Excitement! Then disappointment…
I was trolling the web for ABBA videos (like one does at 7 in the morning) and I came across this version of ABBA doing “Angel of the Morning” and OMGOMGOMG!
Except it ain’t ABBA. It’s the Pretenders’ version. In fact, though it’s pretty clearly the Pretenders’ version and pretty clearly not ABBA, this person posted this in 2008, made one of those little slide show thingies of ABBA pictures, racked up 100k hits, and got about 100 comments saying essentially “Dude…not ABBA!”. Still it persists, spreading its foul misinformation to the masses. It’s not even that I dislike the Pretenders version or anything (it’s solid but no Juice Newton). I was just so excited to hear my favorite Swedes take on the . So many of my earliest musical memories center around songs piping in out of the AM radio (only!) of my dad’s 1979 Chevy Custom 10 pickup (three on the tree!), driving out to fish ponds and whatnot all over rural Alabama. I vaguely remember “Heart of Glass” and “Sailing” and “Sad Eyes” and such, but the one that really sticks with me is Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning”. It felt very adult, very mature; there was a story behind, a touch of mystery in the lyrics and and sadness in the music that fascinated me. Most everything I’d truly loved up until that point might as well have been kids’ music, with simple melodies and maximum singalongability: “Whip It”, “Celebration”, “Elvira”, “Country Roads” (I loved “Country Roads”), “9 to 5”, and “The Gambler”. “Angel…” had heft and meaning. It wasn’t a mere poppy fun trifle (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It transmitted meaning and emotion and scary, big, alien concepts to me. To this day, a few bars of the chorus are enough to wash these ephemeral emotions over me. And they’re defined ephemeral, an ill-defined stew of longing, wistful, and bittersweet, the powerful, conflicted midrange of the emotion continuum that never resolves itself. I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling, just that I’m feeling something, kinda like I’m six all over again.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t post Merrillee Rush’s original version, notable, perhaps, for how much it predicts the raw, gargling with glass vocals of the eventual Bonnie Tyler version.
And then there’s this, a fan tribute to Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA, uh, set to “Angel of the Morning” for no particular reason. Because, like so much of the Internet, why not?
—Lucas
What are y’all’s most potent early song memories?
