“Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA

Everyone knows ABBA and can probably even sing every word to their monster hits like “Dancing Queen”, “SOS”, and “Mamma Mia”. The group consisted of two couples:  Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (incidentally, the initials of their first names is where the moniker “ABBA” originated).

The band cranked out hit after hit from 1974 to 1982. The final ABBA single to chart in the US was 1982’s “The Visitors” – it only went to #63 and was the title track of their last studio album together.

While their songs were always catchy and danceable, the lyrics on the last couple records were getting more sophisticated and often heart wrenching, as the band members wrote about their divorces in song (listen to “The Winner Takes It All”).

Another prime example of their more emotive songwriting can be heard in one of my favorite underplayed ABBA tracks from “The Visitors” called, “Slipping Through My Fingers”.

As you can read in the lyrics below, this song sees Fältskog lamenting how quickly her daughter is growing up, and how many of the things she planned to do together are just slipping away with the ages. The song was written for her daughter Linda, who was seven at the time.

“Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning

Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile

I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness

And I have to sit down for a while

The feeling that I'm losing her forever

And without really entering her world

I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter

That funny little girl…

Slipping through my fingers all the time

Do I really see what's in her mind

Each time I think I'm close to knowing

She keeps on growing

Slipping through my fingers all the time”

The song gets me every time!

Despite numerous attractive offers for a reunion, “The Visitors” was all she wrote for the band ABBA. However, Lyngstad would resurface as Frida with the hit, “I Know There’s Something Going On”, which went to #13 late in 1982. Do you recognize those drums? They sound a lot like what you hear at the end of “In The Air Tonight”, don’t they? That’s because Phil Collins produced and drummed on the record…listen carefully and you’ll hear his backing vocals, too.