It was all meant to be, yeah."
The sun is shining, I feel good.
And no one's gonna stop me now, oh yeah."
Made in Heaven is the fifteenth and final album by the British rock band Queen, released through Parlophone Records in the United Kingdom and Hollywood Records in America on 6 November 1995. After recording Innuendo, Freddie Mercury spent the remaining months of his life recording additional vocal and piano tracks before becoming too sickly to finish his final song "Mother Love", leaving the final verse to be sung by Brian May. On 24 November 1991, Mercury passed away after a lengthy battle with AIDS.
The remaining members of the band assembled these recordings between 1993 and 1995 and recorded instrumentations in their studio in Montreux, Switzerland, the site of the Freddie Mercury statue as seen on the album cover. Despite wishing to complete as much material as possible, Mercury only left behind enough material for three songs; the rest had to be pieced together from outtakes, side projects, and solo projects. For instance, "Made in Heaven", from which the album derives its name, was originally a song from Mercury's solo album Mr. Bad Guy; the band re-recorded the instrumental parts to fit it in with their style. Furthermore, two of the songs are essentially cover versions of songs originally recorded by May for his solo career and Roger Taylor for his side project The Cross: "Too Much Love Will Kill You" for the former, and "Heaven for Everyone" for the latter.
The album was released in two formats: a 48-minute LP, and a CD version with an additional 22-and-a-half-minute untitled ambient track. The covers of both were also different, portraying the Lake Geneva scenery in dawn and dusk respectively. It went quadruple platinum in the United Kingdom, also reaching gold and platinum status in various markets around the world. Two years after the release of the album, the band put out one last single, "No-One but You (Only the Good Die Young)" (recorded for the compilation Queen Rocks), John Deacon retired from music, and Queen became inactive until 2004. To assure that they wouldn't be truly replacing Mercury, they would bill themselves as a collaborative act with a guest singer, first with Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers as "Queen + Paul Rodgers," then with American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert as "Queen + Adam Lambert."
Made in Heaven was supported by six singles: "Heaven for Everyone", "A Winter's Tale", "I Was Born to Love You" (Japan only), "Too Much Love Will Kill You", "Let Me Live" and "You Don't Fool Me".
Tracklist:
- "It's a Beautiful Day" (2:33)
- "Made in Heaven" (5:25)
- "Let Me Live" (4:46)
- "Mother Love" (4:46note )
- "My Life Has Been Saved" (3:15)
- "I Was Born to Love You" (4:50note )
- "Heaven for Everyone" (5:36note )
- "Too Much Love Will Kill You" (4:20)
- "You Don't Fool Me" (5:25note )
- "A Winter's Tale" (3:49)
- "It's a Beautiful Day" (reprise) (3:01)
- "Yeah"note (0:04note )
- " '13' "note (22:33)
Principal Members:
- John Deacon - bass, electric guitar, keyboard
- Brian May - electric guitar, backing vocals, keyboards, co-lead vocals ("Let Me Live", "Mother Love")
- Freddie Mercury - lead vocals, keyboards, backing vocals, drum machine
- Roger Taylor - drums, backing vocals, keyboards, co-lead vocals ("Let Me Live")
Let me live and make a brand new trope:
- Alternate Album Cover: The CD cover depicts the view of the band's Montreux studio at dusk; the LP release, meanwhile, showcases the same area at dawn. Consequently, the back photo of the band also changes, going from them gazing at the Alps to them gazing at the rising sun.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The common
Fanon of the once-untitled 22-and-a-half-minute ambient track " '13' ". - Bookends: Discounting the hidden tracks, the album begins and ends with "It's a Beautiful Day." On another level, as the reprise heads for the close, samples from "Seven Seas of Rhye," the final song on their first album, are mixed into the track.
- Epic Rocking: The unlisted ambient track lasts for 22 and a half minutes. It wasn't on the 1995 LP, at least not in its entirety (the opening seconds occupy a locked groove at the end), but the 2015 LP has it as side four.
- Fading into the Next Song: "It's a Beautiful Day" → "Made in Heaven"; "A Winter's Tale" → "It's a Beautiful Day" (reprise) → "Yeah"note → track 13.
- Hidden Track: "Yeah" and " '13' " weren't listed. And " '13' " was so named because it is track 13 and otherwise untitled.
- Limited Lyrics Song: "Yeah" consists solely of the word "yeah." Likewise, the only lyrics in " '13' " are a mantra of "are you running?" during the bridge and Freddie Mercury shouting "fab!" at the very end.
- Longest Song Goes Last: The album closes with " '13' ", which at 22:33 holds the position of being the longest track in Queen's discography.
- Match Cut: The music video for "Too Much Love Will Kill You" has a series of match-cuts featuring a number of different masks that takes up the entire screen.
- Miniscule Rocking: "Yeah" only lasts four seconds (the minimum track length of a Red Book-compliant CD), and only lasted a few more seconds on any LP release (albeit ending in a locked groove).
- No Title: " '13' " officially went unnamed until a 2015 LP reissue of the album, which named it out of necessity due to it taking up the entire fourth side. "Yeah" meanwhile still goes without an official title, with the name being derived from its one and only lyric.
- Posthumous Collaboration: Deliberate on Freddie's part. Freddie recorded as many vocals as he could for the band to work with, but they still had to dig deeper than that to make a full album. For example, Brian sings the last verse of "Mother Love" because Freddie didn't finish his vocals, a number of songs are repurposed from collaborations or Freddie's solo career, and "You Don't Fool Me" was essentially MacGyvered into a coherent song from scraps. Even discounting the solo career material, a lot of Freddie's vocal and piano work on this album comes from long before 1991. All in all, only three songsnote are actually written and completely recorded after Innuendo.
- Production Throwback:
- "Mother Love" samples Freddie Mercury's call-and-response chant from the band's 1986 Wembley Stadium concert (as documented in the 1992 Live Album Live at Wembley '86), with the synth string intro to "One Vision" playing in the background. The last lines of the song are additionally lifted from Mercury's 1973 solo cover of "Goin' Back", which was included as the B-side to Mercury's debut solo single (released under the pseudonym Larry Lurex), a rendition of the Ronettes' "I Can Hear Music".
- "I Was Born to Love You" samples Mercury's ad-libs from the Title Track to A Kind of Magic.
- "A Winter's Tale", recorded during the post-Innuendo sessions, has a subtle but charming one: "It's A Kind of Magic in the air".
- The breakdown in "It's a Beautiful Day (Reprise)" samples the piano riff from the closing track of both Queen and Queen II, "Seven Seas of Rhye".
- Mercury's interjection of "yeah!" in both "It's a Beautiful Day (Reprise)" and the aptly-titled "Yeah" is sampled from "Action This Day".
- Rearrange the Song:
- Both versions of "It's a Beautiful Day" are taken from a demo that Freddie Mercury recorded during the sessions for The Game in 1980.
- "Made in Heaven" and "I Was Born to Love You" are remixes of tracks from Freddie's solo album Mr. Bad Guy, featuring the original vocals atop re-recorded instrumental parts.
- "Let Me Live" is a remix of an unreleased song recorded with Rod Stewart in 1983. Brian May and Roger Taylor would ultimately take Stewart's role in the final version.
- "My Life Has Been Saved" was originally the B-side to "Scandal"; the version included on this album features re-recorded instrumentals.
- "Heaven for Everyone" is a remix of a song that Freddie Mercury recorded with Roger Taylor's side project the Cross. The 1995 version features a re-recorded backing track and backing vocals and omits the spoken-word portions.
- "Too Much Love Will Kill You" is a remixed outtake from The Miracle that was previously re-recorded by Brian May for his solo debut Back to the Light.
- Record Producer: The album is Queen's first since News of the World to feature the band as the sole credited producer, though like that album, the engineer (Mike Stone there, David Richards here) served as a de-facto co-producer.
- Re-Cut: Initial LP releases edited a few tracks and excised " '13' " in order to fit the album on one disc. To compensate, "Yeah" segues into a locked groove containing the first few seconds from " '13' ". The 2015 vinyl reissue manages to include the full CD tracklist by spreading it across two discs, with " '13' " taking up the entirety of side four.
- Step Up to the Microphone:
- Brian May and Roger Taylor share lead vocal duties with Freddie Mercury on "Let Me Live".
- Brian May sings the last verse of "Mother Love", as Freddie Mercury died before he could record that part.
- Talk About the Weather: The lyrics to "A Winter's Tale" are simply about the beauty of winter weather; fittingly, they were derived from the sights outside Freddie's hospital window at Lake Geneva.
- Vocal Tag Team: Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor all trade off lead vocals on "Let Me Live". Mercury sings most of the song, Taylor sings the second and third verses, and May sings the fourth verse.
