ABBA’s new album Voyage is out and it is a blockbuster.
I already published a DK diary about the first song on the album (which was pre-released a couple of months ago) — but I believe that piece did a disservice to the band and their music by my framing it in America-centric terms. ABBA is a worldwide phenomenon and Americans are just some of the billions of beneficiaries of their remarkable work.
My diary today is about the last song on the album — and apparently the last song ABBA will ever produce. The band’s members are all in their early 70s and they believe their legacy was augmented by this work, but no further creativity is required.
The last song is called Ode to Freedom. The title itself is weighty and the instrumentals carry a great deal of gravity, but the lyrics are relativley simple. There are 18 lines of prose — two stanzas of eight lines each and a couplet at the very end to tie the loose ends together.
Like virtually all ABBA songs, this one contains a musical and lyrical tension between two opposing poles — in this case the yin and yang of freedom. When one thinks of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, there is no ambiguity, no dark side. But ABBA has deeply pondered freedom and they discovered it’s not universally praiseworthy like love, passion, courage, and hope — four virtues that are used liberally in the other songs on this album.
Musically, this tension is broadcast to the listener by the use of unison voices in all the lyrics except the phrase “Ode to Freedom”, which is sung with a rich and subtly dissonant harmony. One senses that the phrase is trying to speak in one voice, but it can’t quite do it.
The lyrics also express doubt about the universalilty of freedom’s praiseworthiness. The first stanza imagines an innocent songwriter who is about to initiate their effort to write an Ode to Freedom. The second stanza reveals a more mature and cautioius songwriter who has experienced many pitfalls and failed attempts at creating such an Ode.
But even in the “innocent” stanza, the songwriters realize that their Ode is likely to be too personal to be widely appreciated by the whole world and thus, they fear their Ode will go unheard like many of the Odes attempted by others previously. In the “mature” stanza, they acknowedge that freedom means different things to different people at the different times of their lives, and such a fleeting Ode wouldn’t even be worth remembering.
Sometimes ABBA is accused of having wierd lyrics, and Ode to Freedom is no exception. In the first stanza, the innocent songwriter asserts that the Ode will be written in “prose that chimes with me” — an admission that the song will be personal, but the word “chime” also evokes a grandfather clock that informs us that the writer’s own lyrics might be different if the writing effort was undertaken at a different time of their life.
Also in the first stanza, the songwriter expresses a deep desire for “freedom” to be “more than just a word”, which means they wish it was something eternal that can’t be abused or misunderstood. But they realize their wish is routinley forsaken by the bad actors and selfish tribes, who often use the concept of freedom as propaganda (which is arguably the worst possible use of a word).
In the second stanza, the songwriters acknowledge that they are privileged, and that status may create suspicion in the mind of the listener who could quickly become wary of the cause that underlies their primary purpose in writing the Ode. This is also a warning about propaganda and the difficulty of overcoming peoples’ biases, when they are fed nonsense and falsehoods about freedom. An online review cited one such offending ode “God Bless the USA”, which asserts “I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free.”
In the second stanza, ABBA seems to conclude that freedom may not even be a top-tier virtue and perhaps that’s why no one has yet written an Ode to Freedom that’s worth remembering.
In the third stanza, ABBA appeals to hope as a more universal virtue than freedom, but in doing so, they actually admit that the job of writing an Ode to Freedom is too diffucult for this group of mortals.
Maybe someday, they conclude, someone will be able to write an Ode to Freedom that we could all sing – but that won’t happen in their lifetime.
Their hope for such an ode will live on through this, their final song, but we, their listeners, must settle for receiving a beautiful song, albeit one that is decidely not an Ode to Freedom.