Why Does This Exist?: "Two For the Price of One" by ABBA

Detail of "After Rain" by Carroll Cloar, 1957

ABBA's final album The Visitors is one of the strangest and most brilliant pop albums ever released, with bubblegum pop arrangements set against lyrics about heartbreak, divorce, aging, and life in the Soviet Bloc. In the middle of the album's bleak second side, though, is one of the greatest oddities in the ABBA canon, "Two For the Price of One".

The ABBA songs with male leads are a real mixed bag, including a few of my favorites ("Crazy World") and many of my least favorites ("Move On"), but "Two For the Price of One" is definitely the weirdest. There's not much ambiguity in the song's story - a lonely train-station janitor reads a racy personal ad, inviting him into the sensual world of three-way relationships. He meets the lady who wrote the ad and things go pretty well - the punchline [SPOILER ALERT] comes when the lady tells him who the third side of their sexy triangle will be. It's her mother who will be invited into their lovemaking!

This song is described as a novelty, which it is in the truest sense because no one else has written a song quite like this before. The song has a TV-theme guitar intro (is it Greatest American Hero that it reminds me of?) that leads into Bjorn's cutesy, mincing melody, punctuated by layered backing vocals from Agnetha and Anni-Frid. The middle section has a mock telephone call (fun!) and then, after the big punchline, the song's outro is a bizarre, sped-up wedding march. Incest! Hilarious!

Is it possible that I'm reading too much into the song's punchline? Maybe the joke is just that this woman is using a sexy bait-and-switch to find a man who will help her look after her aging mother. I don't think so, though. Something about the song says to me, "No, this song is actually really, really creepy."

So, in conclusion... LOL Sweden.

"Two For the Price of One" by ABBA