Finished too late for the ABBAstard album; https://iwillbattle.co.uk/2023/03/06/abbastard/ this Scandi Noir epic was a real nightmare to create, taking many goes. It's long...like any Scandi Noir series - but worth it.

There's a fan theory about ABBA's Day Before You Came - that although the track could be read as a role call of a humdrum existence that changed when a lover arrived, the operatic background vocals from Anna-Frid and doomy noir nature suggests otherwise - that something bad happened. That either the relationship ended and she's back in her dull life - or that something even worse happened to her. That she's looking back to when her life was dull but better, when she was alive.

This creepy mash posits that the man who came into her life was a serial killer - mixing in Steely Dan's Don't Take Me Alive, and flipping Supertramp's Logical Song to make it about schizophrenia and losing reality. I watch a LOT of True Crime on YouTube (hey That Chapter!) and I think it's bled into my mashup work....

This also the last ABBA track they recorded together before the split, and the sadness shows. There's a lot of dark 'Scandi Noir' melancholy subtly in ABBA's work, and I think it shows best here.

I mean how many people have heard Steely Dan mashed with The Weeknd, with Supertramp? Probably no-one. I need to use more Steely Dan in mashups....big fan, but jazzy chords and drumming....and Logical Song was a challenge tonally too, but mostly it's the weird 3/6 bar structure of ABBA that gave me the most nightmares. Appropriate I guess for a mashup about a nightmare.