Bohemian Rhapsody

About the song

«Bohemian Rhapsody» was written by Freddie Mercury, and it had been growing in his head for years before Queen recorded it. He had started developing the song in the late 1960s, from an early piece known simply as «The Cowboy Song». A handwritten draft that surfaced in 2023 showed that at one point he had even considered calling it «Mongolian Rhapsody». By 1975 the fragments had become a single piece in several movements, ready to be recorded for Queen’s fourth album.

The recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1, near Monmouth in Wales, and continued into September across four London studios: the Roundhouse, Sarm, Scorpio Sound and Wessex Sound. The producer was Roy Thomas Baker, working together with the band. The song took about three weeks to record, an enormous amount of studio time for a single track in the mid-1970s. The operatic middle section alone needed around 180 separate vocal overdubs, sung by Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor over and over until they sounded like a large choir. Because the studio machines had only 24 tracks, the tape had to be bounced down again and again, until parts of the recording were eighth-generation copies.

The finished piece runs for five minutes and fifty-five seconds and has no chorus at all. Instead it moves through distinct sections: a short a cappella introduction, a piano ballad, a guitar solo, a mock-operatic passage, a burst of hard rock and a quiet coda. Mercury played the ballad on a Bechstein concert grand piano, Brian May composed the guitar solo that links the ballad to the opera, and Roger Taylor supplied the very highest notes of the choir, holding one of them after the other voices have stopped. John Deacon played bass throughout.

The story that the lyric tells is deliberately unclear. In the ballad a young man confesses to his mother that he has done something terrible, says that his life is over almost before it has started, and prepares to leave. In the opera section a crowd of voices argues over his fate, some pleading for him to be released and others refusing, in a whirl of names borrowed from theatre, science and religion: a clown from the old Italian commedia dell’arte, a Spanish dance, the astronomer Galileo, the barber Figaro from the opera stage, an Arabic invocation of God and one of the traditional names of the devil. Then the hard rock section turns the young man angry and defiant, and the coda lets everything fade into a calm, almost indifferent acceptance.