As one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, it’s almost laughable to imagine Queen frontman Freddie Mercury wishing he could sound like somebody else—yet, as the rest of the world was admiring him and his band, he was admiring Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul.” Mercury spoke incredibly highly of the iconic soul singer, including one interview in February 1984 where he lamented, “I wish I could sing like her.” (Leaving us to wonder: didn’t he, though?)
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Mercury continued, “Her phrasing is just so beautiful. I mean, it’s so effortless. She just sings like a dream. It’s like she doesn’t have to think about it. When I have to sing, I think about it. I sort of practice a few phrases and then do it. Whereas I can tell by just listening to Aretha Franklin’s records that, I mean, she just goes in there and just…it’s effortless. Having said that, I’m sure she’d call me up and say, ‘Wait a minute.’ But it just sounds so effortless, and it’s all sort of spontaneous phrasing and things, which is what I love.”
In many ways, comparing Mercury to Franklin is the classic conundrum of comparing apples to oranges. But on November 12, 1976, Queen and Aretha Franklin were as similar as they ever were, thanks to a song Mercury wrote with Franklin in mind.
Aretha Franklin Heavily Inspired This 1976 Queen Classic
British rock band Queen released “Somebody to Love” on November 12, 1976, as the lead single from their fifth studio album, A Day at the Races. (The album came out one month later, on December 10.) In terms of classic Queen songs, it’s one of the most recognizable tracks on the album to the casual Queen listener. And according to both Mercury and his bandmate, drummer Roger Taylor, it was a song heavily inspired by the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin.
“Freddie’s very much into that,” Taylor said of the “Aretha Franklin-influenced” track during a 1977 interview with Circus Magazine. “We tried to keep the track in a loose, gospel-type feel. I think it’s the loosest track we’ve ever done.”
In his February 1984 interview, Mercury compared “Somebody to Love” to Franklin’s gospel records, which he studied voraciously. He compared her backing choir to “tidal waves” of sound, which he successfully emulated on his own song. The arrangements might be loose in “Somebody to Love”, but only by Queen’s airtight standards. Whether in the lazily swung verses where Mercury sings, “Got no feel, I got no rhythm, I just keep losing my beat,” to the building, chorus-filled outro, the song is a masterclass in both vocal expression and arrangement as a whole.
The greatest shame, in this writer’s humble opinion, is that we were never graced with an Aretha Franklin version of the Queen classic.
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