The Day Before You Came

After 1981's The Visitors, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson took some time off to write new material, yet at the same time, they were beginning to create their first musical, Chess, alongside Tim Rice. Meanwhile, Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad slowly began their English-language solo careers. Fältskog recorded with the ABBA backing vocalist Tomas Ledin the song "Never Again" (a hit in Europe) and played a leading role in the Swedish film Raskenstam, while Lyngstad worked with Phil Collins to produce her solo album Something's Going On.

The group returned to Polar Studios in May–August 1982 to record new songs for a planned follow up album to The Visitors. "The Day Before You Came" was one of six new songs that were recorded, with only two of them being released as singles and two as the B-sides. One of the other songs recorded, "I Am the City", would not see international release until 1993's More ABBA Gold CD, while another, "Just Like That", has never been released in its entirety (partially released in 1994).

I really like that song. It becomes extremely sad when you hear it like this. The recording is sad too, but the lyric itself is not sad, which is the genius of Bjorn (Ulvaeus). To me, when you read that lyric and take the music away it’s just someone saying what they did that day — 'I read a book', 'I watched TV', 'I took the tube', whatever; it doesn’t say what it really is. But when you put that lyric onto that music you realise something not good has happened. It’s a very intelligent lyric.

— Benny Andersson, Interview with News.com[1]

Ulvaeus wrote the lyrics, which to some degree are influenced by his divorce from Fältskog. He later said: "Even if 90% of the lyrics were fiction there are still feelings in songs like 'Winner Takes It All' and 'Day Before You Came' they have something from that time in them."[2]

"The Day Before You Came" was digitally recorded and mixed on 20 August 1982, with the working title of "Den Lidande Fågeln" (The Suffering Bird). The song was also briefly known as "Wind".[3] Apart from Fältskog's lead vocal and a vocal line of Lyngstad mixed with the instrumental, the only instruments featured on the song were Andersson's synthesizer and drum machine, Ulvaeus' acoustic guitar and a snare drum by Åke Sundqvist.

Many years after the song was recorded, Michael Tretow, ABBA's longtime sound engineer, recalled Agnetha performing the lead with dimmed lights and said that the mood had become sad and everybody in the studio knew that 'this was the end'. On this rumour, Stephen Emms of The Guardian continues the story by saying "finishing her vocals, our heroine was to remove her headphones and walk solemnly out into the daylight, never to return".[4]

Ulvaeus commented that "you can tell in that song that we were straining towards musical theatre as we [he and Benny] got Agnetha to act the part of the person in that song", as opposed to singing it objectively.[2] She was "happy to do [this interpretation]". Though not seen as much as a negative in modern times, a "downside" of this creative choice meant Agnetha sang like an "ordinary woman" rather than a lead vocalist. The three ABBA members involved in this decision have all retrospectively wondered if "the dramatic scope [would] have been far greater had Agnetha's natural instincts been allowed to take hold".[5] This is often cited as the reason Agnetha's vocals reveal much more of her Swedish accent than usual, as she is essentially talk-singing the lyrics. In his work ABBA & Me, Robert Verbeek makes special mention of "the way [Agnetha] pronounces the L in the word 'school' in the line 'A matter of routine, I've done it ever since I finished school'" in the song, despite later on saying the band "sang without any accent", implying that this was a unique case.[6] Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg noted in a newspaper piece 20 years later that the vocal is "sung by a dimmed and turned off...Agnetha Fältskog".[7]

"The Day Before You Came" was released in October 1982, as both the first new song from ABBA's double compilation album The Singles: The First Ten Years, and also as a single.[8] The single was officially released on 18 October 1982 with another new song, "Cassandra", as the B-side. By this time, ABBA were experiencing a slow decline in UK single sales. Accordingly, the single peaked at no. 32. In 1984 a cover by British synthpop duo Blancmange charted higher than the ABBA recording, reaching no. 22 on the UK charts.[9] ABBA's recording, however, hit the top 5 in Belgium, Finland, West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. It also reached no. 5 on the Adult Contemporary chart in Canada. Along with "Under Attack", before being featured on the album, the song had appeared in the United States only as a non-LP B-side.[10] The song did not chart in that country.

Take40 comments that "although the single … was one of the group’s most accomplished recordings it failed to become a worldwide hit on the scale that they had been used to".[11] The song was only a minor hit (for example only charting #32 in the UK, breaking "a string of 19 consecutive top 30 hits" which started in 1975 with "S.O.S."[12]), something that Ulvaeus retrospectively puts down to the song being "too different and ahead of its time for the ABBA fans [or] too much of a change for a lot of ABBA fans." He also commented that "the energy [in their music] had gone".[2] Bjorn said that with the song, they were "heading into something more mature, more mysterious and more exciting", but that at that time it was "one step too far for [their] audience". He said that although Tim Rice really liked the song, he had warned them that it was "beyond what [the ABBA] fans expected".[13] However, the Sydney Morning Herald article "Happily ABBA after" suggests this may be because ABBA only "promoted it in Britain with a couple of glum TV appearances".[14] Christopher Patrick, in his work ABBA: Let The Music Speak, argues that although ABBA's final moments had come by the time this song was released, "no-one was empowered to concede it", but also said that the "lukewarm" response toward the song by the public "had already made the decision for [the band over whether to stay together or split up]".[5]

Benny said that in his opinion, "'The Day Before You Came' is the best lyric that Bjorn has written: it's a really good song, but not a good recording". He compared this to "Under Attack", recorded around the same time, which he described as "a wonderful recording, but not such a good song".[13] While reminiscing on the track at an interview for Mamma Mia! the musical, Björn said, "we thought it was a great song", but added that they also thought it would not work as it was so far removed from their previous material. Frida said that there were "problems over how Agnetha would interpret it". ABBA attempted many different ways of singing the song, eventually settling on a "haunted" style. In the version that got released, Agnetha sang as if she was hurt and vulnerable, rather than belting it out (which Bjorn implies she did in other takes). Frida said the song was "a very different sound to what we had done before", and Björn added that they were "taking a chance". Frida said it was a "beautiful song". In response to the interviewer commenting on their looking unhappy in the video clip, Frida said, "it was an unhappy time of our lives [as we were] on the verge of splitting up" and had started talking about the individual projects of each member. She adds that it was not an easy situation, arguably justifying the gloomy atmosphere as a parallel of their real lives as a part of ABBA.[15]

Christopher Patrick, in his work ABBA: Let The Music Speak, describes the song as "more unusual and atmospheric" than "Under Attack". He says that these last two ABBA singles (excluding "Thank You for the Music", which was first released in 1977) "are crystal balls that provide a glimpse as to the intriguing future direction in which Benny and Björn were starting to take the group sound". Acoustic instruments had been slowly replaced by a more synth-sound ever since Super Trouper, and by this time, ABBA's final output would have "s[a]t very comfortably on either of the two albums Benny and Bjorn … produced for Swedish duo Gemini in the mid-'80s", as they are also "quite minimalist in arrangements and orchestration", and synth-orientated.[16] He says that Agnetha's "lament", whether the boys' "stylistic directive" is taken into account, is made "heart-rendering". He argues this is the case as beyond ABBA she, like the narrator in the song, lived an "ordinary … life", far removed from celebrity and fame.[5]

On reissues of The Visitors on CD, "The Day Before You Came" has been added as the 11th track, and the 2nd bonus track after "Should I Laugh Or Cry". The song is also featured as track 3 on the 1993 compilation More ABBA Gold – More ABBA Hits, track 14 of disc 3 in the 1994 compilation Thank You for the Music, track 11 of disc 2 in the 1999 compilation The Complete Singles Collection, track 13 of disc 2 in the 2001 compilation The Definite Collection (also featured on the DVD release), and the 4th bonus track on The Visitors album in the 2005 compilation The Complete Studio Recordings (on which the music video is also featured).[17] The song is also featured on The Visitors [Deluxe Edition].

The lyrics chronicle an ordinary half-remembered day in the life of the protagonist, "before it is changed forever: By what, we never learn."[24] The identity of the titular "You" was long regarded as a "pop mystery" like the "identity of the subject of Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'". After being asked by The Times about this on 26 March 2010, Ulvaeus "smiled enigmatically" and said: "You've spotted it, haven't you? The music is hinting at it".[2][25] Subsequently, in 2012 Ulvaeus elaborated, "The tune is narrative in itself, and relentless. That almost monotonous quality made me think of this girl who was living in a sort of gloominess and is now back in that same sense of gloom. He has left her, and her life has returned to how it 'must have been' before she met him".[26]

Others have described it as "the ordinary life of a woman the day before the arrival of her lover";[4][27] about "the wonder of falling in love by flatly documenting how banal life was before love struck";[28] as an illustration of a common ABBA theme, in which "the unremarkable woman [is] given purpose by a remarkable man...most often...through romance";[29] and as the "account of one ordinary woman's mundane and predictable daily existence", made sobering as it becomes evident that she doesn't have the lover she yearns for.[5] 80s45s says that the "clockwork rhythm [of the] melancholic synthesizers and multi-tracked backing vocals" emulates the "relentless, yet comforting [sound] of the commuter train [as seen in the video clip]", and that the song is in fact about "the alienation of modern life". He says the narrator lives in "quiet desperation", something many can relate to, and recounts the tedium of her day-to-day life "as if to convince herself of her purpose in existing". He argues that "the song is about the day when her self-sufficiency ceases to sustain her [and when] succumbing to the pressure of loneliness, she trades her solitary stability...for love...[a] flimsy...defense against the emptiness of existence". 80s45s interprets the "powerful sense of finality [and the] baleful triumph [as the music swells in the outro]" as her being "resigned to the impossibility of returning to former comforts having once left them".[27]

Prior to Ulvaeus's 2012 comments, some interpretations of the song presumed a more sinister narrative. The song's narrative has been described as "about loss: an utterly ordinary lifestyle which turns out to be something worth mourning,"[30] epitomising a central Abba theme, which is that "life is trivial and nothing happens, but the somethings that might happen are worse."[24] The song, argued one article, conveys a sense that "there is something wrong", in that "instead of being a happy song about complete solitude", the song is driven forward "by an overwhelming sadness". It draws the conclusion that "when [the narrator] met the man [her life] became even worse", for unspecified reasons that might include "fear, confinement, [or] beatings".[7] A resemblance has been noted to the 1960s song "Past, Present And Future" by The Shangri-Las, which has references to sexual abuse.[30] Some writers have even suggested the song's "spectral choirs", the "keening backing vocals of...dread" suggest the "You" referred to by the narrator could be "a murderer as much as a lover."[24][31][32]

Stephen Emms for The Guardian argues that the "ordinariness [and] universality [of the] first-person account" of a depressing day is what draws the audience in, and "morphs [the song] into an unusually poignant parable of what modern life means". He points out that beyond the supposed simplicity, the lyrics are "oddly imprecise...in a vague recollective tone", and adds that the fact sentences include phrases such as "I must have...", "I'm pretty sure...", or "...or something in that style" implies that Agnetha is an "unreliable narrator" and give the entire song a veil of ambiguity. He says that sentences such as "at the time I never noticed I was blue" gives "her account a tinge of unreality, even fiction". Sometimes she may state something about her day (such as "I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame"), and we as the audience fear that in reality the opposite may be true.[4]

Tom Ewing of Pitchfork refers to the lyrics as "awkward" and "conversational". He says that as non-native speakers, they rarely used metaphors or poetic imagery, and instead relied on a "matter-of-fact reportage of feeling", resulting in a "slight stiltedness" which, he argues "is what makes ABBA great lyricists". He says that this style of lyric writing, coupled with the female leads' "occasional...halting pronunciation... could make them sound devastatingly direct and vulnerable", as shown in The Day Before You Came.[24][33]

Tony Hawks, in his work One Hit Wonderland, cites The Day Before You Came when commenting that despite the ABBA lyricists' genius, "there were occasions when [Benny and Bjorn] clearly had difficulty coming up with lines which provided the requisite number of syllables to complete a line", thereby causing the girls to sing things that no native English speaker would ever actually say. His "favourite line" due to its bizarreness is "there's not I think a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see", and responds with the equally bizarre sentence "...there's not I think a single example of better lyrics that I didn't see". He refers to these "nonsense lyric[s]" as gems, and argues "what does it matter when as long as it's got a catchy tune". He adds, via a dialogue with a character named Willie, that "[Euro-dance artists] just sing about whatever they want and don't worry in the slightest if it makes any sense or not".[34]

An oddity in the song is the timeframe used for the given events. The narrator constantly refers to punctuality of transport and her routine train-catching, yet there seems a clear error. She leaves the house at 8 and arrives at work at 9:15 (a train ride of about an hour), yet she leaves work at 5 and arrives home at 8 (a travel time of 3 hours). She did of course stop on the way home to buy some Chinese food to go, which would have taken some time. This implies that there is a part of her story which we are not being told.

80s45s says that "there seem to be too many words in some of the lines, as if the singer [an ordinary woman] is chattering to fill the silence", and adds that "there is something touching about her determination to record the events, despite her uncertainty about the specific details in the endless procession of days". He describes the lyrics as "a series of vague vignettes" about her life. He argues that "this monotonous list and slightly nervous delivery" is juxtaposed with the "ominous drama of the music".[27]

Priya Elan of NME says "a deeper probe [into the lyrics] suggests something a bit darker at the core" than just a woman reflecting on her life before meeting her lover. He comments that the song's working title, The Suffering Bird, may be "hinting at a prison-like fragility". He also comments on the "disorientating ambiguity" of the lyrics, reminiscent of a "zombie sleepwalking through their life", and also notes the line "I need a lot of sleep", which suggests the narrator is suffering from depression.[32]

Margaret-Mary Lieb, as part of the 13th Annual KOTESOL International Conference, suggested that a variety of "grammar lessons...can be based on popular songs", and states that The Day Before You Came "offers reinforcement of past modals".[35]

There are some pop-culture references in the song, which are open to interpretation. For example, the narrator refers to never missing an episode of the TV show Dallas, very popular at that time due to the 1980 murder-themed storyline Who shot J.R.?. She also recalls reading something by Marilyn French, or within the same genre. French was an American feminist author (1929–2009), "whose 1977 novel The Women's Room is cited as one of the most influential novels of the modern feminist movement".[2] Priya Elan of NME notes that French was "a radical feminist author who was infamously misquoted as saying: all men are rapists'".[32] The "latest [novel] by Marilyn French", by the time the song was written, was the 1980 work The Bleeding Heart, which involves a couple who meet on the train, and "fall instantly in love, only to discover they agree on nothing...from the start [knowing] they have only one year together". This plot has been cited as having similarities to the song's narrative.[36] In the version used in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again sung by Meryl Streep, the reference to Dallas is replaced with House of Cards, another popular TV show; and instead talks about reading a Margaret Atwood novel, both references to modernize the song.

The song follows in the footsteps of The Winner Takes it All as another ABBA song that had no "clearly defined verse/chorus structure". The song is deceptively complicated, perhaps due to its length, and is actually one of their simplest tunes melodically. Underneath the "rich tapestry" of the three-verse song is a "close-knit series of three-note building blocks", the last block in each statement being repeated at the start of the following one. For example, "I must have left my house/at eight because I always do" has the musical pattern 1-7-6/2-1-7 while the following phrase, "My train, I'm certain left/the station just when it was due" has a musical pattern of 2-1-7/3-2-1. These "descending three-note patterns" go up a note each time a new statement is sung. For example, as the verse is sung, the pattern could go from do-ti-la to re-do-ti to mi-re-do etc., with each new phrase. Starting with a "minor anchor power-of-three" (mi-re-do), this pattern "remains intact" during the entire song, with the tune "weaving its soulful way through the hues of its relative keys C minor and E flat major, and their collaborators". After the first two statements, the minor key swaps to the relative major, where it remains until the final few statements, just in time for the title hook. The only time the descending pattern is broken is in the eighth statement of each verse ("The usual place, the usual bunch" in the first verse – 6-5-4/5-6-5 went to 4-3-2).[37]

In his work Thank you for the music, Robert Davidson discusses the notion of "young pop stars" commenting on the "musical sophistication" of ABBA songs (which, he argues, would in turn have seemed simple to earlier artists), and the general trend of simpler music in recent times. He says that ABBA itself took part in this trend with its final output, and cites The Day Before You Came as one "in which texture takes primacy [over the] tunes".[38]

In 2010, "The Day Before You Came" was positively reviewed by Stephen Emms for The Guardian. Emms opined that the song is a "forgotten masterpiece", and that the mixture of "the genuine sense of loss in Agnetha's voice, Frida's operatics, a moodily expressionist video and plaintive synths as omnipresent as the rain 'rattling' on the roof . . . carries a sense of foreboding almost unparalleled in pop music." Emms continued to state that "the track's power lies in its layering of boredom and grandeur, transience and doom. It combines a rising sense of melancholy, both in its melody and production, with wistful, nostalgic lyrics." Emms also interpreted that the pathos is "heightened by an extended funereal instrumental coda which acts as one big question mark, leaving us with the feeling that this is not just a meditation on the quotidian but something greater, existential even. Is this imagined relationship, like the band itself, doomed?" He argues in his review that, in his opinion, it is unlikely that the "complexity [in The Day Before You Came could be replicated in] ABBA's [then] rumoured comeback single"[4]

Virdborg describes it as ABBA's "darkest song" and their "very last--and best--recording". It noted that the "happy and well-behaved Abba in [its] last creative moment managed to portray how the romantic dream--which so incredibly strongly permeates our entire culture, especially through advertising--might as well mean destructiveness and suffocating nightmare, that was the last thing many expected [ABBA to do] a few years earlier".[7]

One Week II One Band said "There is something about this long, strange, monotonous, chorus-free ABBA song which gets to people."[30]

The song has been described as: "mesmerising [and] hypnotic",[39] "[a] beautiful ballad",[10] "[a] stark, superb swansong",[40] and "[the] strangest and maybe best of all [from ABBA's catalogue]".[24] 80s45s describes the song as "poignant and quite profound" and says the "bleak lyrics about love and desire" in songs such as The Day Before You Came is surprising, due to ABBA often being "associated with Eurovision cheesiness and sequined kitsch".[27] Evening Standard music critic John Aizlewood referred to the "detailed résumé of the ordinariness of someone's life" as "desperately unhappy".[41]

In a critique of the 2012 album The Visitors [Deluxe Edition], in which The Day Before You Came is a bonus track, Tom Ewing of Pitchfork describes the song as the "career highlight" for ABBA. He says that the song "shares its themes with much of the album", despite being "on paper, a happier song" than the title track. He suggests that the song holds the view that "life is unstable, happiness may be fleeting, and your world can be instantly and forever overturned", and comments that these "strong, resonant ideas" are the perfect way for the band to have ended their career, and serves as an almost "spectral, uneasy premonition . . . of [ABBA's] own demise".[31] Rudolf Ondrich analysed the bonus track by saying "The Day Before You Came is by far the saddest song I know within the pop repertoire", and puts this down to it being one of the last ABBA recordings, commenting that "the late output of many artists" is wonderful as "they realize that they cannot create music forever, that their time is nearly up, and so they go into emotional hyperdrive", causing them to create music that "touches [him] in ways [he] cannot describe", this song being no exception.[42]

Norman Lebrecht of Bloomberg suggests that The Day Before You Came, along with I Am Just a Girl and The Winner Takes It All, are "commercially formulaic as anything cooked up in a dark studio since the dawn of pop charts", and are delivered with a "one musical line bent crescent-shaped in ironic detachment" as opposed to the "belting frenzy of pop style" of some of their other songs.[43]

After contemplating on the "complete choir" that is created just by ABBA's voices, Robert Verbeek in his work ABBA & Me says that "even when they are each other’s backing vocals they sound terrific", and ponders on what "The Day Before You Came [would] be without Frida’s background opera-like singing". He describes the song, along with The Winner Takes It All, Eagle, and I'm A Marionette, as "musical masterpieces", which show ABBA's extraordinary growth from its humble origins in simple pop songs like Nina, Pretty Ballerina and Ring Ring.[6]

In his work ABBA: Let The Music Speak, Christopher Patrick refers to The Day Before You Came as "ABBA's swansong" and an "electronic masterpiece". He describes it as "one of the saddest ABBA songs of all" and "like a magnificent piece of embroidery". He states that "the melancholy is so deeply engrained in [the song's] fabric", and says the "meticulous attention to detail in the vocals and production" is "intricately beautiful". He comments that the approach, involving giving Agnetha lead vocal and make Frida essentially a backup singer, "serves the song very well", adding that "Agnetha's solitary vocal accentuates th[e] sense of loneliness and isolation". He says that "the resulting performance" is both emotional and effective, and "is perfectly matched to the production". He says that into the "dying fade", there is a "faint haze of farewell"[5]

In her paper The Return of Melodrama, Maaike Meijer explains that critic Guus Middag analysed The Day Before You Came within the context of examining how "unsophisticated texts [such as popular songs] were able to evoke [immediate emotion] in the reader". He appreciated how the song "creates an open space for the listener by effectively remaining silent about what had changed the grey life of the speaker", and cited a similar effect in Wisława Szymborska’s poem May 16, 1973.[44] Although Middag claims the poem achieved it much better, Meijer says there still is some worth in comparing the song and the poem. She also comments on novelist Marcel Möring's reading of The Day Before You Came "as a serious poem", thereby "demonstrat[ing] how a song could be transformed into a complex, multi-layered and interesting text, thanks to an interpretative approach, which looks for these aspects". Möring saw the song as "small labyrinths of language, refined aquarelle paintings, complex clockworks of Swiss precision", which Meijer says is an analysis fitting of a "poem deserving careful reading". She adds that "Möring’s sophisticated modernist poetics transports the song to the realm of hermetic poetry". Möring also "compared the Abba song to the classics by Strauss, Mahler and Ives", and in response critic Pieter Steinz, while "declar[ing] the song to be a good one", also "questioned the necessity of Möring's complex academic hermeneutics".[45]

In a "The Greatest Pop Songs in History" countdown conducted by NME, the song came in at #6. Priya Elan commented that the song was "arguably [ABBA's] finest". He says the song is "interesting" as it "totally breaks with the popular impression of the band as all showbiz smiles, massive harmonies, gaudy outfits...". In a career largely based in trying to stuff as much into one song as possible – a "more is better" philosophy – Elan noted that it is unusual for the "track [to] scuttle...along like a slow heartbreak, sparsely painting its picture with the sole palette of a synth and Agnetha’s lone vocal". However he also implied that the song is deceptively simple, and that "there are layers of sonics beneath the smooth surface". He says that ABBA's "mastery of this Cold Wave keyboard sound" could have seen the band "seamlessly ma[k]e the transition into the [1980s]", using The Day Before You Came as a template for the new sound. He concludes the analysis with: "the song is the ultimate tease, a door left ajar, a murder mystery with its final page torn out...which arguably makes it all the more wonderful".[32]

On 5 December 2010 on British TV for ITV1 a poll was made where fans could vote for "The Nation's Favourite ABBA song". Despite its poor chart position of No. 32 in the UK back in 1982, "The Day Before You Came" was voted the third favourite ABBA song.[46][47]

The site Icethesite ran a competition for what songs should be featured on a hypothetical Benny Andersson solo instrumental album, in which he revisits past recordings with his piano. While over 125 different songs were suggested, The Day Before You Came came out on top with 14 votes.[48]

7"

1. The Day Before You Came 4:20
2. All Things Are Nice (Version) 4:16

12"

1. The Day Before You Came (Extended Version) 7:58
2. Feel Me (Live Version) 6:24
3. All Things Are Nice (Version) 4:12