"The Day Before You Came" is a song recorded by Swedish pop group ABBA, released on 10 October 1982 as the lead single from their compilation album The Singles: The First Ten Years (1982) and their penultimate single (preceding "Under Attack") before the group ended. Described as a dark, sorrowful swan song, it features Agnetha Fältskog alone on lead vocals. Its sound was inspired by the sequencer-driven synths popular at the time by contemporary musicians and is heavy on the synth soundscape with a darkly ethereal output. While the song received mixed "lukewarm" reviews upon release, it has retrospectively garnered a high amount of praise and considered by some to be one of ABBA's finest songs. The song also appears on the greatest hits compilation More ABBA Gold: More ABBA Hits (1993).
History Development Following the November 1981 release of ABBA's eighth album The Visitors, the four ABBA members took some time away from the group to focus on individual priorities. Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson both became fathers again in January 1982, and wanted to spend some time with their wives and new born children; at the same time, they were beginning to develop ideas for their first musical, Chess, alongside Tim Rice. Meanwhile, Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad recorded her first solo album in seven years, working with Phil Collins to produce Something's Going On, and Agnetha Fältskog took a break from music to spend time with her children.
Björn and Benny returned to work on a planned follow up album to The Visitors in April 1982, working together in songwriting sessions and coming up with three new songs, "You Owe Me One", "I Am the City" and "Just Like That".Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions, pp.117-118 This was followed by recording sessions at Polar Studios in May 1982 with Agnetha and Frida to record the new songs. The sessions were tense, and the results disappointing. Of the three songs recorded, "You Owe Me One" was deemed fit to be a B-side at best;"Once we had finished that track I remember thinking 'don't care much for that one'" said Benny. cf Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions, p.118 as for "I Am the City" and "Just Like That", the band felt the former "wasn't one of their better songs" and decided the verse and chorus of the latter did not fit together. All three songs were filed away for possible use at a later date. In the end, "I Am the City" would not see international release until its appearance on More ABBA Gold, and ABBA's recording of "Just Like That" has never been released in its entirety, though an excerpt was released in 1994.Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, pp.562-563 Concluding that a new full length album was not a realistic prospect for 1982, Polar Music decided instead to release a double-album compilation of ABBA’s most successful singles in autumn 1982, in which would be included some new recordings which could also be released as singles.
Composition Having taken a break, on 2–4 August 1982 ABBA returned to the recording studio with two new songs written, "Cassandra" and "Under Attack". Both songs were recorded to Björn and Benny's satisfaction in these sessions, though they were sceptical that either would work as a single A-side. With the studio booked for the rest of the day, and nothing else ready for recording, they decided to work on some song ideas there and then. One idea Benny had was "a single melodic fragment that lent itself to being repeated in a series of ascending and descending phrases over several key changes". Working with Björn, he used this as the basis for an entire song. Within an hour they had written the whole melody, and had given the new song the working title ‘Den lidande fågeln’ (‘The Suffering Bird’). This song would be released under the title "The Day Before You Came".Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, p.564ABBA's sound engineer, Michael Tretow, "recorded everything on his tapes, with Benny playing “right out of the blue”, as he recalled. The tape captured the process of the song taking shape: less than an hour later the whole melody was completed." Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, p.564
Björn wrote the lyrics at and following the 2–4 August sessions. His first task was to decide on a theme, and here he was inspired by the characteristics of the melody he and Benny had written: "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." His idea for a theme therefore was "a woman recounting all the dull, ordinary things she “guessed she must have done” the day before she had a highly charged encounter with a man" and began a relationship that would end unhappily: "He has left her, and her life has returned to how it ‘must have been’ before she met him.”Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, p.565Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions, p.119
Once he had his theme, he started writing the lyrics. "When I started writing the lyrics I already knew that the melody was such that from a technical point of view they had to be constructed so that they would lead up to the 'day before you came' place in the melody," he said. "I wrote down all the everyday incidents and things I could think of, that would happen to someone leading a routine kind of life. It was very difficult from a grammatical point of view to get it all to fit together, because it would all have to be logical, there were no place for hitches."
Recording
With the melody and lyrics written, the group reconvened at Polar Studios on 20 August to lay down a track. As in all the 1982 recording sessions, the production was minimalist, Benny and Björn aiming to "keep...the arrangements as simple as possible and to create them electronically". As with the majority of other tracks produced around this time, there was no use of grand piano, and only limited hints of bass, electric, or acoustic guitars. Most of the instruments were played by Benny, synthetically produced on his GX-1 synthesiser and using a Linn drum machine for rhythmic accompaniment. He built up the music from a click track template, something which he later said "was probably not a good idea", despite his liking the track. Real drums were initially rejected in favour of a "synth-generated beat"; later in the session, Benny and Björn changed their minds, and percussionist Åke Sundqvist was called in to lay down a snare drum overdub for the track. The only other instrumentalist was Björn himself, who provided "a few licks of acoustic guitar".
The song has the same production style as "I Am The City", a song recorded earlier that year. Throughout the song, Benny litters the soundscape with a "surprising...mixed bag of synth sounds" which add texture to the piece. The production was influenced by the "sequencer-driven, shrill blipping sound" popular on the records of contemporary musicians such as Gary Numan, The Human League, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode. ABBA had never used a sequencer on their records before, but for this track their sound engineer Michael Tretow simulated the characteristic sequencer effect by 'gating' Benny's synthesizer-playing, the beat of the percussion determining at what moments in the song the sound of Benny's normal long-chord synthesizer playing would be heard or not. While the song has "long, sustained block chords" – a "given" for ABBA songs – it also has "a liberal smattering of percussive synth effects". An example is the "carefree", "spontaneous", and "conversational" synthetic twin flutes, which begin their "integral role in the soundscape [by] offering regular bouts of whimsical reassurance" at the very start of the track. These 'flutes' are "arguably [the song's] signature sound". Their riff "smooths out a series of sustained chordal layers" in the refrains, aided by the backing vocals.
Agnetha sang the lead vocal. The song is noteworthy as "Frida does not double or harmonise with Agnetha's vocal line", and instead only provides backing vocals. In an "intriguing new approach" that had rarely been done in previous ABBA recordings, where she usually sang the lower melody and harmony lines, Frida used a "vibrato-laden...operatic technique" when singing "the sustained high range melody line [of the] refrains". At the point in each refrain where the vocal line drops an octave "to a more manageable register", she "relaxes her vowel sound to a free-flowing and tender falsetto". A "series of subtle vocal and production re-enforcements" give verse three both a sense of empathy and heightened tension. It is at this point in the song that Frida provides a "delicate and brittle" backing vocal to Agnetha's lead. Björn joins in later in the verse, at "I must've gone to bed...", to add to this "smooth and genial major-key affirmation". Benny's riffs "level...out into a more synthetic plateau" at "And rattling on the roof...", Agnetha's second-last phrase. One more repeat of the "forlorn title hook", and the lead vocals end, the soundscape being swept up by the instruments and backing vocals in a "moving mosaic of sound colours" until the end of the song.
Björn 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".Ward, Daniel, Agnetha Fältskog: The Girl with the Golden Hair (2017) This creative choice meant Agnetha sang like an "ordinary woman" rather than a lead vocalist. Agnetha, Benny and Björn would all subsequently wonder if "the dramatic scope [would] have been far greater had Agnetha's natural instincts been allowed to take hold". 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".
Many years after the song was recorded, Michael Tretow 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".Could an Abba reunion ever top The Day Before You Came? The Guardian. 30 September 2010
Music video
The song was promoted by a music video clip filmed on 21 September 1982, and produced by the team of director Kjell Sundvall and cinematographer Kjell-Åke Andersson, breaking ABBA's eight-year directing relationship with Lasse Hallström. The change in direction had been prompted by Polar Music and its affiliates, who believed Hallström's "sometimes unglamorous, almost documentary-style aesthetics" were out of step with the "spectacular, American-type, glossy video" becoming increasingly popular via MTV, and had decided a fresh focus was necessary.Palm, Carl Magnus, ABBA: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, pp.567-568 Sundvall and Andersson, regarded as an up-and-coming filmmaker team, were recruited by Björn to replace Hallström on the advice of his wife Lena Källersjö, who had worked with them on another project.