CAMELOT FANTASIES

Oh the great moment has come - yes indeedy. So exciting! I am finally ready for my No. 1 song. Please know that I did not write everything that follows. I took help from Wiki (wiki has a very long and different interpretations of this song) as well as some article and some other sources from the internet. I hope you enjoy reading it regardless and like the song. It's one of a kind and needless to say - a masterpiece.  An all time classic.

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"The Day Before You Came" was released in October 1982. It's their second longest (behind "Eagle") song at almost 6:00 in length. Björn Ulvaeus wrote the lyrics. Benny said that in his opinion, "'The Day Before You Came' is the best lyrics that Bjorn has ever written. "The Day Before You Came" was the last song ABBA recorded. It was August 20, 1982. The lights were low as Agnetha put her vocal on, and everyone knew it was the end.

Many years after the song was recorded, Michael Tretow, ABBA's longtime sound engineer, 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".

Musical direction of vocals

Ulvaeus 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", as opposed to singing it objectively. Kultur says the song is "sung by a dimmed and turned off...Agnetha Fältskog". The most interesting thing about this song is that only two people know the real meaning and interpretation of this song - Bjorn and Agnetha. Agnetha as she had to know since she's the protagonist and the narrator of the song. And of course Bjorn as he wrote the song. 

Reflection on song's success

"The Day Before You Came" was released in October 1982, as both the first new song from ABBA's double compilation album The Singles: The First Ten Years, and also as a single. The song was only a minor hit (for example only charting #32 in the UK, breaking "a string of 19 consecutive top 30 hits" which started in 1975 with "S.O.S."). ABBA's recording, however, hit the top 5 in Belgium, Finland, West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. It also reached no. 5 on the Adult Contemporary chart in Canada.

Take40 comments that "although the single … was one of the group’s most accomplished recordings it failed to become a worldwide hit on the scale that they had been used to"... something that Bjorn Ulvaeus retrospectively puts down to the song being "too different and ahead of its time for the ABBA fans [or] too much of a change for a lot of ABBA fans."

Interpretation of the song:

"The Day Before You Came," is an absolutely beautiful synth-pop epic that everybody should hear at least once in their lives. A much talked about, debates have been made on it. The gloomy and dark melody is lifted by the vocal of Agnetha. The synthesizer plays a melancholic repetitive pattern close to the 'routine' of the life, the backing vocals  operatic giving an echo of hope in this melancholy.

Agnetha is singing a woman's hesitant reconstruction of the day before she met someone we assume is her lover. The details are banal, but Agnetha makes them live anyway, and they're contrasted by keening backing vocals of such dread that it's been speculated the song's "You" is a killer, not a partner.

It is an hour by hour description of the daily routine. The workaday world is dull, and Agnetha's aversion to politics is seen in the frown brought on by the editorial. Perhaps she is displeased with a particular brand of politics. She likes the TV show Dallas ( Dallas was television's number one show during the later ABBA years) and Chinese is her favorite food.  She likes reading Marilyn French 'or something of that style' (Marilyn was an American novelist of the women's movement and believed every man on this planet is a rapist). But something is not right. Instead of being a song of happiness and the end of loneliness, the song is chased by overwhelming sadness.

The best bit is that she never says she is in love, or that love is wonderful and world changing. Nor that it is also sad, and disappointing, and rarely lasts. She never tells us that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. She never even tells us that this is a love song. It's all unsaid.

The beauty of the song is precisely that we don't know what happened next, and no clue is given. Someone came: maybe a lover, maybe a killer, maybe death itself who knows? So dark, and so sad.

The lyrics leave the ending open, but the music provides some clue. There's a morbid suspense in the music. Like something 'bad' has happened to the narrator. The voice is quite breakable, as if she's a mood of contemplation and accepted her grim destiny. The 'you' in the story is maybe her killer.

The simple lyrics feel trivial and yet, it is not. In fact, it is rather mystical. There is something mysterious, moving, sinister, neurotic about this song.

'I must have... because I always do... ....'
It's like the narrator can't remember factually, but is trying to piece together a sequence of events from the (bearable) trivial to the (never mentioned) important. Who is she speaking to? Herself? Her therapist? Her best friend? The person who killed her or her fate that's apparently responsible for her final gloom and doom?

She ironically frowns; is stressed at work; bored with the bunch; smokes heavily; and escapes into fiction. She is somewhat regimented and represses her emotions... (never realising she is actually very unhappy... With mundanity? With the alienating city? With herself?)

She uses the rain as a screen on which to project her repressed emotions and vulnerabilities... The truth that she is unhappy becomes "I was unhappy because it must have been raining."

Of course, all that was 'the day before you came...' when her life was 'well (functioning) within its usual frame...'

So what happened? We are never told. Film Noire! Continental Cinema!

Well, whatever it was, we are left with the feeling that everything changed and for the worst. Her life before 'you came' was mundane but it was still her life and she was fine with it; it was bearable, she was getting by. Previously, she had no conscious sense of living without aim. She found meaning in TV and fiction, etc. 'It's 'funny...but I had no sense of living without aim' i.e. the before-and-after contrast now makes her laugh.

But something happened after it came and it changed her life from complete order to eternal chaos as we learn from the music.

A few clues from the song:

1. And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained
(Despite having a reasonably normal day, she ends up crying (rain) during the day. The day before you came)

2. Oh yes, I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame
(So the Day before he/she/it came, her life was normal, implying that afterwards it was not)

3. It's funny, but I had no sense of living without aim
(Critical. Before he/she/it came she had no sense of living w/o aim (she did have a purpose or aim in her life); however, this implies that after, there was no aim or purpose to her life.)

4. And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain
(She cried herself to sleep before the day 'you came')

If we look closer, the song's meaning becomes harder to fathom. Throughout, the lyrics are oddly imprecise – every sentence begins with "I must have … " or "I'm pretty sure … " – and it's this vague recollective tone that gives her account a tinge of unreality, even fiction. She is the perfect unreliable narrator: "I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame", she sings at one point, and we fear the reverse; later she claims, "at the time I never noticed I was blue".

Did she die the next day, or even that night? Is "You" her death itself? Is she singing to it and letting it know how she was supposed to meet the man of her dream in the train and he was going to take her away from her mundane life? It's apparent from the video clip that the guy she flirts with in the train is a dream, in the end he does not materialize. Because when she finally looks back at the same scene towards the end of the clip, the platform is now empty. A black crow flies away (a black crow is a symbol of death in many countries especially in South Asia) as the train leaves the platform seconds later leaving an impending doom.

And all this is heightened by an extended funereal instrumental coda which acts as one big question mark, leaving us with the feeling that this is not just a meditation on the quotidian but something greater, existential even.

No. 1 The Day Before You Came

And turning out the light
I must have yawned and cuddled up for yet another night
And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain
The day before you came



Live Version