BA: This is the control room, an old Neve console from the sixties so it's completely analogue
as opposed to now when everything is made digitally.
- The writing itself is more troublesome?
BA: That takes much much much much longer, you have to sit there and work and hear yourself play rubbish. It can sound like music but it doesn't become that until I feel, is captured by something. It can be four bars of something then you can say, at that stage, when you've gotten that far, yes, there is something good here. Then the so called inspiration set in.
- I saw somewhere that you during fifty years had composed x number of hours of music.
BA: Twenty hours?
- Half an hour of music per year.
BA: Yes, and I'm working every day. What it's about really is to be present and wait for something to happen. It's like there is a cave with a dragon in it that you sit and wait to see it. The thing is that if you go away, then it comes out and then you were not there. So it's all about sit and wait.
We did record an album last year ABBA Voyage and there are a couple of songs where I actually felt, yes yes, that's right, here it is, I Still Have Faith in You.
- When you wrote that, you feel it when you're sitting there that this is something?
BA: This is good, yes, and that one is a little older actually than our recording. A part of it is from a film called The Circle that we produced Ludvig Andersson and I.
- When you've worked with others, what was that like?
BA: Thankfully I've worked with others. I don't sing that well, I can't play guitar, drums or bass. It's one thing if you've got talent to write an OK song but that song must then be taken care of. There must be lyrics and two great singers. Björn wrote the lyrics, I am no good at writing lyrics unless it's for your birthday then I can come up with something.
- You're welcome to write something for my birthday! Musically, how did you and Björn work?
BA: We sat next to each other, he tried to follow on what I did. I don't understand how it works really but the piano is stronger than a guitar you know so I play and he must guess what the next chord will be and that he did that quite well actually. I wonder how it happened. You have an image of how a song will appear when you start recording it, often also wrong. We made several versions of Fernando, The Winner Takes It All and so on until we though now it's good, finally. And then everybody are involved, the whole band, they can come with, what if i play the bass like this, this riff. One is very responsive.
- It's teamwork?
BA: Yes, absolutely.
- You have communicated with so many people through your music. How does it fell when one hundred million people feel like they know you?
BA: It feels good in one way but they don't know me, they know the music and it's not only me. When you talk about one hundred million it's ABBA we're talking about. Then they know everybody in ABBA and like that. You can't quantify like that. You work, you come here, you write a song, lyrics, there are songs. Should we record them? We do the best we can. Then it's finished and the next time it's the same thing, the same procedure. So it's solid work but lustful.
- But I have thought about this, I've listened to the Goldberg Variations a couple of thousand times and the same thing about Tumbling Dice with The Rolling Stones. They never get old, they are always fresh! What makes a few compositions so timeless?
BA: I don't know but I believe it has to do with the sender and the receiver. The more honest you are with your intent, which you have to be when you work, like I do, with music that this is me, this is how I feel. If I don't feel it then you will not feel it either.
- You grow up with the image that making music is for the few that have it in them but it's really more about hard work than divine elements but they come as well.
BA: Yes, and they come because you work but I know if I don't give up, sooner or later something will turn up and then you can have that flow for surely two days maybe three. Isn't that a bit strange? You get this flow and where does it come from, I don't really know. I am not religious but now he's been sitting there for a month I'll send down a little something. Why does it happen when it happens? Why doesn't it come directly? I know what I'm looking for, why did it take three weeks to get there?
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