Essential Queen: 40 songs that will rock you

The final song on the final album Queen recorded with Freddie Mercury—he died a matter of weeks after it was released as a single in October 1991—“The Show Must Go On” can be considered a farewell from the singer to his audience. When the band wrote and recorded the song in 1990, Mercury was ailing. Guitarist Brian May, who wrote the bulk of the song, worried that his bandmate would not be able to perform the operatic melody, yet with the aid of some vodka, the singer rallied, turning the song’s decaying glamor into an anthem of perseverance.

Harboring some regrets about not issuing John Deacon’s “You And I” as a single from A Day At The Races, Queen decided to release the bassist’s “Spread Your Wings” as the second single from News Of The World. A story song disguised as a power ballad, “Spread Your Wings” tells the tale of the downtrodden Sammy who dreams of bigger things than sweeping floors at a dive bar. When he finally summons the energy to fly away, Queen signals his ascendence with a stirring crescendo distinguished by vibrant, tasteful fills from Brian May and an expertly modulated delivery from Freddie Mercury, who milks Deacon’s lyric for maximum dramatic value.

“It’s A Hard Life” makes a couple of overt nods to Queen’s predilection for opera—the accompanying music video brought this undercurrent to the forefront via an absurd costumed gala where only Freddie Mercury seems at ease—but the song’s strength lies not in its classical overtones but rather its assured pop craft. With his thick layers of harmonies, Brian May gives the song a suitable coat of colors, yet this is by no stretch a rock song. Built upon a propulsive piano part by Mercury, “It’s A Hard Life” is a wayward cousin to the kind of tuneful soft rock that populated the AM airwaves in the wake of the Beatles’ Abbey Road in the early 1970s.

A garish hodge-podge of an album, A Kind Of Magic found Queen squandering their Live Aid momentum by delivering a record caught between the demands of MTV and the needs of Highlander, a fantasy epic that featured six songs by Queen that formed the basis of this 1986 album. Of these tunes, the big-screen ballad “Who Wants To Live Forever” transcends its cinematic origins, summoning a certain sense of pathos underneath its string-saturated bombast. Much of that is due to Freddie Mercury’s measured delivery—after Brian May’s initial understated verse, Mercury sings with a sense of restrained romanticism—but it’s Michael Kamen, the film’s composer who provides orchestral arrangements, that gives the song its majesty.

Brian May wrote “Save Me” for a friend who recently suffered a painful breakup which may explain its disarming openness: writing through the lens of another allows May to indulge in his empathetic side. Similarly, Freddie Mercury—who may or may not be the friend, according to rumor—is playing a role yet is performing with passion, lending emotional weight to the song’s repeated soaring choruses.

The quietest moment on the overwrought Jazz, “Jealousy” isn’t lacking in flair. It boasts vocal harmonies as sumptuous as those on “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a neat Brian May guitar trick that makes his acoustic guitar sound like a sitar. Despite these accoutrements, what resonates in the song is one of the sweetest melodies Freddie Mercury concocted, one that suggests a hint of sorrowful regret underneath its sighing seduction.

Upon its release in early 1991, “Innuendo”—the title track from the band’s last album with Freddie Mercury—seemed to offer a revival of Queen’s prog peak, a moody, minor key continuation of the pomp of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Coming after nearly a decade of progressively polished pop, the overblown drama came as something of a relief: here, the band is playing to their strengths, jamming a surplus of ideas into a march through opera, arena rock, and flamenco that feels about twice as long as its six minutes.

Lasting barely a minute, A Night At The Opera’s “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon” serves as a palette cleanser between the gnarled “Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To...)” and the overheated onslaught of “I’m In Love With My Car.” That makes it seem minor by definition but within these 60 seconds, Queen and producer Roy Thomas Baker paint a vivid, colorful portrait of a life of leisure, relying both on Freddie Mercury’s high camp and Brian May’s guitar fanfare.

Queen used to proclaim they didn’t use synthesizers, which is why the hazy new wave funk of “Body Language” seems so startling: they’re embracing everything they never were. The instigator for this makeover is Freddie Mercury, who not only wrote the song but played its slinky synth bass line. Mercury pushed Queen into the neon-lit recesses of European dance clubs, a shift that didn’t necessarily sit well with the rest of the group. Brian May in particular didn’t care for the song, both due to its virtual lack of guitars and its homoeroticism; he believed Queen played to everybody, not just one particular audience. “Body Language” does indeed make no concessions to a rock audience but that’s the compelling thing about it: it’s loose and weird in a way that Queen rarely was.

Placed squarely in the middle of Queen’s galvanizing set at Live Aid, “Hammer To Fall” is somewhat a relic of its time, particularly in how Brian May’s lyrics allude to the Cold War; from a certain angle, it could be read as a rallying cry for those living behind the Iron Curtain, those who “grew up tall and proud in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.” When heard on The Works, the arena rocker can seem slightly stiff, yet Queen summoned all of their might when they played it at Live Aid, making it roar with a majestic thunder.

The rush of electronic sounds that provide a fanfare—and a fleeting bridge—to “Play The Game” are ultimately window dressing on a number that is firmly within Queen tradition in how it marries Freddie Mercury’s melodicism with guitar muscle from Brian May. Even if the combination feels familiar, the emphasis here is shifted. Previously, the walls of guitar would be the driving force but here they’re decoration, emphasizing how the focus is on the romanticism of Mercury’s lovely melody.

Years after its 1978 release, Freddie Mercury admitted that the pan-Arabic lyric he sings on “Mustapha” “is complete gibberish. It isn’t any language at all except in a few spots.” A cursory listen to “Mustapha” suggests as much. Queen isn’t aiming for cultural authenticity here, they’re mixing up Mideastern motifs with rampaging rock, creating a hybrid that’s powerful precisely because it’s absolutely absurd.

So successful is Queen’s evocation of British folk-rock on “39" that it might take a moment to realize that Brian May’s song is set in the future, concerning a group of space explorers who return from their voyage to discover that a century has passed. May may have written a sci-fi tale but the music makes “39" feel somewhat eternal, a folk song that’s been passed down through the ages.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis finally brought the old 1930s comic strip Flash Gordon to the silver screen in 1980, pushing his director, Mike Hodges, to play the adaptation for laughs. Queen was brought aboard to help push the film toward gaudy heights. “Flash”—credited as “Flash’s Theme” on the album soundtrack, released in its truncated title as a single—shows why the band was an ideal hire. Nominally, there are lyrics, sung by both Brian May and Freddie Mercury, apart from the cascading shout of “Flash….Ah...Ah...” but that’s where Queen places all of their emphasis, delivering this lightning bolt of absurdity over and over again in a fashion that captures the camp pleasures of the film.

Upon first glance, “I’m In Love With My Car” appears to be a gigantic goof, a satire of macho rock and roll bluster. Brian May himself thought Roger Taylor’s ode to automobiles was a joke when he first heard it and, in the end, the song still seems perched on the precipice of parody—a notion enhanced by producer Roy Thomas Baker’s audio effects. The tension between Taylor’s sincere love for his four-wheeled machines and Queen’s inherently overblown execution is the fuel that drives “I’m In Love With My Car,” turning it into a masterpiece of over-the-top album rock.

A poison letter written by Freddie Mercury to a former manager, “Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To...)” is a cavalcade of vulgar vitriol. As Mercury spits out escalating insults, he’s almost consumed by a whirlwind of contradictory noise. Squalls of guitar dart around the melody, vocal harmonies emerge from the darkness only to fall back again, each element emphasizing the sheer vindictiveness of Mercury: he’s not merely intending to hurt, he means to leave a scar.

“Brighton Rock” comes on with the force of a locomotive, its relentless propulsion in its initial two minutes ultimately serving as something of a feint. Once the first two rococo verses and bridges are dismissed, the song descends into nearly three minutes of soloing from Brian May, who pushes himself to the outer limits of his Echoplex guitar effect. His riffs bounce, answer, and mirror each other, sometimes in furious fashion, sometimes in a luxurious legato, all before the band revives the whirlwind rush of the verses as a closing coda. Even after decades of exposure, the lopsided construction can still cause whiplash: there’s seemingly no connection between the two segments, yet that dissonance is what makes it thrilling.

Effectively Queen’s farewell to the music hall, “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” belongs to a lineage that includes “Killer Queen” and “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon,” but it’s lighter than the former and fuller than the latter. Where those two Queen classics feel arch and campy, “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” is emotionally direct to a startling degree. Freddie Mercury wrote the tune when he was besotted with a new lover, celebrating all the elegant charms of his new lover boy. All the images of tango, fine wines, and fancy dinners give “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” a joyful buoyancy that’s quite ingratiating, helping to distinguish the song from Queen’s other old-fashioned romps.

Kicking around since the early 1970s, when Queen named an album Sheer Heart Attack but didn’t bother to finish its title track, “Sheer Heart Attack” is one of the great curiosities of the band’s catalog: a glam leftover given a punk makeover that turns it into throttling arena rock. It’s the brainchild of Roger Taylor, who plays almost all the instruments on the track, which explains why the guitars slash and pummel in a way that’s foreign to Brian May. And despite Freddie Mercury’s credit for lead vocals, it also sounds for all the world like Taylor sang “Sheer Heart Attack,” a bit of confusion that only makes the track seem like a prolonged sneer.

After The Works, Queen seemed to stumble on the kind of oversized arena rockers that came so easily to them during their peak in the 1970s. “I Want It All” is the exception that proves the rule. Written primarily by Brian May, “I Want It All” is a thumping, defiant rocker that feels comparatively back to basics; it’s so stripped back and simple, it was one of the few Queen songs that sounded right in the hands of Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers, who fronted the reunited band prior to the arrival of Adam Lambert. It’s still a song that belongs to Freddie Mercury, though, particularly in its single mix, which opens with a cappella harmonies as forceful as any guitar riff.

“I Want To Break Free” did indeed find Queen breaking free of a couple of conventions. Underpinned by a LinnDrum, the song deftly wove a tapestry of synthesized and “conventional” instrumentation, a hybrid that culminated in a synth instrumental section designed to sound exactly like a Brian May solo (the guitarist wasn’t particularly thrilled by this innovation at the time). All of these innovations are subtle when compared to the notorious video where Queen sends up the British soap Coronation Street by performing in drag. American audiences didn’t get the joke and backed away from the band in droves. Time has been kind not only to the video but the song itself, a self-empowerment anthem disguised as a sweet pop tune.

The grand unveiling of Freddie Mercury’s debauched Dionysian persona, “Get Down, Make Love” channels nocturnal sleaziness into arena rock. Written at a time when Mercury frequented NYC nightclubs—he said “New York is sin city. I slut myself when I’m there”—“Get Down, Make Love” hints at funk in its stop-start rhythms but the end product is curiously stiff due to Queen’s insistence on hitting every riff and back beat a little too hard. The result isn’t quite seductive but it’s certainly sordid, steeped in the after-hours pleasures of stimulants and sex.

Momentarily entranced by the Tour de France, Freddie Mercury wrote “Bicycle Race,” a song whose connection to bicycling doesn’t extend beyond its ludicrous chorus and equally silly music video containing 65 nude models on bikes. The rapidly escalating harmonies in the chorus are amusing but hearing Mercury sneer at every manner of pop culture phenomenon of the 1970s—“Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars”—is what gives this single its real kick.

Queen’s roundabout answer to the Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star,” “Radio Ga Ga” celebrates the power of radio. Roger Taylor opens the song rhapsodizing about an era before his time, writing “You gave them all those old time stars/Through wars of worlds invaded by Mars,” a bit of misdirection considering how the song essentially is a screed against MTV, a network where “we hardly need to use our ears.” The brilliant thing about “Radio Ga Ga” is that it is constructed to be an MTV hit, pulsating to an electronic beat and gleaming in its synthesized gloss: it may have the patina of nostalgia, but it’s a thoroughly modern single.

Queen first unveiled “Seven Seas Of Rhye” at the end of their 1973 debut, playing a minute-long instrumental fragment of the number because Freddie Mercury hadn’t finished the tune yet. A year later, the completed “Seven Seas Of Rhye” concluded Queen II but in this incarnation, it was a fantastical epic condensed into less than two minutes. Queen wore their Led Zeppelin influence proudly—it’s there not only in Brian May’s light-and-shade riffing but Mercury’s ornate lyrical constructions—but the succinctness is distinctly their own: they don’t luxuriate in their inventions, they rush from one spectacular height to the next, ending the whole shebang with their tongue firmly planted in cheek as they sing the old music hall chestnut “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside.”

The second song John Deacon ever wrote, “You’re My Best Friend” is driven by a joyful refrain performed on a Wurlitzer electric piano—an instrument Deacon played himself, since Mercury proclaimed it “tinny and horrible.” It’s difficult to hear “You’re My Best Friend” without that fuzzy, fizzy bounce: it’s central to the tune’s sunny propulsion, the vehicle that turns this ode to Deacon’s wife Veronica Tetzlaff into an incandescent pop song.

Brian May came up with the core riff for “Tie Your Mother Down” back in the days before Queen, reviving the tune when it came time to record their follow-up to A Night At The Opera. May intended the titular phrase as a dummy title but Freddie Mercury insisted that they leave it untouched, building one of the band’s nastiest rockers around the refrain. Queen pushes May’s relentless riff to the forefront, easing it into an oversaturated shuffle on a chorus that confirms the song’s connection to early rock and roll. Despite its cheerfully violent overtones, at its heart “Tie Your Mother Down” is all about teenage lust, the narrator imploring his crush to get the parents out of the way because he needs her to give him “all your love tonight.”

When Dave Marsh claimed “Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band” in the pages of Rolling Stone back in the late 1970s, “We Will Rock You” is the song he had in mind. Marsh called the song “a marching order,” one that places the band above its audience: they’re the ones calling the shots. It’s not hard to hear what Marsh heard in “We Will Rock You,” as it is a primordial stomp that pummels listeners into submission. It’s hard to deny the power of that earth-shaking beat, just like it’s hard to deny that Freddie Mercury is demanding fealty from the crowd. There’s not much more to the song than its arena-filling chant but that’s why “We Will Rock You” has endured over the years: it taps into a primal essence that’s as dangerous as it is seductive.

Linked forever with “We Will Rock You”—they shared a single and were always linked in concert—“We Are The Champions” finds Queen playing to the rafters of a stadium. Where “We Will Rock You” has a malevolent edge, “We Are The Champions” intends to unify. It’s a stirring power ballad overstuffed with melody and harmony, culminating in a swaying chorus that’s sounded at home at sporting events around the globe. Its omnipresence in culture can sometimes work against it, as repetition dulls the grandeur of its sing-along refrain. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to marvel that Queen achieved precisely what Freddie Mercury intended when he wrote “We Are The Champions”: they did indeed make an arena anthem for the ages.

There’s a reason why Metallica covered “Stone Cold Crazy” 16 years after its initial release. With its breakneck rhythms, pummeling guitar riff, and stylized violent angst, “Stone Cold Crazy” is a precursor to the velocity-addled metal of the 1980s: it’s all aggression and attitude. Even with many decades of distance, “Stone Cold Crazy” can still seem potent in its virulence: Roger Taylor hits the drums hard and fast, setting the pace for the rest of Queen to revel in antisocial antipathy, a live-wire sentiment that retains its danger and energy no matter how many years have passed.

The snazziest song ever written about untrammeled hedonism, “Don’t Stop Me Now” feels as if it was designed with Broadway in mind. All its excesses seem destined to be delivered by a chorus of dancers, so it’s little wonder that it wound up closing the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Whatever the context, “Don’t Stop Me Now” is intoxicating in its splashy hooks, conveying the sense of freedom Freddie Mercury found in seeking pleasure.

Queen’s first single didn’t land the fledgling hard rock group a hit, yet it nevertheless provided an excellent introduction to many of the band’s strengths. Guitarist Brian May may have written the song with a slight sarcastic smirk but Freddie Mercury delivered the song as if it contained inspirational truth. Mercury’s passion is heightened by May’s thick guitar overdubs and lessened slightly by layers of vocal harmonies that seem to serve as an ironic counterpoint to the earnest message. All of these would turn into distinctive signatures for Queen but there’s a sense of electric discovery in “Keep Yourself Alive” which remains exciting decades later.

Queen’s first genuine hit on both sides of the Atlantic, “Killer Queen” is the place where the band not only hits its musical stride but where Freddie Mercury effectively constructs his decadent posh persona. Mercury isn’t writing about himself on “Killer Queen,” per se. Ostensibly, he’s drawing a portrait of a high-end hooker, yet the woman who perfumes herself in fragrances from Paris and keeps Moët et Chandon in a pretty cabinet, a woman who delivers dynamite with a laser beam, sounds unmistakably like the rakish rock star.

Lifting the bass line from Chic’s seminal disco smash “Good Times” nearly wholesale, John Deacon somehow transforms this prowling bounce into a distinctive dance-rock hybrid on “Another One Bites The Dust.” Deacon pushed Queen to keep things lean and dry, facing some consternation from Roger Taylor, who felt the song wasn’t rock enough for the band. It’s true that “Another One Bites The Dust” inverts many of Queen’s strengths, abandoning pomp for precision, yet with its mastery of the studio—witness the flourishes of backward instruments that serve as tension and punctuation—and the compelling focal point of Freddie Mercury, this is clearly as much a Queen song as it is a dance track.

In some respects, “Somebody To Love” is the definitive Queen song, a rousing anthem as stirring as “Bohemian Rhapsody” that’s also considerably more straightforward in its execution and intent. Freddie Mercury designed “Somebody To Love” as a loose homage to Aretha Franklin, threading in elements of soul and gospel that underscore the yearning at the heart of the song. That elemental emotion combined with the stirring call-and-response gives “Somebody To Love” a spiritual directness that welcomes other singers. When George Michael teamed with Queen to sing the song at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in April 1992, the vocalist conveyed all the longing and hunger within the song, building to a climactic high note that felt like a catharsis.

“Love Of My Life” is the most vulnerable Freddie Mercury ever seemed on record, a ballad of devotion tinged by melancholy. Although he’s pining for a lover who has left, Mercury sings as if he’s almost certain that the lover will return after everything is blown over—but he’s not entirely certain, either. That slight sense of doubt gives “Love Of My Life” a richness of emotion and its layers are teased out on record by Mercury’s overdubbed harmonies, as well as Brian May’s strategically deployed guitar and harp.

Essentially Freddie Mercury’s tribute to the then-recently departed Elvis Presley, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” is a swinging little rockabilly number that’s lighter on its feet than any other Queen song. Largely abandoning their predilection for pomp—Mercury can’t help slathering on the vocal harmonies, nor could he resist a throwaway “ready Freddie” joke in the backing vocals—Queen instead keep things loose and swinging, creating an old-time rock and roll song so authentic that Dwight Yoakam covered it with ease 20 years later.

“Fat Bottomed Girls” is one of those rare songs that defies every notion of good taste. Its crassness is evident in its title and is crystalized by such casually offensive phrases as “heap big woman,” but the great thing about the song is that the music is every bit as vulgar as the words. Brian May pounds out a brutal blues riff over a rhythm that never grooves; it’s a pummeling march all the way through the chorus, where vocal harmonies deliver some—but not all—relief from the thundering tension. As the song races towards its conclusion, that primitive beat remains unrelenting, a sound that’s not so much dirty as it is filthy.

David Bowie expert Chris O’Leary called “Under Pressure” “a day’s indulgence by two men past their prime, who were entering a decade that would reward and diminish them.” Realizing that “Under Pressure” was created as a lark, not crafted as a statement, helps to explain its extraordinary allure. The sleek dance-rock hybrid—informed by disco but not belonging to it—is essentially ephemeral and amorphous, built upon a lithe John Deacon bassline that anchors interwoven harmonies and melodies that build to an overwhelming crescendo culminating with Bowie and Freddie Mercury singing “This is our last dance.” “Under Pressure” belongs equally to both Bowie and Queen yet doesn’t quite sound like anything they did on their own: it’s a captured moment that’s only gained resonance as it recedes further into the past.

An audacious composition by any measure, “Bohemian Rhapsody” belongs to a class of rock songs whose formal innovations have dulled due to overexposure. Over the years, the parodies, jokes, and allusions—both musical and visual—have diluted the daring of this mini-suite, turning it into a living cultural cliche. Listen to it closely, though, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” remains a thing of wonder, a masterpiece built upon its contradictions: it’s filled with controlled excess, campy pathos, poignant humor, a ballad that builds to a crunching conclusion.