OH. MY. GOD.
I actually enjoy reading long answers :3
Ummm, let’s see… when I first knew about a song by Queen, it would’ve been obviously been WWRY and Another One Bites the Dust. I didn’t know that this was Queen, as I was only in 3rd or 4th grade. I think I first heard WATC in 6th grade after watching a baseball championship game. I just knew that these songs were awesome, but I did not know who sang them.
Then, sometime later in 8th grade, my mom found an old Queen Greatest Hits I compilation album. I asked her what it was, so she decided to play Killer Queen for me. I just fell in love with that song from the very first moment I heard the finger snaps, to Freddie’s wondrous voice, to Brian’s majestic guitar solo, and the bass riff that you could hear right under the fade, which was also exquisite. Enamoured with this brand-new type of music, I asked my mom to give me the CD so I could listen to the rest of it. This was the UK version, just so you know.
So I started from track 1, which opened to the vocal solo of “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” Which then moved on to a chaotic story of a homicidal person who’s telling his mother to not miss him should he die. Then, quite unexpectedly, the operatic part of this awesome song came around and I just marveled at the echoes that were coming out of the speakers. It was ungodly.
Then came Another One Bites the Dust. I was surprised at first because I actually knew this song, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that that familiar lead bass came from the same people who made that first track.
I started skipping around on the CD because some parts were scratched (this was an 3+ year-old-CD, okay?) until I landed on Crazy Little Thing Called Love. From the start, I knew I loved this song. The simple, yet amazing and catchy guitar work were hypnotizing, along with the canned hand claps and the sudden changes in voice pitches from low to high, then back again. I played this song until I was sure I knew all the lyrics just because I was in awe of its amazingness.
I skipped some more. I came across Seven Seas of Rhye. When I first heard the opening bars of the almost-demonic speed of the piano intro, I remember thinking “This cannot be humanly possible. How can someone play the piano at such speed?” This became to be my favorite track because of the mega-high vocals and the shredding guitar work, courtesy of Dr. May along with the heavy drumming, which was very powerful, but it didn’t take over the other instruments. The tambourine was what made me fall in love with Seven Seas, I think. I don’t know, I just find it really cute whenever a band plays the tambourine, especially with the combination of the hard-rock guitar and the drums. Oh, and let’s not forget the powerful, high-pitched vocals.
After that, were the all-too-familiar-but-still-awesome We Will Rock You (which had a guitar solo that I did not know if until I finally listened to that album) and We Are the Champions, which just makes you feel powerful, and you just want to belt out the vocals to what might be the best-known song in the world — the one that’s played at every single sporting event you watch or attend.
So I guess I have my mom to thank, even though she doesn’t really like them that much, except for the “tamer” stuff, like Greatest Hits compilations (which aren’t bad, but I think that now, I know more than my mom about a band that she could’ve met because she was a teenager during the “famous” and “more mainstream” period of a band I love).
