I Still Have Faith in You – ABBA (2021) written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. Nominated for Record of the Year; #9 on the Canadian digital music sales chart, #2 on the Swedish charts. Platinum in Sweden.

This was the lead song from ABBA’s big comeback album, Voyage. It’s not the best ABBA, but it’s pretty good ABBA. It showed that, after forty years, they can still make it work like they used to. If you missed them, they’re really back.

“I Still Have Faith In You” seems to be about the singer of ABBA wondering if she can still make music with the band like she used to. She thinks so, there’s definitely some of the old magic around, but she isn’t sure of her own ability to rise up to the necessary level. Whether she can or not, though, she’s taking heart that she knows the rest of the group can.

But it doesn’t have to be about that. It could be sung from the point of view of a woman unsure about restarting an old relationship. That’s possible. Look at the lyrics and tell me it isn’t possible. Why aren’t we interpreting it like that?

This is what these music types do, sometimes, with their charisma and their razzmatazz. They get us to like them, to identify with them. To invest in their story. ABBA are four Swedish people who sang several dozen catchy songs forty to fifty years ago. No reason why they shouldn’t try to make a comeback, but how can they presume that a song about whether they can manage that comeback, whether they’ve got the internal resources to live up to how special the group used to be, would be something that would engage our empathy?

Except, of course, that they’re right. We do care about all that; we are glad that they’re back, and that they still have faith in each other, and in us, and we in them, and that the group was and is special. Parasocial relationships gonna parasocial. It’s a great trick. All the more so because the joke isn’t on us: it’s on all the people that it didn’t work on.