February 24, 2023     —–     Chart #184

Hello Music Friends,

Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Chart of the Week. One of the bands that really shaped my musical taste as a teenager combined an iconic guitar player with amazing vocal layers. Exploring a new brand of rock opera, they invented music that was in a category by itself. Queen is the band, Freddie Mercury is the vocalist and Brian May, the amazing guitarist.

 “Love of My Life” is today’s song by the British rock band Queen from their 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a sentimental ballad, notably featuring a harp played by Brian May.

After Queen performed the song in South America in 1981, the version from their live album Live Killers reached number 1 in the singles chart in Argentina and Brazil, and stayed in the charts in both countries for an entire year.

Mercury wrote it on the piano and guitar first, and May rearranged the song for acoustic 12-string guitar for live performances, also lowering the key by a minor third. May contributed occasional guitar phrases to the original recording and played the swooping harp glissandos by pasting together multiple takes of single chords.

Introduced during the News of the World Tour in 1977, “Love of My Life” was such a concert favorite that Mercury would stop singing and would conduct the audience as they took over. A live performance of the song appears in Queen at Wembley from 1986 where again Mercury conducts the audience as they sing the song. After Mercury’s death, Brian May has frequently dedicated the song to him in his own live performances. A notable exception is the Sheffield show which yielded the Return of the Champions CD and DVD. At that show, May announced that Mercury’s mother was at the show and he dedicated the song to her instead. In the Queen + Paul Rodgers Tour, May would sing a few lines of the song, then let the audience take over for every verse, as Mercury did. When played at the Glasgow SECC in the 2008 Cosmos Rocks tour, May dedicated the song to his own mother, who had recently died.

As Brian May put it, “I think it’s the moment when we first realised that they knew “Love of My Life”. Not only knew it but would sing it. And not only would they sing it but would sing it with a passion that brought tears to our eyes.”

Here is what Brian is talking about:  https://youtu.be/v3xwCkhmies

Enjoy this one music friends, and by all means, please sing along. Freddie would be disappointed if you didn’t.

Keep Rockin,

Stan Bradshaw