The Game was chock full of diverse, "hit ready" material, most of which was stripped down noticeably and deliberately from their more bombastic 70s sound. John Deacon's "Need Your Loving Tonight" certainly comes off as a triumphant pop single even if that's not exactly what it ended up as. But already following his very triumphant "Another One Bites the Dust" off the same album, it only further enforced the fact that Deacon had hook-writing chops in spades.
This was Queen's first hit in England, another fantasy diddy by Freddie Mercury and Brian May, (the latter uncredited). I have to admit to rarely listening to either the instrumental "Seven Seas of Rhye" that closes the debut album or the full version that does so on Queen II. This is because the 1991 CD bonus remix, (most of which were pointless sans Rick Rubin's "We Will Rock You" which turned the final lick of May's guitar solo into a riff that the rest of the band then jammed on), has always been my most preferred since I initially heard it.
With a wealth of material recorded for The Miracle, (often sections of ideas rather than full songs), Queen chose to add most of Freddie's brief "A New Life Is Born" to Roger's more complete "Breakthru" to basically kill two birds with one stone. As the band's drummer, naturally Taylor's compositions tended to be more on the driving side. Case in point is "Breakthru's " hooky keyboard riff and to a lesser extent the music video that featured the band on top of a moving steam train.
Though Brian May's riff writing skills were always top notch and he more customarily stuck with guitar heavy compositions, he'd from time to time pen some piano ballads that were as strong as any of Freddie's. The Game's "Save Me" still has bulky guitars as it should, but it's a part-mellow counterpoint to the album's opener and similarly paced "Play the Game". For the lyrics, May supposedly channeled a friend of his breakup with his wife into a heartfelt plea of not being alone.
Roger Taylor worked a lot on his own during the News of the World sessions, "Fight from the Inside" being his second composition on the album to be almost entirely performed by him. Usually I find Taylor's songs plenty descent, but by default they end up being the "weaker" moments on the best Queen albums more often than not. "Fight" though is a highlight, with an equally sturdy and funky riff flavoring it up.
One way to make your foreign, non-English speaking audiences feel more at home is to sing the chorus to your song in their language instead of yours, which brings us to "Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)". Featuring Brian May tickling the ivories again and a huge, (of course), sing-along section in Japanese, the A Day at the Races caper was put out as single only in that country and also performed live there every opportunity since.
Let's stick with A Day at the Races piano ballads shall we? Freddie's "You Take My Breath Away" opens with some of his very most gorgeous vocal harmonies, this time handled exclusively by the frontman as opposed to the usual mix of himself, Roger, and Brian. The song has a dash of forlorn mood to it and is very sparely arranged compared to Queen standards, (Roger Taylor only steps in to provide some cymbal flourishes).
Brian May opted to perform three independent guitar solos during the fade-out to his "Some Day One Day" track on Queen II, which is unique in the fact that far more commonly, the axe legend would instead harmonize a single lead to a near comically marvelous extent. This was also the first Queen song that he wrote and sang entirely alone. Never a live staple or even put out as a b-side, it's a wondrous and very lush ending to May's part of the album's "Side White".
John Deacon back at it again with another excellent song on an album where he had more than one excellent song appear, this time being News of the World. "Who Needs You" is the only bossa nova in Queen's entire catalog and there was no better a record for it to logically fit on than News, which was all over the place on every other track as well. Deacon consistently delivered the least heavy material to the band, which was necessary and welcomed to their repertoire being as varied as possible.
My brother once played "Brighton Rock" to our buddy, (Zaius bass player Jeremy Bellen), when we were kids in an attempt to convince him that Brian May was a "better" guitarist than Jimmy Page. And my brother actually won that argument at that moment. "Rock" features May's signature, unaccompanied guitar solo piece, (which would be a live mainstay ever since and previously was in "Son and Daughter"), and tells the story of two mods holidaying in Brighton. It's another textbook circus rock Queen highlight.
Queen set themselves out to showcase such a strong, distinct sound from the word go on their debut and Freddie Mercury's challenging, multi-sectioned "Great King Rat" is a crystallized representation of that sound. The lyrics once more have religious imagery in it and use an entire segment as a somewhat blasphemous mock sermon, pleading in character to "Put out the good and keep the bad" and not to "believe all you read in the Bible". As if the world needed any more reasons to love Freddie Mercury.
The first of three old-timey jingles to appear on A Night at the Opera was Freddie's cheeky and great "Lazy On a Sunday Afternoon". One of the shortest of Queen songs, (clocking in at just over a minute long), more recording studio exploration took place in miking the vocals through a pair of headphones placed in a tin can to give it a bygone era sound. The band would eventually abandoned these type of throwback compositions, though calculated schmaltz, (always Freddie's doing), still found a home on future albums here or there.
Using universally sympathetic lyrics about grieving and mourning those that have passed on, Brian May delivered another piano ballad with "All Dead, All Dead" on News of the World. Freddie only provided harmony vocals, but nothing else from Mr. Mercury was needed really. This has long been one of my favorite of May's tunes and though the majority of it is arranged gingerly, it easily has one of his finest multi-tracked guitar orchestrations near the middle.
Well, time to get the elephant out of the room, meaning answering the "Where is 'Bohemian Rhapsody' gonna show up?" question. At this juncture, what more can really be said about Queen's signature piece? I've never tired of it and have always loved it, but as you can see, I've never placed it at the very top of the heap as the masses have. The band really did pull out all the stops on it, layering the ever loving shit out of the recording, unleashing it to radio stations unedited, and providing the world with one of the all time most headbanging riffs and opera breakdowns in all of rock music.
Freddie's "The Millionaire Waltz" was written about both their and Elton John's manager John Reid and is a studio performance tour de force for the band. It's a complex, ballroom piano serenade with multiple changes, John Deacon performing lead bass, and Brian May trying to set a record for how many guitar overdubs he could thrown on a track. The middle section where it busts out the heavy is a "typical" Queen moment, where Freddie's nostalgia clashes magnificently with Brian's gigantic guitar orchestration.
The super-heavy "White Man" was Brian May's take on the injustices of Native Americans by European invaders and is definitely one of the hardest hitting songs in all of Queen's catalog. It utilizes that trusty hard rock hallmark to bounce from quiet verses to bombastically loud choruses, (something Kurt Cobain for one would cherish doing in his own writing decades later), and it comes as close to menacing, full-out metal as Queen would ever get.
Sometimes a lyric can't conceivably leave less to the imagination if it tried and "Fat Bottomed Girls" is just such a lyric. While watching a bike racing marathon tickled Freddie's creative bone, Brian May simply spoke a red-blooded, male truth in that "fat bottomed girls make the rockin' world go ROUND", (see what he did there?). Musically, this song's a cappela intro is pure gold, (and is a nice distant cousin to Kansas' "Carry on Wayward Son"), and the bluesy, drop-D riff is one of the band's more simple and fun.
Not necessarily a "working band on the road" song which every such act in the 70s was almost required to deliver at some point, Brian May's "Now I'm Here" is more specifically an ode to their first American tour supporting Mott the Hoople. Said tour was cut just short as Brian came down with hepatitis, which is when the band began working on Sheer Heart Attack. "Now" has some memorable stereo-panned vocal echos and a characteristic May riff as well.
One of the most covered Queen songs is "Who Wants to Live Forever" which was written for the Highlander film by Brian May in the backseat of a car after seeing some rushes from it. Though it was intentionally tailored to a specific moment in said movie, May was channeling plenty of his own feelings of loss around that time, (his father had recently died and his first marriage was on the fritz). John Deacon sat this one out, with May providing all the instrumentation along with the National Philharmonic Orchestra.
Here's yet another aggressive Brian May gem showing up on Jazz and featuring a real thunderstorm recorded by the band, humorously credited to "God" on the liner notes. May has admitted to being far more fond of "Dead on Time" than Jazz' hit "Fat Bottomed Girls" that he likewise authored, but apparently in the Queen camp he was alone in this and the song never got performed live, though it was thrown a bone as a b-side to "Mustapha". As you can see, I agree with May.
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