Lopez Blogs

British ITV channel recently organized poll "The Nation’s Favourite ABBA Song" to discover which ABBA's songs are more beloved and memorable in country. Results of this has become pretty amazing TV-show with participance of Frida, Björn and many huge stars like Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Pixie Lott, Westlife, Joe McElderry, Michelle Williams (Destiny's Child), Kate Nash, Robin Gibb (Bee Gees) and Nicole Scherzinger. So whole hour of ABBA's interesting stories connected with different songs, nice memories and impressions are available on youtube and below you can see links to 8 parts of the show.
Final chart contained some surprises like "Waterloo" only at #17 or "The Day Before You Came" in Top-3, but #1 was quite logical and it was "The Winner Takes It All". If you didn't see this show I really recommend you, you're gonna love it, I promise!

What a nice Christmas surprise for all ABBA fans!
Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus present brand new song "Merry Christmas My Friend" as promo-track for Benny's Rival Hotel. As you can remember it's not the first time when they do such music campaign - in 2009 they wrote Rival promo-single "2nd Best To None" receiving warm welcome from international ABBA-community.
No prizes to predicting ones saying "Merry Christmas My Friend" should sound ABBAesque, it sounds like a mix of cabaret mood and Christmas spirit with skilful and catchy tune that you can always expect when the song is written by these legendary authors.
P.S. And as we speak about ABBA I should present you Linnea Henriksson's cover of "The Winner Takes It All" from Idol-2010 that wasn't online before but here it is and it sounds great, doesn't it?!

This Autumn gave us two happy news from Nina Persson - vocalist of legendary Swedish band The Cardigans!
First one is that Nina and Nathan Larson gave birth to their first child - son Nils on 30th September. Family's feeling fine and currently lives in New York. Our congratulations to parents and little Nils!
Second news are regarding music activity of Nina. Georg Wadenius, famous Swedish musician, is releasing new compillation "Reconnection" in collaboration with some popular artists like Abba's Frida (Anni-Frid Lyngstad), Peter Jöback, Kleerup and Helen Sjöholm. Mostly it's acoustic calm tracks with gentle live instrumentals and cover for Dire Straits' "Brothers In Arms" made by Nina is not exception. It's the melancholic beautiful song with acoustic sound that could be easily found on any Nina's previous projects albums so this work should be welcome among hungry The Cardigans fans. Also you should check Frida's cover of Cat Stevens' "Morning Has Broken" below and samples of other tracks here.

Jessica Folcker's appearance in a list of Stockholm Pride's concert devoted to 90s made me surfing youtube in a search of some new videos of this amazing Swedish pop-singer. Last time we got new stuff from Jessica was 3 years ago when she released her electro-pop album "Skin Close" with very nice single "Snowflakes", both were incredibly underwhelmed though it wasn't the first time when Jessica making perfect pop-stuff in any direction she tried was not quite well appreciated by Swedish audience. Since that time we could only see some rare performance of Jessica on TV and in some public events and concerts. Last November she took part in "Sjung Nu" concert in Stockholm's Konserthus performing with live music and gospel-choir. I really like Darin's cover of this song but imagine how great it would sound with Jessica's vocal in studio version!

And another great video I've found is Jessica's covering ABBA when she was singing "The Name Of The Game" on a big ABBA tribute concert, first time I've heard this cover was around 5 years ago and then I've completely fallen in love with this version. Finally video has leaked and you can watch it below together with another great performance of Jessica together with Charlotte Perrelli and LaGaylia singing "Dancing Queen".

Update: By the way here's short video of Jessica performing at Pride, you can hardly see Jessica but you can perfectly hear full power of her amazing voice in her biggest world-wide hit.

ABBA and dansband-music. Can there be some more Swedish music combination? I guess no. And I'm gonna prove it's a great combination right now.
Sisters Cecillia Furlong and Lena Ström has started their music career in 2003 becoming popular in Denmark very fast and starting their own ABBA-show "ABBA Experience" having success with their live performances and strong vocals. But their first album "Gåva Till Dig" ("Gift to you") was released only in 6 years right after the show Dansbandskampen where girls finally has made a big breakthrough to Swedish hearts and the album produced by Amir Aly became very gentle mix of dansband, schlager and pop-music with catchy tunes and beautiful vocal performance. Due to rumours debut-single "Himlen Kan Vänta" ("Heaven Can Wait") was written by Thomas G:son and Calle Kindbom initially for Melodifestivalen but finally it was given to CC & Lee and just in a year girls decided to enter Melodifestivalen-2010 themselves with the song "Honey" written by schlager-veterans Bobby Ljunggren and Mårten & Lina Ericsson that almost qualified but unfortunately was left near qualification borderline but the song is alive and gets its release these days.
"Honey" is very nice positive pop-track inspired by ABBA and actually containing all those amazing melody tricks that made millions of people fall in love with ABBA. CC & Lee come back to their ABBA-roots and we're happily going along with them!