Things You Might Not Know About ABBA's 'Happy New Year'

(Baonghean.vn) - 'Happy New Year' is not the first name, it is a sad song, it is not the most famous New Year song, there are many surprising things about this song for many people.

For the past few decades, the song Happy New Year by ABBA has been played every year at the end of the year and the beginning of Tet. It is so popular that it has been engraved in the minds of many generations of Vietnamese people. Many children even sing it by heart without understanding the content.

ABBA consists of four members: Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

So what do you know about Happy New Year, a song that is so familiar to all of us?

1. Happy New Year seems to be composed to “take advantage of Christmas and New Year to make money”

ABBA had never recorded a Christmas song and Happy New Year was the group’s closest to Christmas. In the late 1980s, during a radio interview in Sweden, when asked about the new album Super trouper, the listeners, who were two young girls, seemed to like the two songs On and on and on and Lay all your love on me, but criticized Happy New Year as seeming to have been composed “to take advantage of the Christmas and New Year period to make money”.

One of the group’s two female vocalists, Frida, was invited to respond and pointed out that the girls’ assessment was incorrect. Happy New Year was written and recorded before that summer and “when we finished recording it, we didn’t know when the album would be ready,” Frida confided. Contrary to the “bad” comments at the time, ABBA did not let market demand dictate the kind of songs they wrote and recorded.

2. Born during the period when Abba was about to disband

Formed in 1972, ABBA is one of the most famous and best-selling bands of all time, with over 500 million records sold. In 1979, at the height of their career, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog announced their divorce. This had a negative impact on the band's activities. Not long after, Benny Anderson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad also went their separate ways. As a result, ABBA officially disbanded in 1982 and never reunited. Happy New Year was released during this sad period (1980).

3. "Happy New Year" is not the first name

Originally, Happy New Year had a rather funny name: Daddy Don't Get Drunk On Christmas Day.

Happy New Year was originally titled Daddy Don't Get Drunk On Christmas Day and was included on the album Super Trouper. At the time, Abba didn't think much of the song. It wasn't even released as a single until 1999. Benny Anderson once said of Happy New Year: "It's a Christmas song, but it's not a New Year's song."

Felicidad is the Spanish version of the song. This version reached number 5 on the Argentine charts.

In 1999, taking advantage of the world's excitement as they prepared to enter a new millennium, Abba officially released Happy New Year as a single to promote their other albums. However, the song only modestly reached number 34 in Sweden (ABBA's homeland), number 15 in the Netherlands and number 75 in Germany.

4. A sad song

One strange thing about this song is that although millions of people around the world listen to it over and over again every New Year, few people really care or understand its meaning. Especially in countries where English is not the mother tongue, and Vietnam is an example. The deep, delicate melody, not lacking in quite lively and seemingly never-out-of-date upbeat sections of Happy New Year, resounds on New Year's Eve, and then on Lunar New Year's Eve of the Vietnamese people. And for many people, listening to Happy New Year makes them feel warm and feel the Tet atmosphere. But is Happy New Year - Happy New Year really "happy"?

No more champagne/And the fireworks are through/Here we are, me and you/Feeling lost and feeling blue.

So, ABBA did not start singing at the happiest moment of New Year's Eve, but in fact, Agnetha sang when "the party was over" (It's the end of the party), on a "gloomy" morning of the first day, completely different from yesterday. As shown in the video, Agnetha is sitting on a sofa in an apartment littered with wine glasses, decorative papers and balloons. Bjorn stands with his back to the camera, looking out the window throughout the entire song. The simplest interpretation of Happy New Year is the mood of a couple after a New Year's Eve party, with eyes filled with gloom and pessimism.

The scene of the party ending in the MV.

Sadness seems to permeate every word. A characteristic emotion that resembles the human heart when facing the endless flow of time. However, the chorus and the second half are brighter, expressing hope for the future ahead with friends and happiness.

5. Reflecting on a tumultuous decade

The song partly reflects the bitter disappointment that Benny and Bjorn (co-writers) had for a tumultuous decade.

Many people believe that besides ABBA's personal element, Happy New Year also appeared in the context of the world just ending the 70s with a series of crises from all continents such as: the Vietnam War, the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union, conflicts in the Middle East, the Polpot genocide, energy shortages and widespread famine. Therefore, the song partly reflected the bitter disappointment that Benny and Bjorn (co-composers) had for a turbulent decade.

6. Not the most famous New Year's song

The popularity of Happy New Year in Vietnam has led many to believe that it is always played on New Year's Eve in many other countries. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The most popular New Year's song in the world is Auld Lang Syne. This is a traditional folk song set to music from a Scottish poem written by Robert Burn in 1788. Meanwhile, Happy New Year is especially popular in Vietnam, Sweden and some non-English speaking countries.

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