Recorded during the debut album sessions, Freddie Mercury's up-tempo ballad "Mad the Swine" was left off said album allegedly due to the band and producer Roy Thomas Baker disagreeing with the result. Similar to other material from the same period, it contains religious themes and seems to compare Jesus Christ to a pig. Whether intentionally blasphemous or not, I approve.
John Deacon's contribution to the Highlander film and soundtrack album A Kind of Magic that was then released as a single was the keyboard saturated "One Year of Love". It's unique in that Brian May doesn't appear on it at all, Deacon instead handling virtually all of the instrumentation. Though a less collaborative effort than others in Queen's catalog, it's still a lovely yet syrupy addition to their "hits" collection.
The very last thing that Freddie Mercury ever recorded in the studio is the vocal to what was to become "Mother Love". Queen's posthumously finished and released Made In Heaven only featured a few songs worth of post-Innuendo recorded material done during the final months of Freddie's life, usually when he was leaning on a recording console too weak to stand up but never too weak to sing his ass off to the extent that you'd never know from listening that he was in his last days. Aside from the title track which was simply a re-recording by the rest of the band of a Mr. Bad Guy song, "Mother Love" is the album's strongest moment.
More New Testament hemmed, debut album Queen, Freddie certainly seemed to have the would-be messiah on his mind at the time. Odd that he rarely returned to such subject matter again throughout his career and certainly never as blatantly as straight-up calling a song "Jesus" and featuring a chorus about going down to see the lord. All that aside though, it's a highlight on the album and in spite of the fact that it sounds like it could fit in a book of church songs, it's one of countless testimonies to the fact that this band could write about anything and still make it kick more ass than it logically should.
This was one of the few Hot Space jams that didn't sound like a synthy dance song, understandably as it's Brian May authored and the guitar player naturally stuck to guitar heavy compositions nine times out of ten. Hilariously, May was shit-faced when he tracked the guitar solo that made the cut after being severely frustrated with his earlier, sober takes in the evening. The song references John Lennon's then recent murder, (the second track on the album to due so), and acts as an anti-firearms anthem of sorts.
My first of a few "cheats" on this list, the opening one-two track punch to The Miracle features two songs brought in by Freddie that the rest of the band helped flesh out. They also run right into each other and both feature lyrics about partaking in an extravagant shin-dig. The stronger of the two "Khashoggi's Ship" in particular is about Saudi Arabian billionaire Adnan Khashoggi's luxury yacht and is noticeably heavier than it's "Party" counterpart.
Out of all the band members, Freddie Mercury would be the one to write a song about hot, steamy fornication. With lines like "You suck my mind, I blow your head" and "You say you hungry, I give you meat", this is one of the least subtle sets of Queen lyrics and easily one of the more humorous. It's got a "Whole Lotta Love" reminiscent orgasm section and some of Roger Taylor's more flashy drum fill outbursts to boot.
Coming out of the more white funk, drum machine laced, dance sound of Hot Space, The Works had some more guitar driven moments to go along with the poppier ones and Brian May's "Hammer to Fall" is the most memorable. The lyrics could allude to the Cold War and the Soviet Unions hammer and sickle symbol or simply the concept of death being an inevitable part of life, but it chiefly stands as one of Queen's better, heavier 80s moments.
Brought in initially by Roger Taylor as a song inspired by Martin Luther King and then reworked by Freddie Mercury to include more lighthearted humor, (including the closing line "Gimme, gimme, gimme fried chicken!"), "One Vision" was the opening A King of Magic song, chosen as such because it seemed ideal to open a live set list with. It was featured in the film Iron Eagle as opposed to Highlander like the bulk of the Magic album, having the band spreading their wealth of movie ready rock songs ever wider.
Yet another Queen song with a tie to a film soundtrack, this time the adaptation of The Hotel New Hampshire for which Freddie wrote "Keep Passing the Open Windows" initially for. The band was originally set to compose a crop of songs for said movie ala Flash Gordon, but that eventually fell through, so they instead chose to include the up-tempo, piano-based "Open Windows" for The Works album, which was a wise move.
Freddie Mercury from time to time would partake of cheeky, flamboyantly over-the-top vocal phrasing and the b-side to the "Seven Seas of Rhye" single "See What a Fool I've Been" is probably the biggest offender. Musically, it's one of only two straight-ahead blues numbers in Queen's discography, here inspired by the Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee song "That's How I Feel". It was initially toyed with during Brian May and Roger Taylor's pre-Queen band Smile, before Freddie came in to lavishly gay-up the vocals.
The Flash Gordon soundtrack is barely a proper Queen album as it only contains about two-ish "real" songs on it, the rest basically being snippets of dialog from the film wrapped around incidental music composed by the band. Of course "Flash's Theme" is the more popular moment on the album, but the closing "The Hero" contains some sweet Brian May riffage as well as the identifiable "Flash...ah ah!" chorus in "Theme", hence my choosing to include it here.
Written by Freddie Mercury with some lyrical assistance from Jamaican musician/actor/Freddie love interest Peter Straker, "I'm Going Slightly Mad" was one of the more fun, light-hearted moments on the Innuendo album. Keyboard based, it's got a slightly, (pun intended), creepy vibe to it as well, though it's pretty self-explanatory with Mr. Mercury basically rattling off a handful of cliches to express how bonkers he's feeling.
Only a handful of Queen songs feature zero guitar or harmony vocals and the News of the World closer "My Melancholy Blues" is one of them. It's a bar lounge piano ballad that sounds like it'd sit right at home during a cocktail hour, no doubt intentionally. Always a band to try their hand at whatever style of song they wanted, the material on News is arguably the band's most eclectic and a song like "Melancholy" fits every so aptly for that reason alone.
Sung in a consistently high register by Freddie Mercury, (and thus never performed live by the band, presumably for that reason), the penultimate moment on "Side Black" to Queen II is "Funny How Love Is". The song was composed and created entirely in studio and actually acts as a proper closer to the side long medley with "Seven Seas of Rhye" appearing separately from it to close the album out. It's also rather jovial sounding and enormously layered as Queen was often wont to do with their tracks.
Queen had a number of unpleasant run-ins with the British press throughout their career and at the time that Brian May composed of "Scandal", (playing the keyboards on it as well), much of his personal life was unfavorably discussed in the tabloids. The rumors surrounding Freddie's poor health and distance from the public eye also contributed to the genesis of the track, one of the several highlights released as a single off The Miracle.
And speaking of The Miracle and singles release off of it, the title track was the last of such and has one of the band's funniest music videos, with children miming as the band throughout the bulk of it. A collaborative song between the entire group, (with Freddie and John Deacon initially spawning it), "The Miracle" has the sort of uplifting lyrics that they often did without going exactly full anthem with them.
Swiping a melody from a line in Ruggero Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci, "It's a Hard Life" is another stellar piano ballad by Mercury. Both Roger Taylor and Brian May were openly appalled by the music video which featured very silly period costumes that were embarrassing even by the defining standards set by the 1980s. But the song itself has always been a highlight to The Works for me and was the third straight successful single in the UK particularly to be released from it.
There probably wasn't a more perfectly suited closing song than "The Show Must Go On" for what was understandably considered to be the final album that Queen would make while Freddie Mercury was alive, being Innuendo. The keyboard hook that runs throughout was Roger Taylor and John Deacon's doing, Brian May along with Freddie fleshing out the lyrics and melody. The song is given an undeniable urgency of course due to it's subject matter, but also Freddie's typically superhuman vocal, which he apparently nailed after chugging some vodka and saying "I'll fucking do it, darling."
Not that every Queen song they performed live didn't still deliver at the highest possible quality mind you, but very few of them were exponentially improved upon more than the Jazz track "Let Me Entertain You". This is naturally fitting as it was constructed by Mercury to be just such a live showstopper. The lyrics read as a check-off list of how, well, entertaining the band truly was and show all of Freddie's chin-raised chutzpah in their proper setting.
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