The Winner Takes It All

The Winner Takes It All is widely considered ABBA's masterpiece, and it is also one of pop's most quietly devastating songs. Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote the lyric in 1980, not long after his divorce from Agnetha Faltskog, one of the two married couples at the heart of the band. By then both couples had separated, and the group was making some of its finest music while its private lives came apart. The ache of it is that Agnetha sings it. The lyric takes the point of view of the abandoned partner, watching a former lover move on and insisting there is no bitterness while every line says otherwise. Agnetha is delivering her own ex-husband's words about their separation, and her vocal turns a glossy pop production into something raw and exposed. Bjorn has always maintained that the song is not literally autobiographical, that their divorce had no winner and no loser. What is true, he has said, is the emotional experience underneath it. That gap, between a chart-topping single and the real heartbreak it was carved from, is exactly what makes it endure. It is a divorce confession hiding in plain sight at the top of the charts.