Songfacts®:

• ABBA member Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote "The Winner Takes It All" after separating from his wife and fellow band member, Agnetha Fältskog. It's about a divorce where one person doesn't want to separate and clings desperately to the marriage. It put Agnetha in the strange spot of being asked to sing a breakup song written by her ex-husband.
  
  Ulvaeus didn't intend it this way. He explained: "I sang a demo of it myself which a lot of people liked and said, you have to sing that. But I saw the sensible thing of course, it had to go to Agnetha. I remember coming to the studio with it and everyone said, Oh this is great, wonderful It was strange hearing her singing it. It was more like an actress doing something when she sang it, but deeply moving. Afterwards there were a few tears as well."
  
  Ulvaeus claimed that 90% of this song is fiction, which is why he didn't feel too bad about having his ex-wife sing it.
• Bjorn has said that while he usually didn't use drugs or alcohol while writing, he had a bottle of brandy next to him while writing the lyrics for this song. It was very personal to him. He told The London Times March 26, 2010: "Usually it's not a good idea to write when you're drunk, but it all came out on that one. By the time I wrote 'The gods may throw their dice' the bottle was empty."
• This isn't the first ABBA song to vividly portray a divorce. In 1976, years before the couples in the group split, they released "Knowing Me, Knowing You," which captures the sad feeling of being alone in a house you once shared with your spouse. That one was also written by Bjorn Ulvaeus. In the liner notes to the 2011 reissue of the Super Trouper album, he explained:
  
  "'Knowing Me, Knowing You' is an image of how it could be, a very strong image of someone walking around an empty apartment with lots of packing cases and stuff, and with plenty of memories in every room. That's the image I got, and there was no [real-life] divorce at the time. 'The Winner Takes It All' is more of an inside thing: it's not really an image, but simply about feelings." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Pirkka - Espoo, Finland
• "The Winner Takes It All" was the first single from Abba's seventh album, Super Trouper. The album cover is set in a circus. "Super Trouper" is the name given to a spotlight used to illuminate the stars while on stage.
• Like Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way," this evokes some very Behind The Music moments as the male band member wrote deeply personal lyrics about a female bandmate. At least Stevie Nicks didn't have to sing lead on Lindsey Buckingham's lyrics like Agnetha did with Bjorn's.
• For many people this song with its heartbroken lyrics, swelling crescendos and sudden lulls is the definitive Abba single. Benny Andersson explained to The Sunday Times June 21, 2009 how the catch in the throat music came to be written: "It's the simplest song," he said. "It has two phrases - that's it. And they just go round and round. Now it also has, around those two phrases, this counterpoint thing going on" - Andersson then played the descending theme that opens the song, runs beneath the chorus and, modulated, responds to the verse's vocal melody - "and without a doubt, without that, it would not have been a song. Music is not only melody; music is everything you hear, everything you put together. But without the core of a strong and preferably original melody, it doesn't matter what you dress it with, it has nothing to lean on." Andersson went on to say that for a long time, there were only the two phrases, the latter (the chorus) with each line following immediately after the one before. "And then one day," he went on to say as he played the song again, "we were out in the country, and I suddenly played the chorus like this, pausing each time for the phrase to gather itself, and all of a sudden it was a song. Björn and I played around with it for hours, just feeling that there was something in it that was talking to us. Then we recorded it, but still without the counterpoint, and it still was no good. It was only when, finally, I played this other part that it really made sense."
• Despite the song's portrayal of the breakdown of her marriage, Faltskog calls this "her biggest favorite" from ABBA's back catalogue. "It's a shame we never got to play it live," she told the BBC.
• Faltskog told The Mail on Sunday in May 2013 this is her favorite ABBA song: "Björn wrote it about us after the breakdown of our marriage. The fact that he wrote it exactly when we divorced is touching really," she explained. "It was fantastic to do that song because I could put in such feeling. I didn't mind sharing it with the public. It didn't feel wrong. There is so much in that song. It was a mixture of what I felt and what Björn felt, but also what Benny and Frida went through."
• Meryl Streep recorded this song in just one take for the ABBA-themed jukebox musical movie, Mamma Mia! Ulvaeus told The Telegraph: "Meryl Streep is a goddess. And at first we couldn't believe that she wanted to do it. I was completely taken by surprise when I saw her performance in the movie. To hear her delivering the songs with all the emotion we put in the lyrics is more than we could have dreamed of."
• The Winner Takes It All is also the title to a 1999 documentary about the band.
• Australian pop singers Kylie Minogue and Dannii Minogue record this with the BBC orchestra in 2008 for the UK comedy series Beautiful People.
• Matthew Morrison and Jane Lynch performed this on the series finale of Glee in 2015.
• Ulvaeus and Andersson started writing "The Winner Takes It All" in the early summer of 1980 in a cottage Ulvaeus owned on the island of Viggsö outside of Stockholm. They ditched their first attempt, as it was too stiff, and worked on other songs. Four days later, they returned to "The Winner Takes It All."
  
  "All of a sudden, two things stuck together, Ulvaeus recalled to Music Business Worldwide. "The first bit was something that was written before and then 'da da da da da da' was something else. By putting these two together, we had a whole song and we were so deliriously happy with it all night long."
• Ulvaeus recorded a demo using nonsense French words and took the recording home to write the lyrics. "I'm much faster now, but it used to take me a while and this one came flowing in just one evening across a couple of hours," he said. "I used to write down the lyrics by hand very neatly on sheets of paper and then I'd make copies when I got to the studio in the morning. So I remember this morning distinctly when we gathered in the control room and Michael B Tretow, who was our sound engineer, played the backing track, which we had recorded already. We gathered and I gave everyone a sheet of the lyrics, Agnetha sang and it was magic."