The ABBA Hit Where One Band Member Dissected the Breakup of Two Others

For much of their career, ABBA was the band to whom you turned when you were looking for joy and escape. But then their career progressed and their personal lives intervened. And the quartet began to conjure a gloomier shade of their catchy formula.

In 1981, the band delivered the soaring “When All Is Said And Done”. You could still locate the old pop whoosh in the music. But the lyrics detailed melancholy matters of the heart.

Last Hurrah

ABBA didn’t set out to make The Visitors, released in 1981, their final album. (At least until the group returned with their 2021 reunion record Voyage.) They reconvened on a few occasions in the first half of the 80s after that. An album never materialized from those instances.

Then again, considering where the four were in their lives, it’s probably not surprising that they couldn’t quite pull it together again. Both of the band’s couples (Bjorn Ullvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad) had separated by the time they started recording the album.

That tumult within the band was reflected in the tenor of the music that they released in their last few years together. On the album Super Trouper, Ullvaeus wrote about his breakup from Faltskog in the song “The Winner Takes It All”. With “When All Is Said And Done”, he turned his attention to the end of the Andersson and Lyngstad union.

“Done” Deal

To be fair to Ullvaeus, who was writing all the lyrics for the band by this point in their career, he didn’t just go ahead with the song idea all on his own. He ran it by Andersson and Lyngstad before proceeding to see if they were fine with it. Both later claimed that the song accurately represented their feelings.

Unlike the ballad “The Winner Takes It All”, however, the music that Ullvaeus and Andersson concocted was driving and peppy. As a result, it seemed like a can’t-miss single for the world market. Only ABBA decided against giving it that release, instead favoring the song “One Of Us”.

But the band did release “The Winner Takes It All” as a single in the United States. Although, with a No. 27 chart position, it wasn’t the type of massive hit that ABBA enjoyed so often in the 70s, the song nonetheless established itself as an emotional centerpiece for perhaps the most powerful album of the band’s career.

Behind the Lyrics of “When All Is Said And Done”

“When All Is Said And Done” finds the narrator reflecting with equanimity on the end of her relationship, albeit with sorrow always in the margins. The “autumn chill” of advancing years only makes the situation harder for them both. She doesn’t lash out in her pain, however: “Neither you nor I’m to blame when all is said and done.”

Ullvaeus doesn’t paint the couple as wrecked or defeated in any way. “We’re still striving for the sky,” Lyngstad sings. She promotes resilience: “How you rise, shake your head, get up and ask for more.” With no regrets, the couple faces down the future: “Standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run.”

It’s telling that Ullvaeus could find positives in the breakup of his friends more easily in “When All Is Said And Done” than he could when dissecting his own in “The Winner Takes It All”. Nonetheless, plenty of pain makes it into the picture thanks to Lyngstad’s touching vocal performance of this sterling song.

(Photo by Oscar Abolafia/TPLP/Getty Images)

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