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ABBA · S1 E1
The Girl from Jonkoping
Agnetha Faltskog is born in a small Swedish town and starts writing songs before she can read music. At seventeen she records a number one hit and becomes Sweden's biggest teenage pop star
A recording studio in Stockholm, 1967. A seventeen-year-old from Jonkoping sings a love song she wrote in her bedroom, and within weeks it reaches number one in Sweden.
ABBA: I Have a Dream (official music video). A song about believing in fairy tales and holding onto hope, sung by the group whose story begins with a girl in Jonkoping who dreamed of exactly this.
Jonkoping, Sweden
A lakeside city in southern Sweden where Agnetha Faltskog grew up, wrote her first songs on the family piano, and joined her first band before she was sixteen.
The Girl with the Piano
Agnetha Ase Faltskog is born on April 5, 1950, in Jonkoping. Her father Ingvar manages a department store by day but performs in amateur theatre revues at night, filling the house with music and showmanship. Agnetha is writing melodies on the family piano before she starts school.
TAP TO REVEAL: How old was Agnetha when she composed her first song, and what was it called?
Sweden's Youngest Star
At fifteen, Agnetha joins a local dance band led by Bernt Enghardt, singing covers on the folkpark circuit across southern Sweden. She writes constantly, filling notebooks with songs that nobody in the male-dominated Swedish pop industry expects from a teenage girl. One of those songs, "Jag var sa kar" (I Was So in Love), lands her a record deal when she sends a demo tape to Cupol Records in Stockholm.
My Love, My Life
From the Arrival album (1976). Agnetha sings lead on this quiet, devastating ballad about love slipping away. It is the voice this episode introduces: fragile, clear, and capable of carrying enormous emotion with the simplest phrasing.
What was the title of Agnetha's self-written debut single that reached number one in Sweden when she was seventeen?
In Nazi-occupied Norway, a baby is born to a Norwegian mother and a German soldier. Her name is Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and she is the other voice that will complete ABBA.
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