Brian May Reveals What He Thinks Is His Favorite Queen Album
Brian May revealed his favorite Queen album during an interview on the How Do You Cope? podcast where he opened up on how he dealt with the death of singer Freddie Mercury in 1991, as well as the death of his father which occurred in the same year of 1991.
"I like to be open," May says near the top of the podcast about what it's like having his own personal health issues play out in public view. "If I'm having a problem in life, I think it's nice to share it with the world because then it stops other people feeling that they're alone if they're having a similar problem, so I do like to be transparent," he added."
As the podcast progresses, May shifts from his more recent health ailments (heart attack, COVID) to his basement which flooded last year and left many personal artifacts floating in filthy water, including childhood photo albums and touched on the emotions that came with processing these things.
He admits he's a "depressive" and said it's "something that is part of your makeup." May did not seek professional help through a therapist until "after the second [Queen] album," when he was around 26 or 27 years old.
Later on, the guitarist focuses on the death of Queen singer Freddie Mercury and his experience putting together Made in Heaven, the band's final album that was released in 1995.
"It was very weird. It was traumatizing in itself. I spent hours and days and weeks working on little bits of Freddie’s vocals. Listening to Freddie the whole day and the whole night. I’d have moments thinking, ‘This is great…this sounds great Fre… Oh, you’re not here,'" he recalls (transcription via Classic Rock).
"It was quite difficult," May, who will turn 75 this summer, continues, "You’d have to go away from it sometimes and recover and come back. But I felt this immense pride and joy in squeezing the last drops out of what Freddie left us."
Despite this difficult process of assembling a posthumous album in regards to Mercury, May reveals, "I still love that album. I think it’s my favorite Queen album. There are things in there that are so deep. There’s pure gold in there.”
Immediately following its release, however, both May and Queen drummer Roger Taylor made tremendous efforts to distance themselves from the band. "I think Roger and I both went through a kind of normal grieving process, but accentuated by the fact it has to be public. We sort of went into denial. Like, ‘Yeah well, we did Queen, but we do something else now,'" adds May.
"Roger and I plunged into our solo work and didn’t want to talk about Queen," May admits, "That seems almost nonsensical because we spent half of our lives constructing Queen. But we didn’t want to know at that time. It was a grieving thing. We just overcompensated. It went on for a long time."
Listen to the full episode of the How Do You Cope? podcast here.