Invisible input - inspiration

Background

Mercury wrote 10 of the 17 songs on Queen's Greatest Hits album: "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Seven Seas of Rhye," "Killer Queen," "Somebody to Love," "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy," "We Are the Champions," "Bicycle Race," "Don't Stop Me Now," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "Play the Game".

Crazy Little Thing Called Love" was written by Freddie Mercury in 1979, and the track is featured on their 1980 album The Game, and also appears on the band's compilation album, Greatest Hits.

The most notable aspect of Freddie’s songwriting involved the wide range of genres that he used, which included, among other styles, rockabilly, progressive rock, heavy metal, gospel and disco. As he explained in a 1986 interview, "I hate doing the same thing again and again and again. I like to see what's happening now in music, film and theatre and incorporate all of those things."

Compared to many popular songwriters, Mercury also tended to write musically complex material. For example, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is acyclic in structure and comprises dozens of chords.

He also wrote six songs from Queen II which deal with multiple key changes and complex material. "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," on the other hand, contains only a few chords. Despite the fact that Mercury often wrote very intricate harmonies, he also ‘claimed that he could barely read music’. He wrote most of his songs on the piano and used a wide variety of different key signatures.

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Freddie Mercury – His Life in his own Words [compiled by Greg Brooks and Simon Lupton]

I have no set rules for writing a song. It's haphazard. Some songs come faster than others. I never sit down at the piano and say, "Right, I've got to write a song now." No. I feel a few things out and get some ideas about them and then I begin. It's hard to explain but there are always various ideas going through my head. Certain things just come together, but others I have to work for. It sounds conceited, but something like Killer Queen came to me in just one day. It just fell into place, as some songs do. I scribbled down the words in the dark on Saturday night, and the next morning I got them all together and worked all day Sunday, and that was it - I'd got it. Whereas, other songs I had to really work at to try and get the lyrics. The March Of The Black Queen (1974) for instance, on our second album, that was a song that took Ages to complete. I wanted to give it everything, to be self-indulgent.

I’ve been known to scribble down lyrics in the middle of the night without even putting the light on. I like to think that I write songs in lots of different ways, depending on my mood. Crazy Little Thing Called Love [1979) I wrote in the bath. It took me five or ten minutes to write.

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