ABBA blog

When I first decided to publish a revised and expanded edition of ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions, I had all sorts of grand plans on features I wanted to add to the book. One of them was review quotes from the time when the singles and albums were first released, another was fairly indepth background stories on how the album sleeves were put together (and whatever information there were on the original single sleeves as well).

Now, in the course of writing the book I realised that there was so much information on the main subject of the book - the writing and recording of ABBA's music - that I couldn't include any reviews or album sleeve stories. My first idea was to put together a separate pdf file with these features and be done with it. But with time, and with other ideas transpiring, I felt that it would be better to approach this another way.

What I'm going to do is to produce a proper book: a companion volume to ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions. This will allow me to expand on those sleeve design features, and publish more review extracts, rather than dash off something in a pdf. Most readers of ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions have preferred the physical book rather than the ebook alternatives, so I'm confident this will be better for everyone.

The working title of this companion volume is Releasing ABBA, as this is what this book will mainly be about. In other words, after ABBA had created their music, as explored in the main book, this volume will answer what happened with it afterwards: how it was packaged, promoted, and reviewed. In the vein of ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions, you will get the hard facts, but also background stories and personal recollections, so that it will be an entertaining read.

There are also other features I wanted to include in the main book, which I will now be able to research and write properly for the companion volume. They are all related to ABBA's music, of course.

Last, but certainly not least, there have been some exciting developments recently, which will enable me to shed even more light on ABBA's recordings. Yes, dear reader, quite unexpectedly I have been able to listen to hours and hours of recordings/versions I had never heard before and I am very much looking forward to sharing these new findings with you all. Exactly why and how I was authorised to listen to these tapes is not something I wish to discuss at this time, but I'm confident you will find this new information highly interesting - I know that I was extremely excited and fascinated when I listened to the recordings.

I have not set a publication date for this companion volume yet. I'm not certain it will be published in 2018, but hopefully no later than 2019. I have some other projects I want to deal with first, and I also want to make sure my ace designer, Maria Nicholas, will have the time to be onboard for this volume.

More details will follow later.

In the meantime, ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions is still available here: abbathecompleterecordingsessions.com

Thanks for reading!