Since 2002, Megga founders Tony & Gillyée Carey have paid tribute to ABBA and their exceptional contribution to music through live shows. It gave them great satisfaction to assemble casts around Australia to help replicate the ABBA sound, with increasing success, and deliver shows to Australia audiences that not only featured the Gold hits, but also introduced rarely-performed ABBA songs. 

In 2013, Tony & Gillyée conceived of a studio-based recording project, which they named "ABBAnova", that would result in an ABBA Tribute CD that was utterly unique: essentially a "new" ABBA album of rare and unreleased songs, arranged and produced with the classic ABBA sound.

Since the initial concept, the CD has expanded into a 3 year project, including 3 CDs, an EP plus bonus tracks to accompany each CD release. In 2014, the goal is the first volume, entitled "Back Again": an album of tracks written and produced during ABBA's heyday, specifically between 1967 and 1981.

"ABBAnova" is a project by ABBA fans, for ABBA fans. 

Your pledges will help us present a world-class, historic album that honours and continues ABBA's musical legacy to us all.

In 2014, Volume 1, "Back Again", celebrates the classic ABBA sound that we recall when we think of ABBA: the sound of "Ring Ring", "Waterloo", "Mamma Mia", "S.O.S.", "Fernando" and "Dancing Queen", to name a few.

The "Back Again" album is a fan's dream come true: songs like "I Am An A" and "I'm Still Alive" have never been given the ABBA treatment in the recording studio, until now. We have never heard "Arrival" sung with Björn's lyrics, ABBA-style, or some songs in English.

Each "ABBAnova" song is an untold chapter of the ABBA story; each CD is an imaginary tale of what might have been, of different choices made along roads not travelled.

And finally, the success of each album leads to the next. In 2015, Volume 2 will be called "Opus 10", and feature the Holy Grail of ABBA songs, "Just Like That".

Your pledges will help us give the entire "ABBAnova" project ABBA Style.

Additional gear purchased will be used throughout the 3 year project, helping us to emulate the ABBA sound more closely when we go into the recording studio. We will always try to create that sound throughout the "ABBAnova" project, by choosing the most useful and authentic microphones to use in acoustically modified recording rooms.

We hope to launch the CD with a music video for at least one of the songs, in the style of the classic ABBA music clips, thanks to your support.

At the end of the recording of the "Back Again" album, we intend to do a professional photo shoot, with the aim of producing classic imagery befitting an album that continues ABBA's musical legacy. The resulting artwork will be the final step in the album's production, just ahead of the album's worldwide release.

Additional funds raised above our target will help us continue our work and expand the scope of the "ABBAnova" project into the future, making it possible to improve on our technology in the studio. We may even be able to bring you future releases sooner rather than later.

Already, "ABBAnova" has encountered obstacles to progress:

One of the greatest challenges was to assemble the music and lyrics of over a dozen extremely hard-to-find songs. In more than one case, Swedish-language versions abounded, but it was impossible to locate English lyrics, or an English-language recording to provide a template for Megga's version. The heroes of the day have been ABBA fans, who have generously shared from their extraordinary personal collections, and who have time and again supplied the missing pieces from this very complex puzzle.

In a similar way, the "ABBAnova" project needs to reach the worldwide network of ABBA fans in order to be an artistic success. Unless each CD becomes more than just a local release in rural Queensland, the impact of the project's uniqueness is diminished. Once again, the answer is to reach out to the fans.