Somebody To Love' is Aretha Franklin-influenced. Freddie's very much into that. We tried to keep the track in a loose, gospel-type feel. I think it's the loosest track we've ever done.
Our time in the studio is spent recording, recording, recording. We're in there pretty much by ourselves now that we're producing ourselves, and it takes a lot of time. A lot of the album actually expands and grows when we're in the studio… take Somebody to Love, for instance - I knew I wanted a gospel choir feel to it, and I knew that we'd have to do it ourselves. Now what you've got on that track is a 165 piece choir effect - so you can imagine how long it took four of us to do it. We had to do it over and over. I know that it's a block harmony, but it was a type of singing that we hadn't done before; it had a different level. To get that section done, just that one section, took a week, but it was worth it. I don't think any of us ever want to look back on an album and say, “if only we'd done that it would have been better.” We want it right when we do it; if it means taking a long time, then we take a long time.
From my point of view, OK, Bohemian Rhapsody, big hit, but I think a song like Somebody to Love is in my estimation, from the writing aspect, a better song.
Somebody to Love was hard to do because there are so many voices on the record that I didn't know if we'd be able to do it. I enjoy playing it now, but when we first started the tour, we were dreading it when it came round in the set. I suppose we have got over the barrier of reproducing tracks live. I mean, we'll have a go at anything. I've always thought of the band as a live band, but we've never really tried to recreate the records from the second album mainly because I don't think it's always wise to try and go that way; you tend to lose spontaneous and aggression, that spark. But at the moment we've got a good balance between the two.
We had the, the same three people singing on the big choir sections, but I think it had a different kind of technical approach, because it was a sort of gospel way of singing, which I think was different to us, and this is me sort of going on about Aretha Franklin, and sort of made them go a bit mad. I just wanted to write something in that kind of thing, I was sort of incensed by the sort of gospel approach that she had on the earlier albums, although it might sound the sort of same kind of approach on, say, the harmonies, it is very different in the studio because it's, actually, a different range.
Multi-tracked using the same kind of technique as Bohemian Rhapsody, of course. It's almost the follow-up to Bohemian Rhapsody, ‘cause of these multi-voiced choir effects, but this time it's a gospel choir rather than a sort of English choir. It's all us, folks!
It's a big vocal tour de force song, and it's a good strong song.
The song's about desperation.
One of the hardest songs in our songbook.
Again, an immaculate backing track; it's Freddie and Roger and John, driven by his amazingly rhythmic piano. A great feel, just great feel; there's no… it's not been messed with, you know, and these days you have to Pro-Tool it and put everything in the right place before you let it out. But this is just real and futuristic playing. Done in bits as well, wasn't it? Because there's a couple of bits which we didn't even use, I seem to remember; well at least one bit we didn't use.
It's the massed choir, the massed gospel choir of the three of us. It's quite unusual like several of our songs, it's in the three/four, sort of six/eight time. And it's a long backing track too, with a lot of different moods to it, so I guess it was done in sections, yes. Yeah, I remember, actually. Freddie could really shine on this live pounding at the piano and it was a great, live track this.
Freddie came up with a magnificent little sort of foray into white gospel, if you wanna call it that, and we really worked our harmonies on Somebody to Love.
Freddie came in very well prepared with a lot of vocal parts and we just worked our way through ‘em and became something we called the sausage machine that we'd sort of follow our instincts and whoever was leading at the time. It's a very good feeling, I always remember thinking “This is gonna be something great.”
That was Freddie's favourite, I think.
We envisaged the A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races albums as companion pieces. I love the sound we achieved on A Day at the Races, especially on Somebody to Love but also The Millionaire Waltz.
[difficult reproducing tracks live] Sometimes, yeah, I remember Somebody To Love, that was a really, really hard one, we had a lot of problems doing that at first, but now it seems to, they seem to take on a different sort of life, and you have to cut certain corners, because you can't do seven part harmony with like three or four people, so we usually cut down to sort of three or four part harmonies and try and make them as effective as we can.