Out in the city...

I don't want to start a morbid topic on Freddie's illness, but how can a dying man sing a line like "out in the city, in the cold world outside, I don't want pity just a safe place to hide..." with so much intensity is beyond me. And why Brian's songs always had to be so high pitched?

Great verses! Brian always loved those high notes on the guitar, so it's normal to reach for them on the vocals. I love those too.

any great artist can give what the song demands at any point that they are still healthy enough to do so.

He was still able to sing like that then.

Brian likes high pitched songs, no idea why! I think he seems to like the epic sound, and Freddie's voice in the high register had that sound.

Doesn't it sound like a wail of desperation? And so utterly in keeping with the theme of the song. Scandal and TSMGO have similar wails, to name but two.

There's points in Mother Love (mainly the verse mentioned in this thread) where I really thought they were trying (and trying hard) to recreate that intense magic they created on "The Show Must Go On".

And, to me, they somehow managed to pull it off.

Amazing.

Freddie kept saying to Brian (From 1980 to 1991): "Why you want me to sing those high notes? You want to kill me? I'll do it anyway darling".

He probably said it before 1980 too, with Brian bringing him stuff like The Prophet's Song and It's Late, both including some really high notes.

And Sweet Lady, that vocal must have been a pain. He never sant even remotely close to the record live.

Sure, but so did the others: Best Friend, You and I, Radio Ga Ga, A Kind of Magic, Another One Bites the Dust, Rock It, they've all got high notes as well.

And of course, Freddie's own songs were demanding too: It's a Hard Life, Was It All Worth It, Innuendo (he started off the melody), Don't Try So Hard, etc.

Moreover, 'Mother Love' is not a Brian-only song, it's a Brian-Freddie collaboration.

@Seb:

How do you know Freddie started off the melody for Innuendo?

That's the most logical conclusion taken by Freddie having been the one who started off the words by singing along, as reported by Brian (http://www.brianmaycentral.net/gmoct94.html).

If we assumed Roger wrote the melody, the point would still remain: Brian did write demanding songs for Freddie's voice, but so did the other 75% of the band.

In fact, think of almost the whole of the Mr Bad Guy album..... it has some crazy high notes, and all written in pretty awkward keys even for Freddie.

Yet another case of: Someone having quoted Freddie for something he may have said a long time ago, and suddenly people start using that quote all over the place.

Remember the thing Jim Beach said in the 2011 documentary...

[QUOTE] [b]Sebastian wrote:[/b]

Sure, but so did the others: Best Friend, You and I, Radio Ga Ga, A Kind of Magic, Another One Bites the Dust, Rock It, they've all got high notes as well.

And of course, Freddie's own songs were demanding too: It's a Hard Life, Was It All Worth It, Innuendo (he started off the melody), Don't Try So Hard, etc.

Moreover, 'Mother Love' is not a Brian-only song, it's a Brian-Freddie collaboration.[/QUOTE]

Surely the melody is *fairly* irrelevant to how difficult/high the song is to sing, but it's the key that it's in that is 'key' (pardon the pun). For example, if Innuendo were written in a different key then it could have been sung to exactly the same melody but be not as difficult to sing and would contain far less high notes?

That's quite a good point indeed, although it could also be quibbled that, sung in a different key, the low notes would be quite low.

All in all, the point is still that, while Brian did indeed write challenging songs for a vocalist, he wasn't by any means the only one in the band to do that. All four did.