If you notice in the beginning, when I’m a kid, there is no narration. Nobody’s explaining anything and it is a kid’s perspective. The second one is written in a different tone, similar to the song where it completely shifts in tone. So in the second one I’m writing like a teenage diary and there is a lot of narration. In the third one I sort of messed it up a little bit. The third part was actually the hardest to write, not because of the emotional aspect of it but because it was more difficult to write about things that had happened more recently; there was less perspective. However, I tried to get a different tone in each one.
Did you play the song a lot?
Yeah, I did.
Now I want to read Freddie & Me again while listening to the song.
You have to read it very quickly. [laughs]
Do you have a favorite Queen album?
It is currently Day at the Races. Which was not my favorite at all for a very long time.
So it has changed over the years?
Oh yeah, it’s changed a lot. My whole feeling about Queen’s music has changed a lot. I now have a very definitive set of albums that I really think are their best, which goes from Queen II to Hot Space. Hot Space—I don’t think that many people consider it good but I actually really like it. Then the stuff after that I don’t like as much anymore and I used to like it a lot more. But over the last four years I’ve listened to a lot of Queen. [laughs] So Day at the Races, which I didn’t use to like, is now by far my favorite. I think “Somebody to Love” is a great song. You know that song “Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)?” I love that song. That one I’ve told my wife that she has to play at my funeral.
Do you like Freddie Mercury’s solo stuff?
I do. I do feel like the stuff that you like as a child, however, you sometimes do lose a little perspective on. I know I like it but I can’t say that I’m a hundred percent sure that I would like it now were I to hear it for the first time.
I have to say, for being in high school, your friends were pretty tolerant of you listening to Queen.
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