Written by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus Key Recordings
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Although songs such as Dancing Queen and Voulez-Vous received significant play in American discos and clubs in the 1970's, Abba entered the year 1981 with no major Dance chart hits in the U.S. to their credit. Their 1980 album release Super Trouper had received lukewarm reviews and produced only one top 10 Pop hit, the melancholy The Winner Takes It All. Lay All Your Love On Me, another track from the album, was never intended to be released as a single, but the remix created by Raul Rodriguez for the DiscoNet subscription remix service changed all that.
The remix of Abba's Lay All Your Love On Me, one of the best known and most highly valued of all the DiscoNet mixes, extended the song with a brilliant break before the re-introduction of vocals. The DiscoNet mix was never released commercially, but Abba topped the U.S. Dance charts by May of 1981. Atlantic did eventually release a non-remixed 12-inch single of Lay All Your Love On Me in the U.S. and the U.K. In the U.K. the song reached the Pop Top 10 in the summer of 1981, one of the few 12-inch only singles to accomplish that feat. Unfortunately for Abba, this embrace by Dance clubs did not amount to a revival of their commercial fortunes. After one additional album the group called it quits.
Lay All Your Love On Me returned to the Dance charts 8 years later when it was featured on the first album release by Information Society. Remixes by Phil Harding and Justin Strauss propelled the new version to the top 30 of the charts in 1989. By 1992 a full-scale revival of interest in Abba was in progress. The tribute band Abbacadabra released a new recording of Lay All Your Love On Me including a Disco-Net Revisited mix, and the Dance duo Erasure recorded a flattering tribute, their Abba-Esque EP. Abba-Esque closely followed the original and was updated primarily with state-of-the-art electronics.
The ensuing years have included a number of additional versions of Lay All Your Love On Me as more tribute albums have been released including the tremendous success of Mamma Mia!, the Abba musical. Possibly the most interesting recording of Lay All Your Love On Me in recent years is the heavy ballad version by Power Metal pioneers Helloween released in 1999.
