Learn these songs by Queen with Fret Zealot
British rock band Queen is one of the most commercially successful bands of all time, selling over 300 million albums around the world. They formed in 1970 and had multiple huge hits, including “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “We Will Rock You”, and “Don’t Stop Me Now”.
Check out these Queen songs you can learn with Fret Zealot!
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
A song written by Freddie Mercury as a tribute to his musical inspirations, Elvis Presley and Sir Cliff Richard, Mercury said he wrote “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” in five to ten minutes. “I did that on the guitar, which I can’t play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords,” he told Melody Maker magazine in 1981. “It’s a good discipline because I simply had to write within a small framework. I couldn’t work through too many chords and because of that restriction I wrote a good song, I think.”
A favorite song for sporting events, “We Will Rock You” is usually followed by “We Are the Champions”. They were the last two songs Queen performed at Live Aid in 1985. The song is nearly completely a cappella except for a 30 second solo by May toward the end. The “stamping” effects were made by the band.
Queen’s 1975 six-minute “mock opera” dominated the charts in England and took the number one spot in a dozen other countries when it was released – but in the U.S., it never made it past #9. When Wayne’s World came out in 1992, the car scene featuring “Bohemian Rhapsody” helped shoot the track to #2 on the Billboard chart.
Don’t Stop Me Now didn’t chart very high when it was released as a single in 1979, but time has been very kind to it. The song has become more popular over the years thanks to consistent airplay, use in TV shows, ads, and movies, and through cover versions.
Another One Bites the Dust (for bass)
Featuring a simple but insanely catchy bassline, “Another One Bites the Dust” was written by Queen bassist John Deacon. Deacon had been hanging out in the studio with disco band Chic, which inspired him to write the funky line.
MORE:
Want to play guitar like Brian May of Queen?
Five little-known facts about Queen
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