The Same Woman Inspired Two Songs — In One, He Wrote Her As Dead

Cat Stevens wrote a song imagining his girlfriend lying in a coffin because she left for a month. When she left him for good, he wrote a second song about it — and someone else's cover reached the charts before his own.

In 1970, a British singer-songwriter wrote a farewell song to a girlfriend that never even name-checked her.

It became his first real hit in America.

But it wasn't the first song he'd written about her. That one was even stranger — because in that song, she was already dead.

The first song imagined her as a corpse

Cat Stevens met American model and actress Patti D'Arbanville in the late 1960s. Their relationship lasted almost two years, with D'Arbanville frequently traveling between London and New York for work.

At one point she left for New York for what she thought was an ordinary, one-month trip.

Stevens didn't take it that way. He wrote "Lady D'Arbanville," a mournful ballad about a lover grieving as though the woman he loved had died — "Lady D'Arbanville, why do you sleep so still."

D'Arbanville was baffled when she found out. "I left for a month, it wasn't the end of the world, was it?" she said in a 1973 interview. "But he wrote this whole song about 'Lady D'Arbanville, why do you sleep so still.' It's about me dead... for him it was like I was lying in a coffin."

Cat Stevens, pictured around 1972, two years after writing both songs inspired by Patti D'Arbanville.

Then the relationship actually ended

By 1970, Stevens and D'Arbanville's careers really were pulling them apart for good — his recording career, her modeling work.

"[Patti and I] had some great times together, but I started recording and she was doing her modeling and it just became like two different worlds," Stevens said years later.

This time, the song he wrote wasn't about grief. It was a warning.

"Wild World" imagines a man watching the woman he loves walk out into a dangerous world without him — half tender, half unable to let her go. He tells her to take good care, to make a lot of nice friends, and admits he still thinks of her "like a child," even as she leaves.

A reggae cover reached the charts first

Stevens included "Wild World" on his fourth album, Tea for the Tillerman, released in November 1970.

Before his own version made it big, though, Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff recorded his own reggae take on the song — and it reached No. 8 in the UK, three months ahead of Stevens' single.

Stevens' original version, released in the US in January 1971, entered the Billboard Hot 100 at a modest No. 83 in February. It climbed steadily — No. 35, then into the top 20 — before peaking at No. 11 on April 10, 1971, where it stayed for 13 weeks on the chart.

▶ Listen: Cat Stevens — "Wild World" (Official Audio)

He later denied it was about her at all

Decades on, Stevens gave a more complicated account of the song's meaning.

Speaking on The Chris Isaak Hour in 2009, he said "Wild World" was really about himself — about returning to music after nearly dying from complications of tuberculosis a few years earlier, and warning himself to be careful heading back out into the world.

"It was not me writing about somebody specific, although other people may have informed the song, but it was more about me," he said.

Even so, he's also directly credited the breakup elsewhere, telling Billboard in 2019: "'Wild World' was really my parting song with my girlfriend Patti D'Arbanville."

A song that keeps finding new audiences

"Wild World" never reached No. 1 in the US or UK on its own. But across four different charting versions in America — Stevens' original, a cover by The Gentrys, Maxi Priest's 1989 reggae version, and Mr. Big's 1993 hard-rock take — the song has never really left the radio.

In 2025, more than half a century after it was written, "Wild World" found an entirely new audience on TikTok, becoming a favorite backing track for nostalgic, acoustic-style videos among listeners who weren't born when Stevens first sang it.

As for D'Arbanville, she later said she preferred being the "Wild World" muse to the one where the song pictured her dead. "I quite like 'Wild World,'" she said in 2012, "but 'Lady D'Arbanville' is about me — dead. I found that weird."

The Heartbreaking Story Behind One of the Greatest Breakup Songs Ever Written

In 1980, four people were trying to make music together while their personal lives were falling apart.

ABBA had become one of the biggest groups in the world. But behind the glitter, costumes and enormous pop hits, the group’s two marriages were breaking down.

Earlier that year, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog had divorced after seven years of marriage. They had two children together, yet they continued working side by side in ABBA.

Then came a song that would make that situation almost impossible to ignore.

“The Winner Takes It All.”

The song began taking shape in June 1980 at Polar Music Studios in Stockholm.

Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson brought in a new musical idea. At first, it wasn’t even called The Winner Takes It All. The working title was “The Story of My Life.”

The first version didn’t work.

The arrangement felt too stiff and mechanical, so they went back to the drawing board.

Eventually, Benny developed the distinctive descending piano figure that became one of the song’s defining sounds, while Björn began working on the lyrics.

And Björn had something very real to draw from.

He was writing about a relationship ending.

His own marriage to Agnetha had ended only around 18 months earlier.

But there is an important distinction.

Björn later explained that the song’s story was fictional, even though his divorce provided emotional inspiration. In other words, the lyrics weren’t literally a transcript of what happened between him and Agnetha. They took the feelings surrounding a breakup and turned them into a dramatic story.

Then came the part that makes the song so damn powerful.

Agnetha was going to sing it.

Think about that for a second.

The man who had been her husband had written lyrics about the end of a relationship.

And now she was standing in the studio, singing them.

Agnetha later described the recording as one of the strongest emotional experiences of her ABBA career. She said she could hear the sadness in the performance because both she and Björn were going through a tragic period.

Yet she didn’t reject the song.

Quite the opposite.

Agnetha has repeatedly identified “The Winner Takes It All” as her favorite ABBA song, praising its music and lyrics and describing singing it as almost like acting a part.

And that may be why her vocal performance feels so different.

She’s not screaming.

She’s not trying to overpower the music.

She’s controlled.

Almost painfully controlled.

It sounds like someone trying to keep themselves together while admitting that something they once believed would last forever has ended.

The recording itself was completed and mixed in June 1980. A few weeks later, ABBA filmed the promotional video on Sweden’s west coast, with director Lasse Hallström. The video deliberately leaned into the emotional atmosphere of the song, using images of happier times alongside Agnetha’s visibly melancholy performance.

Then, on July 21, 1980, the single was released.

And it became a huge international success.

But there was something almost surreal about the timing.

ABBA had built its image around two couples making music together.

Now one of those marriages had ended.

And instead of hiding that pain completely, they turned some of it into music.

The song’s title sounds almost cruel:

The Winner Takes It All.

But Björn later made clear that there wasn’t actually a winner in his divorce from Agnetha. The phrase was part of the fictional story he created for the song.

That’s what makes the song more complicated than a simple breakup anthem.

It’s not really about revenge.

It’s about surrender.

About looking at something that once meant everything to you and accepting that you can’t bring it back.

And because Agnetha was singing it, listeners couldn’t help hearing the real-life story underneath the fictional one.

The song was released as part of the Super Trouper era, when ABBA’s music was becoming increasingly mature and emotionally complicated. The group could still produce enormous pop hits, but beneath the polished sound were four people dealing with relationships, divorce and the realities of growing older.

And there was another divorce coming.

ABBA’s other married couple, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, would separate soon afterward. Their own breakup later influenced another ABBA song, “When All Is Said and Done.”

So the song exists at a fascinating point in ABBA’s history.

The group was still incredibly successful.

But the personal foundation underneath it was changing.

And somehow, they kept making music.

That’s what makes “The Winner Takes It All” so enduring.

You don’t need to know anything about ABBA’s history to feel it.

Anyone who has lost a relationship can understand the emotion.

The feeling that there are no villains.

No easy answers.

No way to rewind time.

Just two people who once belonged together—and eventually didn’t.

More than four decades later, the song still feels incredibly intimate.