B minor · Camelot 10A · 82 BPM
One of Us
by ABBA
- 82
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 63
- Danceability
- 59
- Acousticness
"One of Us" was one of the last songs recorded for ABBA's 1981 album The Visitors, and it carried the working titles "Number 1" and "Mio Amore" before settling on its final name. Agnetha Fältskog took the lead vocal on a lyric about a woman trying to revive a relationship she had ended, and the track sat among several songs shaped by the divorces of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, which were beginning to push their writing into darker territory. Polar Music released it as the album's lead single on 4 December 1981, backed with the non-album track "Should I Laugh or Cry".
Ulvaeus had favoured it as the first single and most record companies agreed, though manager Stig Anderson had misgivings about the depressing lyric. The choice came so late that the single reached Swedish shops only after the album itself was out. It became ABBA's final number one of their career, topping charts in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and West Germany, and reaching number three in the United Kingdom.
Epic Records gave the British release its own sleeve, with Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad on the front and Ulvaeus and Andersson on the back, using photos that showed Lyngstad still with her frizzy perm and a beardless Ulvaeus. The British and South African pressings also carried a spoken Swedish count-in from Andersson that had slipped onto the master tapes by mistake.
One of Us runs at 82 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.93 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 732 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.