decade of hits out of one cottage

ABBA's international break came at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton on April 6, 1974, where "Waterloo" won for Sweden with 24 points, the country's first Eurovision victory and the moment the band stopped being a domestic act and became a genuinely global one. What followed was one of the most efficient hit-writing runs in pop history, nearly all of it worked out on that same island: "Mamma Mia," developed in the library of Ulvaeus's Stockholm home and initially almost left off as a single because the band wasn't sure about it; "Dancing Queen," built on a rhythm pattern inspired partly by George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby," which Andersson reportedly played for Frida at home before she'd even heard the finished vocal arrangement, and which she has called the best song ABBA ever made; "Knowing Me, Knowing You," written mostly by Ulvaeus while both marriages were still intact, despite its subject; and "Money, Money, Money," sung from the perspective of a woman fantasizing about escaping poverty through a rich man, written under the working title "Gypsy Girl." It's worth noticing how consistently the two of them worked: melody first, from Andersson, words built to fit it, from Ulvaeus, almost never the other way around.

Writing "The Winner Takes It All" out of their own marriages ending

By 1980, both marriages inside the band had ended, Ulvaeus and Fältskog's divorce made public in January 1979, Andersson and Lyngstad's not long after. "The Winner Takes It All," brought into Polar Studios that June under the working title "The Story of My Life" before being reworked into a slower, more stately arrangement, is the song most listeners assume is a direct account of the Ulvaeus-Fältskog split. Ulvaeus has pushed back on that reading for years, saying flatly that "there wasn't a winner or a loser in our case" and describing the lyric, which he's said he wrote quickly, fueled by whisky, as fiction rather than autobiography. Fältskog has told the story differently, calling it her favorite ABBA song and saying more directly that Ulvaeus wrote it about the two of them after their marriage broke down. Both things can be true at once, a lyric that isn't a literal transcript of what happened and a lyric that came directly out of what happened anyway. It's a genuinely useful distinction for any songwriter mining a real relationship for material: the writer and the person the song is nominally about don't have to agree on how autobiographical it actually is for the song to still be true.

Splitting up, then giving their songs away to build Chess and Mamma Mia!

ABBA wound down through 1982 without a single dramatic breakup moment, the two marriages already over and the band's members increasingly working on separate projects. Andersson and Ulvaeus's next major work was Chess, a concept album and later stage musical written with lyricist Tim Rice, who first pitched them the idea in Stockholm in December 1981; the album arrived in 1984. Years later, producer Judy Craymer, who'd met the pair during the Chess sessions, spent close to fifteen years convincing them to let her build a stage musical around ABBA's existing catalogue rather than write anything new. Mamma Mia! opened in London in 1999, became one of the most successful jukebox musicals ever staged, and led to a 2008 film adaptation that turned into one of the highest-grossing movie musicals of its era. It's a good reminder that a songwriting catalogue can have an entire second act built on it decades later, one that has nothing to do with the writers standing on a stage themselves.

Coming back forty years later, as avatars

Andersson floated the idea of a technology-driven ABBA return publicly as early as 2017, and the concept eventually became ABBA Voyage, developed with Industrial Light & Magic. During the years of preparation, the reunited band recorded new material together in the studio for the first time since 1982, which grew into Voyage, released in November 2021, ABBA's first new album in four decades. The avatar concert opened in London in May 2022 and has run to sold-out audiences since. Both men were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside their bandmates in 2010, and the band as a whole has collected honors across four countries and five decades of continuous cultural presence.

What's worth taking from their partnership

What holds Andersson and Ulvaeus's writing together across sixty years is a clean division of labor, melody from one, words from the other, that never asked either man to do the other's job, plus a willingness to keep testing what a finished ABBA song could actually carry: a Eurovision entry, a stage musical built from scratch, a jukebox musical built from nothing new at all, and eventually a digital avatar concert nobody had really attempted at that scale before. They wrote some of their most enduring songs directly out of their own marriages failing, without ever fully agreeing between themselves on how literally to read them, and thirty, forty, fifty years later the songs are still the thing doing the work, not the two men who wrote them. If you're looking for a co-writer to split the melody and the words with, the way Andersson and Ulvaeus did for six decades, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: ABBA, ABBA Official Site: The Winner Takes It All, ABBA Official Site: Waterloo, Wikipedia: ABBA, Wikipedia: Voyage (ABBA album), Britannica: Chess (musical), Wikipedia: Mamma Mia! (musical)