Crazy Little Thing Called Love The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke
Fender Telecaster Electric Guitar
1: "I do like that one, it's the last track on the album. There's a semi auto-biographical feel about it" - John Deacon (Queen for an Hour, May 1989). 2: Brian is quoted on Guitar magazine (October 1994) as saying "Was It All Worth It I really like. That's me and Fred, but more him. For that track we did all sit around and try to come up with rhymes and stuff. Roger's very good at that". Since then there have been debates on whether his contribution was lyrical (e.g. the line "when the hurly-burly's done" is quoted from 'Macbeth', a play he was writing a score to) or musical (e.g. the alternate endings, a trick he applied more often than Freddie, for instance in Prophet's Song, I Want It All, Show Must Go On and Save Me). It's all up to speculation, at the moment. |
By the time Freddie penned this song, he'd learnt a lot from his classical album, 'Barcelona', where he'd been co-writer, co-arranger, co-producer and of course performer. Was It All Worth It? closes the 'Miracle' album and is one of the best-known later-days no-hits from the band. Lyrics start off in singular ("what is there left for me..."), while from the second verse onwards lines are in plural ("it didn't matter if we won..."). Whether this was a coincidence or an intentional development from "I" to "we" can only be speculated at the moment. By the way, "we love you madly" paraphrases "I love you madly", found in Rachmaninov's Revenge (a song Fred was working on in 1987, which later on would become The Fallen Priest). This song embodies some early trends of Mercury's, but at the same time relies on technology and showcases Freddie's 80s approach to orchestration (the first classical break is very reminiscent of Mr Bad Guy). While definitely not beyond the limits of the 70's Freddie, the orchestral interlude is something he wouldn't have composed before 1987 for a number of subtle details. Music
by: Freddie Mercury Produced
by: Queen & David Richards Recorded:
Between January 1988 and January 1989
Keys: Cm, Am, C Dorian, Bbm, A, D Dorian Acoustic
Drums: Roger Taylor Lead
Vocals: Freddie Mercury Perhaps as a nod to the old days, Freddie, Roger and John recorded the backing track (although it's not know if it was done live), only that Mercury was on synths instead of piano. But drums and bass are all human, which was relatively strange for Queen later albums (further examples are Innuendo, Don't Try So Hard and The Show Must Go On, all having synths though). Brian's work consisted of four-five guitar layers (again, a rarity for 'Miracle' standards, where his bits were extraordinary but hardly beyond two or three tracks), and then Freddie overdubbed more synths (they seem to be programmed for the most part), including two great orchestral bits: For the first break, there are two-three string sections plus a background pad doing a nice eerie ornament. The long interlude has an introduction first, scored for about five-six layers of strings with some stereo trickery (production's marvellous there!), a sampled car-horn and a timpani, which most likely was sampled too. The "crazy" orchestral bit is mostly for strings, doubled with some pads to reinforce the sound. As for vocals, there's one track for Freddie's lead and the arrangement varies in the last chorus, being thicker and, for a second or two, a capella (shades of Mustapha). During "surrealistic" there's a strange filter on the backing vocal, but it sounds brill.
Being an autobiographical song (1), references to Freddie's (and then the band's) career are found in the lyrical side (to which all four contributed), but then there are some hidden links in the music as well: - The chromatic descending fragments (in thirds) in the orchestral interludes are reminiscent of Stone Cold Crazy. - The outro (in D Dorian) has the IV > III > I progression; Liar had ended up on III > IV > I, also in D Dorian. - The track begins with a reversed intro, as Ogre Battle did. - At the end of the first synth-break, one of the riffs from Death on Two Legs is quoted. - The descending line with pedal point resembles the piano motif in Bohemian Rhapsody. - bVII > IV > V > I cadence found in Bo Rhap too ("...monstrosity"). - The use of long cycles with varying breaks is an update of the Staying Power formula. - Flamenco-cadence variant, as in Liar, Great King Rat, Innuendo and It's a Hard Life.
Besides The Miracle, this track's structure is the most complex in the entire band's synth period. The recurring use of the intro is reminiscent of Staying Power, as well as the non-repetitive breaks put between verse and lift (which could be considered two halves of a same section, too). The way the last chorus changes its final chord is a little similar of a trick employed by Freddie on the last Ogre Battle riff, and by Brian on the second Save Me chorus as well as some sections in both Prophet's Song, I Want It All and The Show Must Go On.
The song starts in Cm but then shifts to Am, which again could be a contribution from Dr May (2), as there's a very similar formula used in the intro of Keep Yourself Alive (which still doesn't prove anything). The vocal parts are in Am, changing to C during the chorus. The bVII > IV > V > I progression had been used before in Bohemian Rhapsody ("spare him his life from this monstrosity"), and hints at some Dorian inflection especially as each chorus ends in Bb. The Dorian mode is suggested again in the outro. Freddie had applied that mode several times in the past, including Master-Stroke, Crazy Little Thing and Liar. Of course, the most interesting parts are the instrumental bits, especially the crazy spacer before the orchestral interlude properly begins: Dm > Bbm > Ab > Ebm, which is a modulation from Dm to Db (i > bI), and then to A (I> bVI, as in The March of the Black Queen and Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy).
This great musical theme is (in most iterations) based on a i > VII > VI > v progression, which is a variant of the flamenco-cadence Freddie used to flirt with in the early days (e.g. Liar, Great King Rat). Note that it sounds quite filmic, especially when played only on synth-pads. And as in some sort of twist-ending picture, where the plot is revealed at the end, the outro drives the harmony to D Dorian...
Harmony seems to go away from Am and change to E (as reinforced in the 'Two-Legs motif', first bar), only to switch then to Dm (or C Dorian, depends on how you interpret it), which is again a very strange kind of modulation. The closest example is Bohemian Rhapsody, where the "Galileo" bit makes the key change from A to Bb (as established by the "Magnifico" part).
Note the clever five-part score Freddie wrote here for strings. It forms some strange dissonances (A > G6-9 > Fmb9b11/G# > A) which could have been learnt from George Gershwin. Freddie was never a prolific jazz musician, but there were still some influences from that genre in some of his early work, particularly Seaside Rendezvous, Bring Back that Leroy Brown and My Melancholy Blues. The chromatic bit of the orchestral interlude is quite similar to the recurring piano-motif in Bohemian Rhapsody:
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