Abba's Abba Gold [Paperback]

33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives - often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. (A task which can be, as Elvis Costello famously observed, as tricky as dancing about architecture.) What binds this series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors - musicians, scholars, and writers - are deeply in love with the album they have chosen.

Elisabeth Vincentelli is music editor of Time Out New York. She has also written for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly among many other publications. She grew up in France and has loved Abba since watching them triumph at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974.

This sensitive, smart, tiny book is amazingly comprehensive, dealing with everything from recording history to the gay following the band developed. Vincentelli, an astute critic and a rabid fan, is just the writer to grasp the many-layered experience that is ABBA. Claire Dederer,Newsday, 4/11/04

Vincentelli is an intriguing sociologist (calling Abba one of the few band to link 'European drag queens and Midwestern housewives, New York hipsters and Japanese students') and a funny critic ('Lay All Your Love on Me,' she says, 'may well be the gayest song ever recorded by two clean-cut heterosexual couples'). Mike Miliard,The Boston Phoenix, 7/8/04

With Elisabeth's personal anecdotes thrown into the mix of ABBA's history, quotes from contemporary critics and musicians, and analyses ofl#’