THE ABBA UNCOVERED EXPERIENCE
Welcome to the third day!
The Winner Takes It All
There is something very powerful about this song. The lyrics are so intimate and honest. I love performing it with "The Concert”, it’s like the show stops for a bit and everyone is engulfed in the magic of the music. The Winner Takes It All was a given to include on the EP.
How The Winner Takes It All came to life.
Even though we recorded “One of Us” first, “The Winner Takes it All” was the first one we rearranged. Since the whole song contains of the same chord progression over and over, I wanted to change it up, to reflect different state of emotions for each verse. I sat down by the piano and sang and felt where I wanted it to go as I went along in the song, finding the right chords to build up the story. Andrew had some creative freedom and he arranged the strings for this one without me. I gave him the new chords and we talked about my vision for it. I wanted a raw and dramatic feeling and his classical influences would work well to enhance that. Since this rendition would have only a string quartet, we did have a few back and forth about the arrangement, finding the balance to enhance the melody and story, while still letting the strings build up and be a big part of it. I think we succeeded, you tell me? :) Here is one of the voice memos I sent to him with some new chords and ideas.
Recording
The strings were recorded in the same session as "One of Us", so the same four lovely ladies performed the arrangement in Andrew's basement where his studio is. Listen closely at the end of the song and you can hear them breathing, being in the song with lots of emotion. I liked it and didn't want to take it out, it added a very real and live element! You can hear a short section from the recording in the video!
We made a rough mix of the strings for me to record my vocals over. I had spent some time practicing how I wanted to sing it but in the moment I got into a different approach that felt more right so I went with that feeling. I wanted it to be raw and close, very exposed and intimate but still strong.
The vocals for this song was a bit tricky to record since the sound pressure of my voice on the top notes were very high and the microphone couldn’t handle it! :) We had to experiment with the distance I needed to have from the microphone without it distorting, cause I didn’t want to sing more gentle or with less volume. I wanted that full, real and human sound.
After the vocals were recorded we could go in a tweak the dynamics in the strings, who didn’t have my vocals to listen to while recording their part. They did such an amazing job!! But it was extra important to match them up with my vocals- it was only them and me! Fortunately Andrew is an experiences string engineer so it was easy :)