This article analyzes The Day Before You Came, an Abba song I don't remember hearing before. Abba?? Yes. This song has great lyrics that capture the time with references to Marilyn French and Dallas.
It's this ordinariness, this universality that hooks the listener immediately. Agnetha's first-person account of a day at the office, backlit by an almost unacknowledged depression, morphs into an unusually poignant parable of what modern life means. We are whisked through a sludge-grey morning commute, "heaps of papers waiting to be signed", and a rainy lunch at the "usual place" with "the usual bunch", followed by the slog home at 5pm with "Chinese food to go". Finally, at quarter past ten, our world-weary protagonist collapses into bed insisting she has "no sense of living without aim".
