Photographer Carsten Sander shows Europe as a basis for peaceful co-existence and portrays a diverse society with 1,000 faces. In this work the individual and the community form snapshots for eternity.

Björn was interviewed for this project as a representative from Sweden and gave some very interesting and passionate insights into his songwriting process.

(beginning cut off)

Björn Ulvaeus: .... but then, er, you know, we'd go for three days - nothing - and we'd go for a week and we'd have eight bars of something, "this is good", it's not a whole song but it's eight bars - that's good, we keep that in our heads - never wrote it down. And then, the next month, or the next year, something comes up, another eight bars.  Hang on!  they fit with those eight bars, do you remember?  da-da-da-da!

Carsten Sander: Ah, OK!

BU: ... and then suddenly, um, there is a song and, er, who knows where that came from?  I don't know

CS: This is the question!

BU: (laughs), yeah, yeah

CS: I wanna know!  So ...

BU: But it's the reason we're standing here I think is very much because we threw away so much. We didn't tour, so we spent, you know, three or four months a year writing. Fourteen songs a year on average. So we threw away 98% of everything; just keeping the very ... that both of us felt THIS is good, you know, and not keeping anything else, because we had that luxury, we, we didn't have anyone who told us you have a deadline, you have to be ready now. Nobody ...

CS: No pressure.

BU: No pressure at all, just going on until we had three songs maybe and then into the studio with the ladies and recording and then out there writing again, recording, and in the end we would have an album.

CS: Easy!

Faces of Europe

Thanks to Chris Williams c/o ABBAtalk