When Björn Ulvaeus announced that his newest project would be written with the help of artificial intelligence, the world of music paused. Could the man who gave us “The Winner Takes It All,” “Thank You for the Music,” and “Knowing Me, Knowing You” truly hand part of his creative soul to a machine?
Those who know him weren’t surprised. Björn, now in his late seventies, has always seen songwriting as an experiment in empathy. For him, technology isn’t the enemy of emotion; it’s another instrument waiting to be played. “Every piano is a machine,” he said recently. “AI is only a more complicated one. What matters is the person sitting in front of it.”
The new musical — still untitled, quietly taking shape in Stockholm — blends human imagination and machine learning. The AI system listens to melodies, generates counter-lines, and even suggests lyric fragments drawn from thousands of texts. But the final decisions, the emotional logic of the story, still belong entirely to Björn.
💬 “I’m not asking a computer to feel,” he explained. “I’m asking it to remind me how I feel.”
What fascinates him most is how the technology forces reflection. When the AI proposes a chord progression that sounds almost, but not quite, human, Björn stops and asks himself why. “It shows me where emotion lives,” he said. “It’s in the small imperfections — the hesitation before the note, the word you nearly didn’t choose.”
Observers who have visited his sessions describe a strange beauty: a grand piano surrounded by glowing screens, programmers and musicians trading ideas in real time. Sometimes the computer “answers” his melody with an unexpected harmony, and the room falls silent. “It’s eerie,” one collaborator said. “It feels like listening to the future whisper.”
Yet at its core, the project is not about the future at all. It’s about memory. Björn Ulvaeus has spent a lifetime examining how songs preserve emotion long after the moment has passed. “Music,” he said, “is humanity’s diary.” The AI, trained on patterns of love songs and laments across centuries, becomes a way of reading that diary back to us — a reminder that even data has traces of feeling.
For a generation that grew up on ABBA, this experiment feels both daring and fitting. The man who once captured the ache of a broken heart in perfect pop form is now asking what creativity itself might sound like when time and mortality are taken out of the equation.
When asked whether he worries that technology could replace the songwriter, Björn simply smiled. “You can teach a computer to arrange notes,” he said. “But you can’t teach it why a melody makes you cry.”
The premiere of the musical, planned for next year, will feature both live performers and algorithmic harmonies — a conversation between human breath and digital echo. And somewhere in that dialogue, Björn Ulvaeus hopes listeners will hear not the triumph of machines, but the persistence of the human heart.
Because for him, every innovation still returns to the same truth:
Technology may build the instrument,
but only love writes the song.