Anni-Frid Lyngstad — Frida — has spent nearly half a century being the most quietly dignified keeper of ABBA’s most complicated truths, the woman whose extraordinary contralto anchored some of the greatest pop recordings ever made and whose personal story within the group she helped build was always the most complex and the most privately painful of the four that came together in Stockholm in the early 1970s and changed popular music forever. She was married to Benny Andersson, wrote history with him, lost him to Agnetha Fältskog’s partner Björn Ulvaeus in the great romantic reshuffling that occurred as the group’s marriages dissolved simultaneously and catastrophically in the early 1980s — two couples falling apart at the same time in the same creative space, producing in the process some of the most emotionally devastating and most commercially successful music the pop world has ever seen,

including The Winner Takes It All, a song so transparently rooted in the real grief of the people singing it that the studio session that recorded it has become one of the most discussed and most mythologized moments in the entire ABBA story. Frida has spoken about those years across four decades of interviews with the particular care of someone who understands that what she says about Benny and Agnetha will always be received as more than personal testimony — as the inside account of one of the most beloved creative partnerships in music history from the person who had the most intimate and the most painful view of what was actually happening inside it. At 78, having arrived at the stage of a remarkable life where the carefully maintained diplomacy of the official ABBA story feels less essential than the honest accounting of what she actually lived through, Frida has finally confirmed the truth about Benny and Agnetha — the thing that the music always suggested and that the interviews always circled without landing on, the confirmation that the people who loved ABBA most have been waiting for since The Winner Takes It All first played on the radio in 1980 and everyone who heard it understood immediately that something very real and very painful was hiding inside those three minutes and fifty-five seconds.