You can recognize the greatness in a song almost instantly – it interrupts the status quo, it catches you off guard in the very best of ways.

Instruments, voices, and the empty spaces around them come together at one moment to be forever etched in your heart and mind. I can still remember the first time I heard “Take A Chance On Me” by ABBA – it was so different, so interesting and unlike anything I had heard before, that I almost erupted in a cheerful enthusiasm that is the closest to a Pentecostal moment I’ve ever had before. I was 12 years old, visiting my grandparents for the summer, and my grandma Pat was folding laundry in the master bedroom upstairs. Their house is an A frame house where the vaulted ceiling was 2 stories tall, and the master bedroom was at the very top, with a stained-glass window that opened up to the living room below.

While she folded socks and towels, she played the “ABBA Gold” CD on the house stereo system. I had never heard of ABBA at that point. When the third track came on, I felt this sense of excitement and curiosity as the locomotive “take-a-chance take-a-chance” came on. By the time the song was ramped up to the “if you’re all alone, when the pretty birds have flown”, the bumbling bass came on, something like a Swedish disco hoedown, and I was HOOKED.

I literally ran up the stairs to ask grandma Pat what this music I was hearing was called. “ABBA?” she replied as if I should have already known, pronouncing it like “Awwbuh” instead of the Australiamerican “Ebba”. To her, it was just the casual soundtrack to fold laundry to on a Saturday afternoon, but to me it was a revelation.

Up until that point, my musical fancy consisted of Pebbles (Do you wanna ride in my Mercedes boy ri-yide!), and a Randy Ttravis cassette that my other grandmother Theresa got me for Christrmas. Oh, and her Patsy Cline greatest hits cassette that was the only thing in the glovebox of her Mazda 626. But this ABBA was something different – it opened up a world of possibility, coming at just the right time, when preteen brains start to have the capacity to appreciate popular music.

“Take A Chance On Me” was so unbelievably catchy; it still is. And it seems like on paper it wouldn’t make sense – a call-and-response cheerleader type chant, with a barbershop-quartet slash onomatopeia rhythm section of “take-a-chance take-a-chance”, and that’s just the first 30 seconds.

By the time the disco bass makes its appearance, the song has released so many endorphinic moments that you are either addicted for life at that very moment, or you are never going to be.

Then there are the lyrics! While ABBA unfairly gets stereotyped as a band with “foreign” word choice and phrasing, they’ve actually always spot on. ABBA’s attempt at English is 1,000 times better than anyone else’s attempts at Swedish, let’s be fair. The lyrics have a brilliance to them that is not necessarily about technical proficiency or poetic license – the brilliance lies in the moods invoked.

The song is something along the lines of a challenge, a call to action, a “double dare” moment, but it’s laced with this combination of hubris, overconfidence, and insecurity all at the same time. “If you’ve got no place to go, or you’re feeling down…” At first, we are unsure of where they stand – are they good enough?

But then it becomes clear that you would be stupid not to take a chance on them! They thought of it all – and they are confident in the long haul approach to seduction. “Oh you can take your time baby, I’m in no hurry, know I’m gonna get you”.

LET ME TELL YOU NOW! If there was ever any doubt that they should not take a chance on them, all reservations disappear with the constant reminder that “it’s magic!” Paired with that multichord synthesizer arpeggio, it is the ultimate convincing moment.

Then there’s a hoedown guitar of country music proportions that comes out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, other than just because ABBA are just that good.

And then it starts all over again. What brilliance!

So while a great song has the capacity to get you hooked from the moment you hear it, a timeless song has so much to offer that you relisten to it and hear even more context, even more nuance, a few more easter eggs and surprises, that you are always going back to the song because the richness it provides is sustaining and gradual, and there’s always more to be impressed by.

That’s how “Take A Chance On Me” reads in my mind. It never ceases to amaze and surprise.

From that moment at age 12 to the present day, ABBA has never gotten old. That song and that moment turned me onto a whole world of possibilities.

It was the only thing we listened to that summer (other than Sade) – ABBA Gold on repeat. Over and over, in the car, at home, everywhere. Whether it was the Robin Hood forest-adventuring disco stomper of “Gimme Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight”, or the sleazy, high-school-concert-band tympani of “Does Your Mother Know”, ABBA was a fixture and a family affair.

When I came back to Texas in time for school to start, I shared my enthusiasm for ABBA to my mother and my aunt, and it turns out they both loved ABBA since they were children. My mom was partial to “Does Your Mother Know” (obviously – that song was about her, only she was eventually the mother herself!)

My aunt Sara would probably say “Knowing Me, Knowing You” (uh huh) was her favorite. We would watch the music video over and over and pantomimed the perpendicular poses of Frida and Agnetha’s dentally eclectic faces and lips. The awkwardness of their music videos (hey, they were pioneers) paired with the beautifully weird harmonies results in some kind of intersection of impossible things that makes ABBA so great.

We would sing “Knowing Me, Knowing You” so much that we totally overlooked the fact that the song is about a couple breaking up, and we would sing it over and over in front of her friend April who was going through a divorce at the time. Once we realized this, we basically just giggled and went “oops!” and kept on singing. My aunt Sara then did the ultimate next-step maneuver in nuturing my ABBA obsession, and gave me a VHS of copy of “Muriel’s Wedding”. The Christmas after that, she gave me Erasure’s “Abba-esque” EP, and it’s been all ABBA turds and the fateful nights we crossed the Rio Grande from that point forward. She created a monster!

I urge you to consider revisitng the songs and the bands that first got you hooked – there’s the nostalgic aspect, but there’s also the sense of enduring apprecation that you can only get from growing up and becoming an adult. Everyone starts with “Dancing Queen”, and some of us serious nerds end up somewhere between “The Visitors” and “The Winner Takes it All”, or god forbid, tickets to Mamma Mia.

Or, you could be so obsessed (like me), and know exactly how manty winks were winked during the music video to “Take A Chance On Me”. If you count Frida’s demi-winks where she doesn’t quite close her eyelid all the way, it’s 6.