Head over Heels
After seeing Mamma Mia this summer, I realized there were more than a few Abba songs I was unfamiliar with, despite my indoctrination as a young boy.
I've since discovered that most of the songs I don't know are on the Visitors album - and it's been my very great pleasure to (re)learn some of them over the past month or two. This one in particular has been stuck in my head for weeks now.
It was definitely familiar from my childhood, but I would have been hard pressed to recall anything about it without hearing it again. Now I can't shake it. But I'm not complaining. I've had worse ear worms.
Comments
But Head Over Heels is brilliant - with great use of chromatic scales and a wonderful baseline anchoring the chorus.
When All is Said and Done (and Slipping Through my Fingers) were the two songs from Mamma Mia that inspired this research, and I agree with Cheryll that When all is Said and Done is one of Abba's best.
If you played 12 notes on a piano - black keys and white keys - in order, that's a chromatic scale. It's not all that common to use it in popular music. Chromatic scales make things sound kind of "circus-y" because the most famous use of chromatic scales is in a famous circus song (yes, the one you're thinking of)
In Head over Heels - it's used in the part where they sing "the kind of girl who likes to follow a trend"
Learn something new every day!