ABBA blog

It's now almost two years since ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions was published, at which time I promised a companion volume featuring lots of stuff that there was no room for in the main book. I had originally planned to include background facts on the album sleeves, fun and interesting stories about how the record company people worked with the ABBA releases, vintage single and album reviews, and other stories.

There was also the exciting addition of more unreleased/unheard recordings/versions that I was granted access to in 2017, too late for inclusion in ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions. Since then we have also had the announcement of two brand new ABBA tracks, and, obviously, I want to include information about those songs in the companion volume. In fact, it's wrong to regard this book exclusively as a companion volume, since its publication will largely be justified in itself.

So, where is the book? Why have there been almost no updates about it? The answer is long and, perhaps, boring. Nevertheless, some people are wondering, and therefore I shall try to explain.

After publishing ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions, I was a bit exhausted and needed to take things a little slower for a while. In fact, a rather stressful period, work-wise, started about a decade ago, well before The Complete Recording Sessions, so there was a case of accumulated exhaustion to deal with. In addition to that, because of my seven-days-a-week work situation, there were a number of different things I had to push to the side for many years, meaning they had to be dealt with once The Complete Recording Sessions was published. I've also spent time trying to get other projects off the ground, and that has been quite time-consuming.

Research and interviews for the companion volume have been ongoing though, just at a slower pace than normal. There's also another thing about research. Whenever I visit an archive or get access to a collection, I inevitably find information that will be useful for future book projects. This means that it would be counter-productive to ignore that information - in other words, it makes complete sense to secure copies of all ABBA-related information I encounter whenever I encounter it. But then all that info has to be sorted through and catalogued, because otherwise the information is difficult to access. And that takes time.

However, from now, January 2019, the intention is that ABBA On Record (yes, that's the title of the new book!) will be my main focus for the remainder of the year. I don't want to commit to a publication date yet, but hopefully within a year or so. Obviously, I will keep you updated on this: when there is something to announce, I will announce it.

Discussions and preparations regarding design ideas for the book is ongoing with Maria Nicholas, who designed ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions. I am very happy that Maria is onboard again, since her work was such a great part of the success of the main book.

I have nothing more to add at this juncture, but will be back with more news when I have anything of interest to share.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the amazing support: past, present and future.