When I Kissed The Teacher

Fun song - excellent album opener. But for me it's basically the antipasti before the more sumptuous fare dished up later on as 'Arrival' unfolds. Actually, to resort to a wild generalisation, I tend to prefer albums that don't lead off with the best track, as they take you on more of a journey. By that criterion, WIKTT is pretty much the perfect lead-off track. KMKY is the Everest in this particular mountain range and WIKTT helps you start to acclimatise.

Does ANY of that make sense??

Yes, I'd agree with that. To me it screams "opening album track" louder than others apart from, perhaps, As Good As New.

I think the song just draws you into the whole album which is one of the many reasons why we love this song.

Josef....

i have to agree a little, about interaction, I guess it's just a different forum, I wish there was some more ......ooomph  ,


not not sure what's missing if anything, it may just be...... us !

still we carry on....

Yes, Graham. I'll give it a little time but it's disheartening when you start a thread (not this particular one) and it gets very little response or a jokey post that doesn't answer your originally question. It makes you feel like not bothering. Ah, well...probably others feel the same. I like the picture threads (I have no problem with a thread that becomes a 'shrine' to Agnetha, Frida or anyone else- no one is forced to look at them) but I do enjoy debate more, and proper opinions. I like to know the WHY from fans, not just ''I don't like such and such..''.

That generally isn't happening here, but I have started threads on other forums that got very little response.

Does anybody have a timeline as to which tracks on Arrival were recorded first and which were last etc?

When I Kissed the Teacher has an excellent beginning, if you get a version that isnt terribly compressed, when the whole band kicks in, its like a cannon.

But after that, there are points when the layering and over-dubbing seems to get muddy, its the same thing that plagued the mixes on the album before this.

Other songs on Arrival seem better about this. There probably isnt a very good explanation but if When I kissed the Teacher was mixed first... maybe they finished it and decided, "maybe we should go for a more open sound". Just a guess, I have no idea.

I dont know if its too much vari-speed trying to get the phil spector thing.... this was the trick they used to great (And awful) effect for the first few albums, really piling it on thick here and there... and then seemed to lighten up on it as time went on.

Or if its a case of so many backing vocals mixed loud and competing with everything else.

They arent Deep Purple. You can't really have "everything louder than everything else".

I quite like the 'straight in with the vocals' surprise tactic on STMY. WIKTT is a bit of a halfway house - as I say, ideally, I'd like the intro doubled. Failing that, I'd probably prefer it halved. Just the E-flat (?) chord and then keep it there as the vocal piles in. As it stands, it sounds a little neither-one-thing-nor-the-other. Just my own preference.

Yes, it's in E-flat, which is interesting in itself, because it's the last key that Bjorn would have chosen for it when he and Benny were developing the song, and it's doubtful that Benny would have deliberately picked E-flat just to make Bjorn sweat on the guitar. If you were strumming away with a pianist, trying things out, you would want to be a semitone lower in D. Indeed, the live segment of it in the Movie is played in D, and (confusingly) whoever is playing the acoustic guitar on the intro to the recorded version is clearly playing the chord shape of D rather than E-flat. So either the guitar is tuned a semitone higher, or a capo is being used on the first fret, or (unlikely) the whole thing was recorded in D then speeded up.

Further, choosing E-flat means that the 'one of these days' note is a semitone higher than what I believe to have been Frida's belted ceiling of B4. She may have been able to make it in 1976, but it wouldn't have been comfortable at all. So why choose E-flat? There are several possibilities, but the key point (ha-ha) is that B&B would always have their musical or (more likely) vocal reasons for this kind of a call.

Regarding the short intro, it could be argued that it's actually a very long intro, given that the band doesn't kick in till after the first verse. But there's an easy way to check how it would sound if the vocals came in later. Just start singing 'Everybody screamed...' beginning around 11 seconds into When I'm Dead and Gone (which is again in the key of D)

These days, the info can be found anywhere. Take Wikipedia for example:

By the time ABBA began working on their fourth album in August 1975, they had achieved a modest level of success around the world. It was with Arrival however that they would achieve global superstardom to become the biggest name in the music business - a title they would hold for the rest of the decade. The first song to enter the studio was a track called "Boogaloo" on 4 August. Taking inspiration from the current disco sound (and in particular George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby") heavily present in the charts, the backing track was laid down. All four members remember hearing this for the first time and knew that they had something big on their hands, as member Agnetha Faltskog remarked: "We knew immediately it was going to be massive". With re-written lyrics, the song became known as "Dancing Queen", and would go on to be ABBA's biggest ever hit. Work on the song continued intermittently until December as the group's activities were increasing in the latter half of 1975 as they saw a sudden surge in popularity in the United Kingdom and Australia. During this time they also recorded a song for member Annifrid Lyngstad's solo album, "Fernando". Early in the new year, they decided to release it internationally as an ABBA song and with English lyrics the song became the group's next single in March 1976. "Fernando" became ABBA's biggest hit to date - hitting No.1 in many countries, including a 14-week stay at No.1 in Australia. Also around this time their Greatest Hits album was selling in huge amounts, becoming the biggest-selling album of the year in the UK. In the midst of all this promotion, the group finally found time to return to the studio in late March. The next song they began working on was "Knowing Me, Knowing You", which was to become yet another major hit all over the world. Member Benny Andersson has said that it is "one of our five best recordings".

By the end of April two other songs had been laid down entitled "That's Me" and "Why Did It Have to Be Me". The latter of these then became reworked into "Happy Hawaii" before ultimately arriving back at its original title with completely different lyrics and member Bjorn Ulvaeus on lead as opposed to Faltskog and Lyngstad ("Happy Hawaii" would later be released as a B-side). A similar situation occurred with the next recording when a song called "Money Money Money" became "Gypsy Girl" and then back to its original title. "Money Money Money" would also be released as a single and become a major hit some months after the album's eventual release.

During June, the group were invited by Swedish television to make a TV special dedicated to the group The programme entitled ABBA-dabba-dooo!! was filmed around the same time they were recording a song called "When I Kissed the Teacher", which would become the opening track on their new album. Late July saw the next two tracks "Tiger" and "Dum Dum Diddle" go into the studio. Considered by biographer Carl Magnus Palm as the "complete antithesis" of each other, the former being a hard rocker against the pure pop of the latter, members Lyngstad and Ulvaeus have both expressed dissatisfaction for the latter, with Ulvaeus admitting that it was a nonsense lyric he'd come up with in desperation. The next song to be recorded for the album was a Faltskog lead titled "My Love My Life". Originally titled "Monsieur Monsieur" and more upbeat, the song soon became a lush ballad with backing harmonies inspired by 10cc's hit "I'm Not In Love". It was also around this time "Why Did It Have to Be Me" was completed as well as the album's lead single to be released internationally; "Dancing Queen".

The final track to be recorded was an instrumental song, "Ode to Dalecarlia". Featuring Andersson prominently on keyboards, the song was soon renamed "Arrival" - a word that had already been decided on as the title of their new album. By September 1976 work on the album was finished just as "Dancing Queen" was hitting No.1 all over the world. The album cover shots were taken of the group posing in and out of a helicopter (a Bell 47) at the Barkarby airfield, northwest of Stockholm.[1] The now-renowned "mirrored-B" copyrighted ABBA logo, designed by Rune Söderqvist in 1976 — and said to have been inspired by Benny — was also premiered on this album cover. Arrival was released on 11 October 1976.

It's not E though, it's E-flat. I can explain the issues in a sentence if you play guitar, or a page if you don't    I would be happy to do the latter, but it might not make particularly interesting reading! I could maybe post a video of it being played in the three keys D, E, and E-flat; seeing the fingering in each case would make the point more effectively than a long written explanation. Very briefly, a guitarist wouldn't normally choose to develop a song in the key of E-flat because the E-flat major triad makes the basic E-flat chord shape awkward; not difficult so much as restricting. Almost all of the other chords used in WIKTT are similarly compromised when the key is E-flat rather than D.

I agree that B & B always had the girls' capabilities in mind in terms of relative range and harmony intervals, but they wouldn't need to worry about the final key when developing the song together. If you listen to FATSTAPA, the melody and chords are already complete, yet four or five different keys are attempted before settling on a Frida-only version in a lower key than her first try. This is exactly why I take such an interest in the key that eventually appears on the recorded version of any ABBA song. There will always have been a logic behind this choice, probably connected with the vocal options. 

Heh-heh, yes indeed. I'm glad you noticed this, because I almost included a long passage about it in my previous reply, having looked at some WIKTT videos last night. He is not only playing an E there rather than an E-flat, but he is playing (well, miming) through the whole song in the key of E, even though he is miming to a song that is blaring out in the key of E-flat. If you could hear his guitar, and if it was tuned correctly, the result would be horrendous on the ear. Of course, E and E-flat major aren't at all compatible with each other; they are as different to each other as E is to F.

Again, without going into too much detail, this would support the point I made about the unlikely choice of E-flat when developing the song. In order (presumably) to avoid the awkwardness I mentioned when playing along to the song in its correct key, Bjorn has either tuned his guitar up a semitone, or he is having to make sure not to accidentally strum the strings, or his guitar is so quiet that he isn't worried about the sound he is making live in the studio.

But the plot thickens. Check out another playback of the song (below) and he is miming along to it in another key completely. Not D, not E-flat, and not even E. You can tell this by the barre he is doing, which unfortunately makes it difficult to establish the key because I can't see the frets, but it is probably F-sharp. So I was going to put out a request for any other video examples of WIKTT in which you can see Bjorn playing the guitar, other than the two we are discussing and the live segment in the Movie. It maybe needs its own thread, because it would be very interesting to me but not, I suspect, to many others!

Thanks for your kind reply, Martin! I actually do know the difference between E and E-flat (even though I'm more 'guitarish' than guitarist ), but I'm going to blame my initial comment on loose reading, language barriers (its called 'Ess' in Swedish), world events and that old video we've both seen!

But I agree, it is interesting. In my darkest moments, this discussion supports my theory that Björn might not have been a very big contributor after all...