The most painful song Brian May ever wrote: “It was true therapy”
Recording their 1995 album Made In Heaven would have undoubtedly been a jarring experience for Queen.
Freddie Mercury had sadly passed away four years earlier, leaving them with one final record in Innuendo. They would be left without his charismatic presence thereafter and surely a hole too gaping to even think about filling. It was their 14th studio record at the time, a natural bookend to a career that saw the band reach the most glittering heights of the music industry.
But in ‘95, they dusted themselves off. Brian May and Roger Taylor knew that music is immortal, and unbound to the cruel changing tides of life, and so to dishonour that would have been to dishonour the band entirely.
So, digging through the crate of sonic ideas, the pair decided to look back at demos that existed in the earlier works of the band. Songs that may not have made the cut during their triumphant Mercury-led years, but may now find space to grow under the new, more considered stewardship of May in particular.
During the intimacy of those thoughts, one song presented itself clearer than the rest: ‘Too Much Love To Kill’. Mercury’s vocals were given another chance to front the band, telling a story that was brutal and personal for May, guiding him out of one of the darkest periods of his life.
“‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ is the most painful autobiographical thing I’ve ever done,” he explained. “That was the low point for me in my life and it became the high point in terms of creativity. But only that song, that’s the only thing I did in that probably 15 month, 16 month period. I was very bad.”
He continued, “Love is supposed to be a good thing, but too much of anything can turn into something which poisons your soul. So too much love will kill you,” adding, “Every word is there for a reason. It’s not like because the song is there, because it has to rhyme, because it’s another word. It’s like every single word is something I had to say to get it out of my system. It was true therapy.
“So it’s very important to me. I think it won an Ivor Novello Award, which is great. It kind of reinforces my feeling that it’s one of the more important songs I’ve ever created. And it’s probably a candidate for being written on my tombstone.”
Nothing was left off the table for May when it came to ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’. It was a clear reference to his 1988 separation from his first wife, Christine Mullen, the mother of his three children and subsequent affair with his second wife, Anita Dobson, two years earlier, whom he later married.
Grappling with the conflict of heartbreak and newfound love, May took solace in the voice of his beloved bandmate to lay all his vulnerabilities bare on the track. It was certainly painful, but with the help of the late Mercury, he proudly turned something so brutal into something beautiful.
