it's the most beautiful weird unexpected surprise ever and uh the fact that i'm getting a chance to talk to you and you're taking the you know the time to represent not just yourself but your friends and that's where i want to start i want to start with the friendship
because the music obviously is very important and it's why we fell in love with you all in the first place but it's very clear that you wouldn't be doing this unless this was about really experiencing the friendship side of your creative again isn't it it is that that's so true
we knew that we had these bonds obviously you know we would see each other every now and then but it was especially clear when we were in the studio for the first time for this album um together because that was so strange and wonderful at the same time uh that the the way
everything came rushing back like it was yesterday like this was you know very familiar normal situation we were in the four of us yeah okay we're recording like it was yesterday i've asked you know musicians to try to try to describe that for many many years and uh i've
almost given up on that question but i'm gonna give it one more shot because i don't think i could get a better description of what it feels like to feel that again than from someone like yourself after 40 years of not feeling it so so is there a way that you can
somehow find earthly words to describe what that moment was like when you came together well i mean i looked around and i i looked into agneta's eyes and frida's eyes and there was this the same kind of uh feeling the warmth and the friendship and the bonds uh between us that
as you suddenly realize no one on earth has experienced this kind of of relationship that we have sadly i mean people die and they they don't stay on friendly terms for their whole lives but we have and uh i'm so incredibly happy for that you know you've always spoken through
your music great artists do and it's only after time and and with the benefit of hindsight that we can as fans realize that a lot there was a lot more buried in the music than we thought when we were dancing to it and i i think about you know a song as
you come back with i still have faith in you and and i wanna i wanna try to expedite that time and figure out what's in that song and whether you can see and hear in that song messages that you might even be saying to each other without realizing it yeah
definitely uh when when benny sent me a demo of of that melody i knew uh it had to be about us but at the same time lots of people and in lots of situation will find that yeah this is about them too and because i i love to have hidden layers in the lyrics and um
and i i still have faith in you can be read in many different ways but i won't uh i want i mean you get what's face value um and that's about us but the others you'll have to think yourself you know but i think about both songs that we're hearing right now i still
have faith in you and don't shut me down these are anthems of of resistance and strength and the idea of moving past the challenges in one's life we will all be able to universally appreciate these songs for that reason but but how did it feel watching yourself and your friends conjure up no
doubt countless emotions that you've experienced in the last 40 years and for the first time as a as a team be able to draw upon those emotions and perform these songs exactly i mean that's exactly what we did we we didn't know what to expect when we
went into the studio we knew that oh it might just be that we're not you know we don't have it anymore and then realizing that we have something to give and something to say that was an incredible feeling um and both in both songs as you say that there is there is a lot of that
the happiness and joy of being able to come back like this and being proud of it we're as proud of this as as we were uh back in the 70s about those albums this is the follow-up of the visitors wow wow that is such a powerful statement i mean i love the way that you laid it out
in a humble way but to to follow the visitors with the with with voyage i mean even the way that those two titles string together in a timeline did you really think about this in terms of an addition to the legacy as opposed to a standalone reunion
for me personally it has become part of a legacy if you call it that it's 40 years apart but it's still very much you know the latest album uh if you know what i mean it's uh i don't see it as a standalone thing we we take all you know that wonderful
baggage that we have with us into this production as well you said something really poignant before no one has had this kind of experience um in the arts and the way that the abba has and the way that you are able to walk away live your lives build upon your success and build upon
your friendship i mean that just doesn't happen one of them normally goes the other way so as we now start to trace this reunion to some degree i'm going to go back a little bit and ask you for you personally when it went from being a subconscious planted idea that came from somewhere
into something that started to take shape the idea this might actually happen it was initiated by the idea of creating these digital selves these digital avatars that made us think about maybe we should give them something to sing that that we didn't
sing but they can sing and so that's how it started and and uh thinking if we this is a concert with the avatars and we thought if we'd gone on tour we'd have written two three four new songs and benny called freda i think i called angnetta and asked them if they uh wanted to
try and come into the studio again and see just to see what happens you know it was this was as light-hearted as that we wrote a couple of songs and we thought well great but uh we went into the studio just for fun just to see what happened and we were as astonished as everyone
else that out came the sound of abba as though nothing had happened i love having these songs in my life now but i but i can't help and maybe i'm just maybe i'm just too reflective i can't help but think about the songs that have been sitting there for 40 years waiting for the four
of you to touch them oh no but most of the songs have been used in musicals and benny has a band a dance band really and we've written a lot for that all in swedish but somehow we've never thought of ourselves as as pop musicians or pop writers
until maybe now but doing it our own way in our own weird way so there's nothing on this album that you'll hear that is speculative in the least yeah it's uh we decided early on never not even try to go there um listening to the hit records now and see what they sound
like like we used to i mean we had our ears to the ground all the time and seeing what what are the bee gees doing this time and rob stewart and what have you but but this time we just wrote and uh they're really good songs that's what they are they really are what i've heard
so far is the standard that you've set for yourselves and subsequently for others do you think so yes good good of course because you are the same human being searching for inspiration to share and you summed it up beautifully at the beginning of our chat when you said even
you were surprised at how naturally it fit being abba again it really sounds like abba yeah and it it just happened again that was the biggest kick of all i think when they started singing together and and there was that sound and uh you know
there is frida is a mezzo and she's one tone lower maybe than she used to be and uh is a true soprano also one tone lower but when one strives to reach up to the other which frida strives to get up there that's when that metallic typical upper sound comes
my last question at this point bjorn and it's been a pleasure to connect with you about this music and about your return so thank you for the chance hopefully we'll talk again but for now my last question being once the music was moving and you were connecting with your friends again and
being creative again did it change the way that you woke up and how you moved through the day and did you feel different than you had done in the last 40 years and did it surprise you yeah funny now that you mention it it's it's like yeah there was something missing
and i didn't know it but but it feels now as though this was the missing piece this was what was supposed to happen at this moment you know you rarely feel that but but i do feel that now i mean speaking to you now i feel yes wow so grateful we did this