Made In Heaven

Made in Heaven was certified gold by the RIAA on March 26, 1996.

By the time we were recording these other tracks after Innuendo, we had had the discussions and we knew that we were totally on borrowed time because Freddie had been told that he would not make it to that point. I think our plan was to go in there whenever Freddie felt well enough, just to make as much use of him as much as possible, we basically lived in the studio for a while and when he would call and say, ‘I can come in for a few hours’, our plan was to just make as much use of him as we could, you know he told us, ‘Get me to sing anything, write me anything and I will sing it and I will leave you as much as I possibly can.’

Brian May – Champions of the World documentary

It was a long journey, and it was a much bigger job than anyone realised; we didn’t talk much about it.
We were able to work with Freddie on it, but hardly at all, and the object was to make an album that sounded like four guys in a studio. We knew that if we achieved that, then no one would ask any questions. And that’s almost what happened.
We started off with just scraps of tape. It was a huge job, two years of my life finding a way of developing the songs, but at the same time using the limited input we had from Freddie. Sometimes there was a complete first take vocal, while other times there were no more than three or four lines.
It was a labor of love for me, working through the night perhaps on just one line. But if you can listen to, for example, ‘I Was Born To Love You’ and say that it was a good performance, I’m glad it sounds so, but obviously, it couldn’t have been.

Brian May, July 1998, Guitarist

Roger and John became very impatient with me and started working on the tapes. I didn’t want this stuff to go out without my involvement, so I took the tapes off them, felt that they’d done it wrong and spent months putting it all back together. Doing Made In Heaven was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. But I wouldn’t have put my seal of approval on it if I hadn’t thought it was up to standard.

Brian May

The thing that was really unusual about these last songs they recorded was that Freddie insisted on doing final vocals. Normally he had always wanted to wait until all the music was completed before he would put his final vocal on. There must have been a reason for this, I think he felt there wasn’t enough time to have it completed in time. Which also means that he definitely wanted these things to be released, there’s simply no other reason why he would have done that.

David Richards