[quote="Squeely"]It's probably for the best that ABBA wasn't available. With all due respect to ABBA fans, their music bores the heck out of me, and I get the feeling that their songwriting would be a weird fit for a Disney film, especially one set in Africa. I mean, perhaps it would have worked, because using a British pop star worked. But I can't shake the feeling that ABBA could have easily made this film go from great to awful.
I'm glad Elton John ended up being the one to help write the songs. He feels like the better choice to me.[/quote]
I'm not sure about the song-writing one way or another but compositionally ABBA would have clashed with what they were trying to do with TLK.
Elton John worked with real unaltered instruments, ABBA didn't and with the sorta exception of 'can't wait to be king' most of Elton's work in TLK is real unaltered instruments. The rest of the score also focuses pretty heavily on this and some bits were simply beyond what could be done with electronic instruments. Epic moving music is a strings orchestra* on most occasions and when it's not it's taking notes about how string orchestras work to create that music to replicate it with other instruments.
There's a reason why
Apocalyptica still has traction in a world where electronic music is so much easier to make. There's centuries of evolution in the wood and strings of a cello, all responding to something not easily understood in waveforms, what sounds good to the human ear, what resonates, literally and metaphorically. This isn't to say that electronic music is all bad, I
appreciate a fair bit of it, but I view them as instruments in need of maturing before they attain the versatility of older instruments.
*This is to say an orchestra with a strings section, not necessarily excluding other instruments