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Written and composed completely by frontman and pianist Freddie Mercury, “My Melancholy Blues” is the concluding song for the Quadruple-Platinum hit album News of the World by the British band Queen. The song, following in the same vein of a preceding hit “Love of My Life”, describes a speaker experiencing a sorrowful end – or so it seems – to a night out for a bar patron.

This song displays a, for a lack of a better word, melancholy feeling to the listener with Freddie’s dissonant vocals, dual piano solos and the great combination of drums and bass by Roger Taylor and John Deacon respectively, especially after the upbeat ending to the preceding three-part song, “It’s Late”. This version of the song is one of the few in the history of the band to not feature the guitar or participation of guitarist Brian May, even though he and his guitar conclude the live versions with a solo, as shown in the BBC Sessions, and Live at the Summit in Houston.

Being one of the lesser known but complicated Queen songs, little is known about “My Melancholy Blues” other than that it originated as a solo Freddie Mercury demo “My Melancholy Baby”, and it came out not only as more of a jazz composition rather than the mentioned blues, but one of the most heavily complex ones of the band’s “No Synth” Era, lacking a normal songwriting formula. As noted by QueenSongs.info:

The shuffle beat with 2/4 meter (the only Queen song in 2/4) could be influenced by both genre. While on the surface it sounds like a jazz standard type of song (foreshadowing the “Jazz” album?), the form is unusually novel for the genre which is dominated by AABA form…The form cannot really be interpreted as a sequence of textbook sections (ie: Verse, Chorus, Bridge). Some features:
- The title phrase closes the B section.
- The A-B transition is so smooth that it doesn’t sound like a real section transition (note: no tonic is used there).
- long non-repetitive sections.
- Except three (2+1) Mercury-esque “import” phrases there is no “crosstalk” between the two halves of the song.
- the BBC version starts with Intro II and closes with the Intro I' figure.

It was a regular on the News of the World Tour, but not played much afterward. It was originally incorporated into the following 1978-1979 Jazz Tour, but was replaced by “Dreamer’s Ball”. The 1977 Summit recording was a part of the B-Side for the CD version of the 1989 single “The Miracle”, along with “Stone Cold Crazy”, which was in turn featured in the concert video Rare Live: A Concert Through Time And Space. A live recording from the 1977 BBC Sessions was one of two (The other was “Spread Your Wings”) released in the 2011 News of the World reissue.

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Credits
Produced By
Written By
Bass Guitar
Background Vocals
Lead Vocals
Recorded At
Sarm Studios, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Greater London, England; Wessex Sound Studios, Highbury, Islington, Inner London, England
Release Date
October 28, 1977
Songs That Interpolate My Melancholy Blues
My Melancholy Blues Covers
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