ABBA's 'Lay All Your Love On Me' Is the Greatest Pop Song from Sweden, Maybe from Anywhere

Look, I’m not here to tell you what to think or what not to go wasting your emotions on, but but you have to admit that when that first chorus comes in, your heart fills with the excitement and perhaps dread of first love, mixed with the misery and devotion of a breakup that may not be over. All. At. The. Same. Time. When Agnetha Fältskog blurts out “It was like shooooting a sitting duck!” you’re listening to one of the greatest moments in 20th-century pop history.

It is so anguished yet hopeful, and the vowels are so flat (“Daaaan’t go sharing your devooooaaation!”). It achieves what any great song about matters of the heart ought to: leaves the listener unsure if in the end, the protagonists got together. Isn’t that how life is?

I defy you to listen to this song at any hour of the day or night and not feel in the mood to do all of the following simultaneously: enter a long-term and steady monogamous relationship with a thoughtful and giving partner who looks like Björn Ulvaeus, do some cocaine, feel the thrill of youth again, have sex in a Volvo, swim in the Baltic Sea, suffer for love, wear blue eyeshadow, cheat on your loving and thoughtful partner with someone who also looks like Björn Ulvaeus, eat some Knäckebröd, and assemble a MALM bed with your partner who looks like Björn Ulvaeus (you’re back together again) while shouting more than singing “what can I dooooooo-ooooh?!”

Here’s the second best pop song ever: