Queen Song of the Week: You're My Best Friend

I debated for a bit whether to feature You're My Best Friend as this week's Queen Song of the Week or move on to the next song on Queen's 1975 release: A Night at the Opera.

My reservations?

Well, I kind of already featured You're My Best Friend here when I wrote about my favorite Queen memories during my last giveaway.

Finally I decided that post was really more of a featurette than a feature and since I'm really trying hard to show poor Deaky some love on my blog, I'd go ahead and do a full feature on this song.

You're My Best Friend is the fourth track on A Night at the Opera. It was released as a single in 1976 where it peaked at #7 on the U.K. charts and at #16 in the U.S. It was released in 1984 as a Double-A side with Killer Queen in 1984, but did not chart.

Video courtesy of queenofficial.

Deaky wrote this song about his wife Veronica. They've been married for more than thirty years and have six children so the sentiment was clearly true! When Deaky first told the band that he envisioned using the Wurlitzer piano, Freddie expressed his unhappiness with playing that particular instrument so Deaky went home and taught himself! When played live, Freddie played his traditional piano.

RT hits some great high notes in the backing track and as for the drums, Deaky had his own ideas about them as well.

According to RT (Absolute Greatest audio commentary, 2009): It was a nice big, fat drum sound and a sort of reverse round the drums starting on the lowest tuned drums first and ending on the snare, which is not… it’s sort of the reverse of the way things are normally done – so quite interesting from that drum aspect.

This song is particularly special to Husband and me because we hired a string trio to play it as a musical interlude during our wedding ceremony. I wasn't able to rip the performance from our wedding DVD, but here's a link to the Vitamin String Quartet playing the song. And upon further inspection, they seem to have recorded a number of Queen songs - totally awesome!

You're My Best Friend is the first of many hits that Deaky wrote for the band and demonstrates his traditional pop style. The song was particularly popular in the U.S., where Queen had slowly begun to make a never for itself.

Regarding the tremendous popularity of the song, RT, never one to mince words, remarks: I was absolutely devastated one day when I happened to catch the Donny and Marie Osmond show, or was it the Osmonds? And there they were singing it and I thought it’s all gone terribly wrong.

Yikes - I wonder what he'd have to say about my string trio!

Happy Listening!