A Select Discography by Phoebe Lupton
A Select Discography
The First Album (2004)
1. I’m dancing again. I’m five, in the middle of the living room. Mum’s put on some music from her childhood, ABBA or Earth, Wind and Fire or Bony M and I’m boogieing away. It’s one of my favourite stims (a repetitive movement that stimulates the senses. A hallmark of autism, although many neurotypical people also stim. I don’t know I’m autistic at this point, but it’s pretty obvious that I am).
2. I’m spinning around in circles and somehow avoiding dizziness. My movements are spontaneous and uncoordinated, and it feels like one of the few times when it’s safe to be spontaneous and uncoordinated. Years later, my movements will be dubbed ‘The Phoebe Dance.’
3. It’s because of Mum’s nostalgic taste in music that I’m even able to dance, or at least able to dance as a stim.
4. Songs like ‘Mamma Mia,’ ‘September’ and ‘Daddy Cool’ are a special kind of magical. It’s all in the layering. Take ‘Mamma Mia’: it starts out with a simple piano melody, then morphs into an electric guitar melody, which transitions us to Agnetha Falskog and Frida Lyngstad singing in unison, until eventually Agnetha Falskog and Frida Lyngstad unleash their iconic harmonies and the song reaches heaven.
5. I’m no Boomer, but songs these days just don’t match up. At the age of twenty-three during the early 2020s I have ‘Don’t Start Now’, ‘Watermelon Sugar’ and ‘Deja Vu’, which are all good, I guess. But I’ve always preferred dancing to ABBA.
The Difficult Second Album (2009)
1. My Friday nights (and Saturday nights) (and Sunday nights) (and all other possible nights) are spent at the Singstar mic. It’s not your ordinary Singstar though; oh no it’s not. It’s a playlist made entirely out of ABBA songs. Mum got it the previous Christmas, and she’s decided to test it out with ‘Voulez-Vous’ in the living room.
2. Today, I’ve snuck in, without any inkling that my life is about to change for the better. Mum sings while the ‘Voulez-Vous’ music video plays. At around the halfway point of the video, Frida’s sparkly eyeshadow catches the light of the disco ball above, and it catches my eye.
3. I watch Mum for a bit. She sings ‘One Of Us’ and ‘Take A Chance On Me’ and ‘The Name Of The Game’ (one of ABBA’s best and most underrated songs), and it clicks in my brain that I’ve heard all these songs before.
4. A flashback rushes through me. A year or two prior, I was in the car with Dad on the way to Canberra to see family. I remember now that he’d had a whole list of tracks lined up for the ride, including but not limited to Moby, Talking Heads and most importantly the ABBA Gold album. As we were driving around the bend of Lake George I’d been tapping my feet along to ‘Dancing Queen.’
5. It’s a particularly special song, ‘Dancing Queen.’ The song is disco but also a ballad, euphoric but somehow simultaneously tragic. When you hear the lyrics “Friday night and the lights are low,” you picture yourself as a lonely youth. You find yourself wishing along with the seventeen-year-old Queen of the Dances that you’ll find some semblance of happiness soon. But that happiness is not ever lasting; it is ephemeral. It’s only for “when you get the chance.”
6. Mum tells me that she grew up with ABBA. She was there when ‘Fernando’ dominated the charts, when they toured Australia and ABBA The Movie came out in theatres, when they disbanded only to reunite after forty years (we’ll come to that later). I want to know more.
7. I join Mum on her Singstar sessions and something takes me over. ABBA, as I’m discovering now, has always been in my bloodstream and now it’s been fully activated.
8. I receive the entire set of albums for my eleventh birthday. This ends up being a great inconvenience to my parents, because on the way to school I refuse to play anything else. That’s another thing about being autistic: those damn special interests. This is only one in a very long line of obsessions (and it will grow longer, trust me), but during the years of 2008 to 2010 it’s all that matters to me. I bring my CD’s to school, thereby forcing the songs on my poor classmates.
9. It’s my one defining trait now. The Girl Who Loves ABBA. The Girl Who’s Always Singing Dancing Queen. The Girl Who Wears That Hilarious T-Shirt With All Four Members’ Faces On It.
10. It comes to a head during choir. We’re sitting down in a circle, waiting for the conductor to announce what we’ll be singing for the end-of-year concert. Surprise, surprise, she announces that it’ll be an ABBA medley. I jump out of my seat, scream and spin around like I used to do when I was five.
The Third Album That No One Cares About (2013)
1. I’m concealing a lot now. During High School, I sew a mask that’s thicker and blander than it's ever been. An undiagnosed autistic fish forced to swim in the neurotypical sea, I’m on a healthy dose of fakery.
2. It starts when I receive my report card: five A’s, three B’s, one C and one D. While at first this row of letters triggers pride in me, that feeling quickly dissipates when the comparison starts.
3. A classmate and I stand in front of the blue-grey door through which we enter our Latin class, my top subject. She asks me what I received in my report and I tell her that I got a 97 in Latin and French, but I only got a 53 in Maths. Her mouth opens, her impression at my 97 palpable. Then, she explains that she only got a B in Maths but got an A in everything else. An A in all but one subject.
4. Halfway through the year I begin to sew the mask, a mask that belongs to a Good Girl or a Brainiac or something socially appropriate. All the other girls are Good, Brainiacs. When we’re in music class, those girls compare music taste and in doing so, denounce ‘mainstream pop music.’
5. In my head, it’s imperative that I leave the Girl Who Loves ABBA behind.
6. Certain elements of my true self bleed out at times. My ears prick up when I hear someone singing ‘Dancing Queen’ and my peers notice, and I have to explain to my peers why my ears pricked up.
7. As I grow older, my friends and I exchange songs and share music tastes. It seems like I’ve been missing out on a lot: Two Door Cinema Club and Panic! At The Disco and Bastille. The kind of masculine indie rock that I’m hearing all the other girls talk about in the school corridors.
8. One night I stalk my peers’ Facebook accounts, specifically the ‘Likes’ section of their profiles, more specifically the ‘Musicians/Bands’ section of their ‘Likes’ sections. The names I read—Two Door Cinema Club, Panic! At The Disco, Bastille, Regina Spektor, HAIM—nest inside my brain. I open iTunes and sample their music. It’s alright. It’s intelligent. It’s interesting. It’s socially acceptable.
9. I’m feeling like Muriel in Muriel’s Wedding when all her fake friends tell her that they don’t listen to 70s music, they listen to 90s music, and that feeling is akin to nausea.
10. My music library builds. It’s mostly 2010s music now.
The Fourth, Actually Quite Good, Album (2018)
1. Many evenings are spent on my own. One night in second year uni, the loneliness hurts every part of me and I’m left keeling over on my bed, eyes wet and breath quick.
2. A text springs out from my phone: ‘Sorry we can’t hang out, Phoebe.’ I sob violently, like my body’s purging something I didn’t know needed to be purged (I’ll find out later that this is a manifestation of c-PTSD, with a dash of rejection sensitivity).
3. My thumb wiggles around the apps on my phone (another kind of stim). It lands on Spotify and the first album that comes up on the home button is Arrival by ABBA.
4. I can’t remember the last time I listened to the album in full; it was probably over five years ago.
5. My thumb presses down on the play button. Two bars of acoustic guitar in a major key thrum in my ears as ‘When I Kissed The Teacher’ begins. It builds and builds, just like ‘Mamma Mia.’ Then, the album as a whole builds and builds, melding euphoric pop with sad soft rock ballads and the odd Scandinavian instrumental track.
6. I can feel the music change my brain ever so slightly. The increase in serotonin is as clear as the piano glissando on which ‘Dancing Queen’ opens.
7. I’m not ready to unmask fully yet, but I know I need to surrender to this part of myself for my sanity’s sake.
8. At karaoke nights spiked with too many ciders (in company with the same friend who told me she couldn’t hang out with me just months earlier), I’m always pushed towards the mic.
9. The first time, a friend of my friend offers to duet ‘Dancing Queen’ with me: “K told me you like this song.”
10. Later, I sing the 1980 dark dance banger ‘Lay All Your Love On Me.’ My intoxicated body sways and my voice, hoarse from yelling over layered sounds, squeaks out the melody and I somehow pull it off. I’m momentarily relieved from the discomfort of socialising.
11. Looks like I’m the ABBA Girl again.
The Fifth, Best, Album (2021)
1. I’m starting to have more faith in myself, in the things that I truly love. 2021 pop culture—camouflaging pandemics and propaganda alike—reignites me.
2. I’m in the middle of the second ACT lockdown, and on my lunch break my phone buzzes with two messages: one from my mum, one from my best friend in New South Wales. They contain the same information. “ABBA has reunited and released two new singles exclamation mark smiley face smiley face!”
3. My body heaves as if I’m on the brink of a panic attack, but the emotion is not anxiety, it’s joy. It’s a joy I can’t remember feeling since I saw Mamma Mia! The Musical at the Canberra Theatre four years ago.
4. I call my mum, incoherent. ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh this is my dream come true!’ I respond to my friend’s message in all-caps: ‘I’M FUCKING CRYING’.
5. After I get off work, Mum plays the two new songs on the iPad. The first one, ‘I Still Have Faith In You,’ begins with Frida’s crooning mezzo-soprano, spinning messages of rebirth and camaraderie. Six quavers plonk in each bar, and I’m faced with the old and the new, the past and the present. The bridge soars with jubilance, and my happiness swells.
6. The second song, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down,’ is my favourite. Agnetha solos here, at first reminiscing about “the sound of children’s laughter,” then morphing into a classic disco-pop tune alight with the odd ‘Dancing Queen’-esque glissando.
7. It’s the same layering I heard back when I first danced to ‘Mamma Mia.’ ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’ keeps playing and replaying on my Spotify and I don’t know if or when it’ll ever stop.
8. The irony is, I wrote a version of this just over three years ago, when I was in the second year of my Bachelors. I’d responded to a prompt regarding ‘mixtape memoirs’ and had immediately thought of ABBA. So, I wrote the thing. But I didn’t write it fully, at least I didn’t have any grasp of the emotions and sensations listening to the band’s music gave me so there was no way I could reveal it through writing.
9. I discover I’m autistic this year. This discovery reveals everything.
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