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Lasse Wellander, the soft-spoken musician who performed guitar on a lot of ABBA’s most well-known tracks, toured with the Swedish supergroup for years, and helped create the Mamma Mia! soundtrack, died Friday, in accordance with his household.
“It's with indescribable disappointment that we have now to announce that our beloved Lasse has fallen asleep,” a Sunday assertion posted to the Swede’s Fb web page learn. “Lasse not too long ago fell unwell in what turned out to be disseminated most cancers and early on Good Friday he handed away, surrounded by his family members.”
Calling him an “superb” and “humble” musician, the put up additionally memorialized Wellander as a “fantastic husband, father, brother, uncle and grandfather,” concluding that he had been a “hub in our lives, and it’s unbelievable that we now need to reside on with out you.”
In October 1974, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus had been trying to find session musicians after they heard a rock-blues group known as Nature taking part in in a Stockholm membership. They tagged alongside to a rehearsal, and requested Wellander, the band’s guitarist, if he could be inquisitive about recording with ABBA. “If I bear in mind rightly it was ‘Intermezzo No. 1,’ ‘Tiger,’ and two or three different numbers,” he advised the journal Guitaristfinal 12 months.
ABBA, which had fashioned two years prior, boasted a lineup consisting of two married couples—Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog. The prospect of any marital strife amongst his new bandmates wasn’t sufficient to dissuade Wellander, nevertheless. ABBA was already a family title, having pumped out two studio albums and received that 12 months’s Eurovision Music Contest with “Waterloo.” He sensed that the pop group was going to “be large, fairly early on,” he defined. “Robust songs all the best way. Even the straightforward pop numbers had been very prime quality.”
He promptly signed as much as be the group’s lead guitarist, and “performed on every thing from ’75 onwards,” he stated.
Wellander joined ABBA because the group toured Europe, Australia, and Japan over the subsequent half-decade. He could be credited on each album the group put out between 1975 and 1981, ending with The Guests. By then, each couples had divorced, and the ambiance within the recording studio was, “by pure causes, a bit completely different than earlier than,” Wellander recalled to the Sunday Categoricalin 2021.
He obtained the sensation that “possibly it was all coming to an finish,” he stated, and wasn’t shocked when he obtained the decision that the group was taking a break. By 1982, ABBA was completed, seemingly for good.
Wellander continued working as a “freelancer,” as he put it, collaborating with different Swedish musicians. A prolific session guitarist, he performed on 6,331 titles and 1,698 albums over the course of his profession, in accordance with information collected as much as March 2020 by the Swedish Artists’ and Musicians’ Curiosity Group. In 2018, Wellander was honored with the Swedish Musicians Union’s Studioräven Award for his session work.
He additionally discovered time to rack up seven solo albums to his personal title. Two of these albums cracked the Prime 40 charts within the Eighties, in accordance with a biography on ABBA’s web site.
He continued working along with his former bandmates, taking part in on a number of of Fältskog’s solo albums and contributing to Chess, the musical a couple of Chilly Battle-era chess event penned by Andersson and Ulvaeus. After a 1984 idea album and live performance tour, Chess was staged on London’s West Finish and later made the leap to Broadway.
Wellander was additionally tapped to contribute to the soundtracks of each ABBA jukebox musicals, 2008’s Mamma Mia! and its 2018 sequel Mamma Mia! Right here We Go Once more.
In 2017, Wellander was driving in his automobile when he obtained a name from Andersson, who requested him if he may come to the recording studio, saying he was fascinated by making “‘one or two songs with the outdated band,’” he advised the Categorical.
“At first I didn’t understand what he meant,” he continued. “Then I noticed he meant ABBA!”
With Andersson, Ulvaeus, Fältskog, and Lyngstad reforming for the primary time in practically 40 years to make 2021’s Voyage, Wellander would go on to play guitar on eight of the album’s 10 tracks. “Everybody was so completely satisfied and excited,” he stated of the recording course of. “It actually gave the impression of ABBA.”