"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by British rock band Queen from their fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera. The lead single from the album, it is a suite composed of five main elements: an introduction, a ballad, an opera, a hard rock segment, and a reflective coda. Released in 1975, it is one of the few progressive rock songs of the 1970s to reach a mainstream audience and is now regarded as the band's signature song.
Written by the band's lead singer, Freddie Mercury, he referred to "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a "mock opera" that resulted from the combination of three songs he had written. It was recorded by Queen and co-producer Roy Thomas Baker at five studios between August and September 1975. Due to recording logistics of the era, the band had to bounce the tracks across eight generations of 24-track tape, meaning that they required nearly 200 tracks for overdubs.
The promotional video is credited with furthering the development of the music video medium. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stone 2021 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". A Rolling Stone readers' poll also ranked Mercury's vocal performance in the song as the greatest in rock history.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks (plus another five weeks following Mercury's death in 1991) and is the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada where it spent two weeks at the top position, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and has sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two after appearing in the 1992 film Wayne's World. In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Following the release of the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century. In 2021, it was certified diamond in the US for combined digital sales/streams equal to 10 million units. In 2022, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started.
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999:
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 overdubs. In multiple interviews, May recalled how Mercury's vocal overdubs were so exquisitely precise that he would create a natural phasing effect.
Since the studios of the time only offered 24-track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16-track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
In May 2023, an early handwritten draft unearthed from an auction of items that belonged to Mercury, courtesy of his friend Mary Austin, revealed that Mercury originally considered the song to be titled "Mongolian Rhapsody". It was explained that he wrote the title along with the lyrics in 1974 on a page of stationery from defunct airline British Midland Airways, but crossed out the word "Mongolian" and replaced it with "Bohemian". There is a 1962 Decca album of the same name, with music by Bohemian composers Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, art rock, progressive pop, and art pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism.
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band's "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49) The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality". The section is nearly entirely in 4/4 time, with the exception of measure 3 ("Caught in a landslide, no es—") switching to 5/4 time, then returning to 4/4 after.
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against [the man's] head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)