1980 · Behind the Songs
Björn Ulvaeus’s teenage Paris romance, set to one of ABBA’s warmest melodies.
Some ABBA songs glitter. “Our Last Summer” glows. Tucked into the second half of 1980’s Super Trouper, it is one of the warmest recordings the group ever made — a memory of a teenage romance, sung by Anni-Frid Lyngstad with a tenderness that suggests the memory mattered. In a catalog famous for precision, this is the rare ABBA record that feels like it is breathing.
The lyric came from Björn Ulvaeus’s own youth. As a teenager, he had a romance in Paris with a girl from his hometown who was working there as an au pair — a summer of first love in the world’s most romantic city, remembered decades later. Ulvaeus rarely wrote so directly from life, which may be why the song feels so unguarded. Every line carries the particular ache of a memory that has been polished by time.
Benny Andersson and Ulvaeus wrote the song together, as they wrote everything, and the recording began on June 4, 1980, at Polar Music Studios in Stockholm. The track runs four minutes and nineteen seconds — a pop-rock miniature built around one of Andersson’s most graceful melodies. It is not a complicated record. Its power comes from restraint: the band plays softly, the arrangement breathes, and the song unfolds like a photograph being passed across a table.
Listen closely to the bridge and you will hear a ghost of the future. The guitar solo, played by Lasse Wellander, weaves in part of the melody of “Anthem” — the show-stopping number from Chess, the musical Andersson and Ulvaeus would write with Tim Rice several years later. It is one of pop’s great Easter eggs: a melody the writers couldn’t let go of, smuggled into an ABBA record years before it found its true home.
Anni-Frid Lyngstad sings lead, and it is one of her finest performances. Frida had the deeper, more reflective voice of ABBA’s two women, and “Our Last Summer” gives her room to use it — no vocal acrobatics, no drama, just warmth. She sings the song the way you would tell a story about someone you still think about: fondly, and with a small, private smile.
The song sits on Super Trouper, ABBA’s seventh studio album, released on November 3, 1980. The album is remembered for its giants — the title track, “The Winner Takes It All,” “Lay All Your Love on Me” — but “Our Last Summer” is its quiet heart. Sequenced among the hits, it provides the record’s emotional exhale, the moment the album stops performing and starts remembering.
The song’s second life began on the stage. “Our Last Summer” was woven into Mamma Mia!, the stage musical built from ABBA’s catalog, and it survived the journey to the 2008 film — sung on screen as part of the story’s tapestry of memory and romance. For a song that was never a single, it was an extraordinary promotion: suddenly one of ABBA’s gentlest album tracks was being heard by millions of new listeners.
The film version earned a Silver certification from the BPI in 2022 — official recognition that the song had become a standard in its own right. And in a delightful swerve, “Our Last Summer” later turned up in Thor: Love and Thunder, carrying its Parisian glow into the Marvel universe. Not bad for an album track about a teenage au pair.
What to listen for: Wellander’s guitar solo in the bridge, and the “Anthem” melody hiding inside it — once you hear it, you can never unhear it. Then the final chorus, where Frida’s voice lifts just slightly, like someone standing up from the table where the photograph was passed. And the ending, which doesn’t fade so much as recede, the way summers do.
“Our Last Summer” belongs to a small, precious category: ABBA songs about looking back. The group that sang about the thrill of the new — new love, new chances, new dance floors — was, by 1980, old enough to sing about memory. The song’s power comes from that shift. It is ABBA discovering that nostalgia, handled honestly, hits harder than euphoria.
It is also, quietly, one of the group’s most covered-by-circumstance songs — not through other artists’ versions, but through its travels: from a Stockholm studio to a West End stage to a Hollywood film to a superhero movie. Few album tracks have journeyed so far. The teenage romance in Paris turned out to be the most portable thing ABBA ever recorded.
The Super Trouper sessions captured a band at the absolute peak of its craft. Recording began in the summer of 1980 at Polar Music Studios, and the album that emerged is a marvel of precision: every harmony placed like a jewel, every arrangement immaculate. “Our Last Summer” benefits from that mastery. There is no strain in the performance, no reaching for effect — just four musicians who knew exactly what they were doing, choosing to do it gently.
And then there is Paris itself — the song’s silent fifth member. The Paris of “Our Last Summer” is not the Paris of postcards but the Paris of memory: warmer, softer, and slightly out of focus, the way every remembered summer is. Ulvaeus gave the song a real girl and a real city, and Andersson gave it a melody that sounds like sunlight through leaves. Together they made a record that belongs to everyone who has ever had a last summer.
Put it on when the light is going gold. “Our Last Summer” is only four minutes and nineteen seconds long, but it contains an entire youth — a Paris summer, a girl from home, and the particular sweetness of a memory that never got the chance to go stale.