All That She Wants

The song is supposedly about young women in Denmark using men as "Stud Bulls" in order to get pregnant (to get welfare payments for being single mothers). Only not really. "Baby" is often used as slang for "boyfriend" (think "Baby, baby, where did our love go?"). Being a Swedish act, Ace of Base didn't quite get the hang of using English colloquialisms in their songs. Another lyrical oddity: "catching tan." But they didn't care, anyway. "I think it was to our advantage that English was not our mother language," Ulf Ekberg, keyboardist and vocalist for the band, explained in John Seabrook's book The Song Machine, "because we are able to treat English very respectless, and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody."

This was the first hit for Ace Of Base. A few months later, "The Sign" stayed at #1 in the US for six weeks.

Ace of Base sent their demo tape to Swedish producer Denniz Pop, who hated the song (then called "Mr. Ace") and refused to produce it. But there was a problem: The tape was stuck in his car's tape deck. Every morning, he had to listen to the track on the way to work, and every morning he heard something new in it. Ekberg explained in The Sound Machine: "Jonas and I are good at melodies, but there were too many things happening on the track. Denniz was very good at erasing things, and making the sound picture cleaner, and simplified. I think he took away maybe fifty percent of our instrumentation." The whistling melody was originally heard at the end, but Denniz moved it to the introduction, making the song instantly recognizable.