Monday Queen: Personal

The Queen bio-pic, Bohemian Rhapsody comes out this Friday. We look foreword to it.

Like a lot of men our age, we discovered Queen in the mid-80's. That means we discovered the Iron Eagle/Highlander version of Queen.

Our first Queen album was A Kind of Magic which is also the Highlander soundtrack and has one of our favorite Queen songs ever: One Vision.

This is a very special album to us and helped us through a very tough time in our youth. We've listened to A Kind of Magic a thousand times.

Tell me the opener to One Vision doesn't sound like a squadron of choppers taking off, and tell me the rest of the song doesn't sound like a call to battle. It is. One Vision is about Martin Luther King. We often took great inspiration from the song and the album, and we feel it today when we write out combat sequences.

Later we were a HS senior when the whole Bohemian Rhapsody/Wayne's World thing happened. The timing was just perfect. So was the release of their last album, Innuendo. There's more serious songs on the album, but we'd like to call attention to Headlong.

Back in the day, we'd drive our  '86 Celica GT North on Route 9A, out of Briarcliff  down 'Killer Hill' toward Croton. Near the bottom of the hill, 9A makes a long, swooping downward right curve into Croton. We'd hit the gas with Headlong blaring.  If we timed it right, we could start coasting at about 3:00 and really explode out at 3:20. God it was perfect...

Sometimes, if we hear Headlong in the minivan, we'll still hit the gas.

Monday Metal

Queen: A Kind of Magic.

In Radio-Ga-Ga Freddy Mercury sings about radio being his 'only friend through teenage nights'.

Well in a senior year filled with disappointment and pain A Kind of Magic was our friend. Twenty-five years on it still is.

First the lead song, the theme song for Iron Eagle:

A call to arms if we ever heard one.

Not until we were much older did we get into earlier Queen, so for a good portion of our life we thought of them as a hard rock-metal band. Between the Wayne's World moment and albums like A Kind of Magic one can see why.

For Gen-X sci-fi geeks, A Kind of Magic is more properly called Highlander, as  half the songs were in the 1985 film.

To this day we get chills from this one:

Fuck yeah.

Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, swords....

Here's another great one:

Great solo and some nice harmonies:

A Kind of Magic, for us it has always beem