When meeting up with Tuomas Seppälä on a nice Finnish winter day shortly before the release of the ABBA cover album ‘Take A Chance: A Metal Tribute to ABBA’, he told us about the lengthy process he went through to make a selection of songs. Where Tuomas sat down and went through the whole ABBA discography to besides the obvious choices, also pick some of his favorites and relatively unknown “deep cuts”. He’s hoping to get people to go on a discovery when hearing those lesser known tracks and that people can appreciate what they’ve done with the songs. He also explained how he approached putting an Amberian Dawn touch to the selection while trying to keep their versions as close as possible to the originals by mimicking the keyboard sound, and keeping the melodies and vocal lines basically the same.

In the future they might make another album like this if it seems to be well received, but in the nearby future they’re planning to focus on Amberian Dawn originals, since they don’t want to be branded as “just a cover band”. And while they will definitely play some ABBA covers live here and there, people should not expect them to do shows with only ABBA songs, that is not what the band is about. Tuomas wasn’t sure if ABBA has heard or will ever hear their renditions of the songs, but if they do, he hopes that they appreciate the care and love that went into it. And finally, Tuomas shared some of his thoughts on the latest ABBA album ‘Voyage’ and the hope that they would after all decide to do some live shows besides the virtual shows, thinking that fans will really enjoy seeing them live for real even though all the glitter and spandex of the past wouldn’t be there.

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