Chiquitita

So how does one cope with the existence of ABBA?

As I understand the history, ABBA started having big hits in 1974, and I mostly didn’t notice. I was into other things, and ABBA was on the other side of the world, physically, culturally and (I thought upon first impression) in matters of musical taste.

I don’t remember them from the mid 70s. I had some kind of impression of a Swedish pop group with beautiful girl singers and what seemed to my eyes to be naïve, glitzy costumes. There was nothing unpleasant about them, but if I heard them, they did not get onto my musical radar.

Then came Chiquitita.

I don’t remember when I first heard it, though I know I immediately liked it, like when I first heard Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” or Kate Bush’s "Watching You Without Me."

Anyhow, something about Chiquitita just totally knocks me out. And to this day, it’s still the only ABBA song that I really love, though I certainly understand the great success of dance floor hits like Dancing Queen and Momma Mia, et all.

On some level, from my American perspective, at first Chiquitita mainly just sounds really really Northern European and White – as well it might, composed and performed by Swedes.

Likewise, King Sonny Ade’s music sounds West African and Black.

Viva la difference...

So, Chiquitita. Diatonic melodies and harmonies. Pianoforte centered, with baroque embellishments. Beautiful angelic women’s voices singing together in diatonic thirds in English. Melodic, in the best possible way. And then the Chorus hits and there it is – this enormous unapologetic 2-beat groove.

And that melody again. Uplifting. Uplifting. Shall I say it again? Uplifting.

And what about the words? Written in Bjorn Ulvaeus’s second language, to a rhythmically precise and inflexibly stressed melody, they are just masterful. And, as I understand it, the melody came first, and there were other lyrics:

Many preliminary versions of "Chiquitita" exist. It had working titles of "Kålsupare", "3 Wise Guys", "Chiquitita Angelina" and "In The Arms of Rosalita".[1] A revised version, which had a sound that was influenced by the Peruvian song "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" performed by Simon and Garfunkel, was recorded in December 1978 and released as a single in January 1979.

Check out this finished and then rejected lyric:

Tell me Pedro

Why did you leave

Still I've got your white sombrero

In your eyes

I believed I'd found my hero

But I know some day you'll regret

You'll return to your senorita

Happy as you can be in the arms of Rosalita

It is not a trivial task to write a supremely singable lyric to a pre-existing rhythmically precise melody. Both syntactically and semantically, lyric writing is a monster of a craft. So much more so in a second language. Listen to the progression of the ideally singable vowels in Chiquitita. Impeccable rhyme. Powerful internal rhyme. Landing the Title in the best possible places.

What did it take to come up with the word “Chiquitita” to land on the Title moments in the melody? Did they have to go through the semantic dead end of "In the Arms of Rosalita" to come across the word "Chiquitita?

Did composer Benny Andersson prescribe that the Title must land here and here and here...?

This thing is really well crafted. Everything about the music. The words. The beautiful and emotionally spot on singing. The arrangement. The production – that is, the sound of the record.

Wow.

I wonder how the challenge of writing this lyric in a second language effected the craft of writing the lyric? Did it give Bjorn Ulvaeus some kind of freedom from the cerebral ruts we develop in our first language? Perhaps working in a second language could somehow help in some ways in such a precise craft as lyric writing?

I wouldn’t know.

I did write a song last year, Play My Heart, that I think might be better rendered in a Romance language. I know a little Spanish, but I’d need to know a lot more in order to land a lyric in Spanish. Italian would be nice. French. Actually, I’d like to hear it sung in any language.

Enough about me. Anyhow, if you mostly don’t get ABBA – like me – do have a listen to Chiquitita.

Over the moon good.