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At the end of 1991, the looming promise that has hung around Queen like a dark cloud for possibly five years had been fulfilled. The great Freddie Mercury had finally succumbed to the awful virus, which looking back may now seem inevitable, nonetheless a horrible day for rock music fans as yet another icon has been taken from us way too soon. Made In Heaven tells the story about what the drive of a real icon looks and sounds like. While Queen were recording The Miracle in 1988, guitarist Brian May remembers thinking that that album would probably be their last as he witnessed the deteriorating health of his friend Freddie. However, as soon as they finished recording The Miracle, the band almost immediately reconvened and starting writing and recording music for their next album Innuendo. Queen had taken their time recording from early 1989 until about November of 1990. Innuendo was released in January of 1991, and the band still forged on at the insistence of Freddie to get enough of his recordings down so that the band could finish them at a later time, finally realizing that time was rapidly growing short. Queen only had about six months with Freddie in the studio, but when the pain became too great and his talent was withering away along with his life, it was time for Freddie to finally go home to his "palace" a place he hardly saw, to die peacefully.

Somehow, life goes on. The remaining members of the band had worked together and for the most part separated to tie up some unfinished business after Freddie's passing. In April of 1992, six months after Freddie died, the remaining three members, Brian, drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon came together along with some other famous Queen fans and paid tribute to Freddie's life through his music. Some notable guests included Elton John, Extreme, Def Leppard, Guns N Roses, and of course Spinal Tap. The three then left to do some solo work. Brian had completed his first full-length solo album, Back to the Light, for a while now, and finally released it in 1992. Roger had completed his run with his second band The Cross. John Deacon had worked a little with Brian on his solo album, along with a couple of other projects. According to some interviews, John Deacon and Roger Taylor had begun some early work on some of the remaining tracks left over from the studio from January 1991 to June 1991. Brian and Roger especially had been hyping the remaining tracks for a few years before Made In Heaven had even come out. I remember Brain saying that there were about five to six songs from the studio time post-Innuendo. Depending on your meaning of "new" it appears that there are only about three songs from the 1991 sessions along with a couple of other leftovers from other projects.

One of the newer songs, You Don't Fool Me is a techno/pop-style track that had been created in the studio by producer David Richards from bits of vocals left over which were glued together into a skeleton of a song, which then the members of Queen played their respective instruments plus keyboards and the result is a fantastic track. The riff is reminiscent of Dragon Attack while Freddie Mercury seems to attempt a Stevie Wonder style of vocal which somehow fits the mood of the song. Another one of the newest tracks, A Winter's Tale is said to be the last song written by Freddie Mercury. It has a double ambiance where on the surface it sounds happy and Christmas/Holiday season like, yet below lurks a sense of lonely solitude hidden in the lyrics. The last song recorded by Queen was Mother Love; this is only the second track in the band's history that has a byline from Freddie and Brian (the other one is Is This the World We Created). Mother Love is another very moody track with very heartfelt lyrics from Freddie. The fact that Brian May finished the haunting vocal track after Freddie couldn't go on anymore is enough to bring the mood down, but it also makes me really feel for Queen, they were such a unit and so beloved by their fans where we understand the story and reasons why their songs are they way they are. .

There are about five of the songs here that were known from before, even if they weren't very well known. Heaven For Everyone, for example, which was the first single, was only familiar to those who were familiar with Roger Taylor's second band The Cross. Like Winter's Tale and Mother Love, Heaven For Everyone (written by Roger Taylor), is a sappy ballad. At first I thought that this was the worst song on the album, but it grows on you. My Life Has Been Saved was originally a b-side to the 1989 Scandal single. To my ears, it doesn't sound like anything was done differently to this song since 1989. My favorite of these tracks is Too Much Love Will Kill You. The lyrics seem to come from a very personal place, yet since Brian had written with two outside writers, it's unsure how personal it is for Brian. The award-winning lyrics are some of the best put forth by Queen. The track first showed up on Brian's first solo album Back To the Light, and I go back and forth on which one I like better. Both Brian and Freddie give fabulous vocal performances, and although Brian gives a more emotive vocal, Freddie is technically better. The last two songs are probably the most well known for Queen fans as they were both taken from Freddie Mercury's first solo album Mr. Bad Guy. Made In Heaven was never a good track originally, and even though Queen give it their all, it remains forgettable. It was chosen however because its apt title fit this project so well. The second song from Mr. Bad Guy is the greatly improved I Was Born To Love You. While the song originally was enjoyable, it still reeked of laziness as it was basically all synthesized garbage. Brian, John and Roger brought the track up to Queen standards, where Brian May's blistering lead guitar work against the heavy backbeat from John and Roger turns the song into a pop-rock track which should have worked enough to be a single, but didn't.

The two remaining are from pieces out of the Queen archive. It's A Beautiful Day and the reprise were obviously pieced together from snippets of Freddie fooling around in the studio sometime around 1980. The edits on his voice are very apparent, yet the music flows without a hitch. Although there are two similar versions here, the version on the Heaven For Everyone single is the best one. These two versions are heavy rock and pleasing but they are mere shadows to the complete version found on the CD single. Let Me Live is supposedly an old duet between Freddie and Rod Stewart from 1984 that never came to fruition. Brian and Roger share the vocal duties, divvying up the Rod Stewart parts, whereas Roger's natural rasp would have been a fine substitute for Stewart's missing vocal by itself. The song has a gospel-choir sound provided by the backing vocal talents of Rebecca Leigh-White, Gary Martin, Catherine Porter and Miriam Stockley. These four talents would never have been used back in 1984, where Queen would have done all of the vocals themselves, so I presume these were added in 1995 for this track. The untitled last hidden track, which runs at 22:32, is merely a loop created by David Richards with some very soft Freddie voices here and there which sound like studio chatter. Some Queen fans out there, including myself, view it as the ascension of Freddie's soul into Paradise, and it takes that long to reach these heavens. It's something that I say to get me through the long track.

I like the fact that Queen once again work as a unit instead of substituting themselves with the inferior synthesizer, a practice since 1984's The Works up until Innuendo. As a Queen fan, I was unaware of some of these songs and regarded them as mostly new from the 1991 studio sessions. Just listening to those rare studio tracks on Youtube convinces me that there are plenty more rare tracks from the band, yet they are still unwilling to release these songs as of yet. I decided to write another Queen review this week as I anxiously sit and wait for the 40th anniversary remastered albums to be released on May 17th here in the States. It's a miracle that I am able to show this much restraint from just buying the imports from the UK, yet from experience I always know that the American releases are always superior somehow to any other version out there.

Not every song is a winning number, and Made In Heaven surely makes a lousier Swan Song than the 1991 Innuendo has done. Mother Love is a standout track from the newer ones, and Too Much Love Will Kill You is worth the price of admission by itself. Other than that Made in Heaven is pretty good, better than their worst albums A Kind of Magic or The Miracle, but as a whole pale next to the classics.




Queen
Made In Heaven
Length: 70:29 minutes
Released: 11/06/1995
Rating: 4 stars
the Songs:

1. It's A Beautiful Day
2. Made In Heaven
3. Let me Live
4. Mother Love
5. My Life Has Been Saved
6. I Was Born To Love You
7. Heaven For Everyone
8. Too Much Love Will Kill You
9. You Don't Fool Me
10. A Winter's Tale
11. It's a Beautiful Day (reprise)
12. Yeah! (hidden track)
13. Untitled (hidden track)

Recommended: Yes