Song Analysis - Hey, Hey Helen

Hey, Hey Helen tells the story about a woman who is fresh out of a marriage.  She's a mother with kids, and is honestly still ridden with guilt if divorcing and leaving her ex was a good decision.  Was it really worth it?  The song is pretty much her anxiety and intrusive thoughts, making her doubt everything.  It kinda feels like friends or family are accusing her of only wanting to divorce so she can be called a "Woman of Today," basically invalidating whatever else happened that made Helen want to leave this marriage and belittling her.

"Hey, hey Helen now you live on your own. Hey, hey Helen can you make it alone?" Agnetha and Frida sing in the chorus.  However, the quiet last line of the chorus "yes you can" is like, yes, yes you really can do it, basically proving that all of this is not in vain.  She will be okay.  And the second verse is basically here accepting that yes, it was all worth it. "But you’re right, you had to take a second chance. So you fly to find your freedom."

The song may seem on the surface, belittling Helen a bit, but when you actually delve deeper, you realize it's truly meant to be empowering.  Helen eventually learns to not let judgmental people and comments get to her, and ultimately she's okay and she knows the does the right thing, even when her own anxious thoughts get her down.  

I like this song a lot.  Agnetha and Frida sing together beautifully with that third voice, and the backing vocals, especially during the instrumental, keyboard break or whatever it is you call it where they sing the "Aha, yes you do yes you do", is really nice.  I also love the backing vocals during the chorus, with the "hey hey Helen, oooooooh"s in the background.  And the way Agnetha and Frida sing, "Don't you know what to do," in the last chorus of the song is almost heavenly?  

I also love the instruments and arrangement of this song.  It's a lot more on the rock side with the electric guitars and heavy drums.  And it sounds so good.  It kinda makes me wish ABBA had done more rock songs like this.  I think they would have nailed it.

ABBA would perform this song during their 1975 tour as can be heard during the bootleg Eskilstuna audio.  Hey Hey Helen is the opening track to their entire setlist, and it's so good live.  You can just feel the energy from this performance.  With no backing vocalists during this tour, Bjorn and Benny sing the backing vocals and honestly I really like that rawness with it just being Agnetha, Frida, Benny, and Bjorn, and I kinda prefer that to the backing vocalists during the 1977 and 1979 tours.  Not saying that the backing vocalists from those tours don't sound good - they all did amazing, I just really really like the early sound of the 75 tour more.  And that's just me. 

While we have no visual, moving footage of the 1975 tour, we do have this one performance of Hey, Hey Helen when ABBA were on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert in 1975.  I always wondered why they performed this song of all songs, but it's such a good song, and I like how it sort of gives us a glimpse of what their performance on tour was like, with the simple routine and movements that Agnetha and Frida do.  From this performance alone we can now really imagine what the opening song of ABBA's 1975 tour was like. 

So yeah, the song is great, and empowering, and really fun.