Queen’s guitarist Brian May has revealed that when Bohemian Rhapsody was first written and recorded, he never thought it was anything especially remarkable. In a recent piece with GuitarPlayer, May shared that the track, which would become Queen’s biggest hit, felt to him like just another ambitious song—one of many experiments the band had already been doing.
May pointed out that Queen’s early albums contained similarly complex pieces, citing My Fairy King and March of the Black Queen as examples of songs that already stretched into unpredictable territory. Because of that, the inventive nature of Bohemian Rhapsody—the operatic sections, the fused styles, the dramatic shifts—didn’t immediately feel revolutionary to him.
He said, “People have such a hard time understanding how unsurprising ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was to us.” To him and his bandmates, it was just another track in the studio. The difference came from producer Roy Thomas Baker, whose vision helped polish and shape Freddie Mercury’s ideas into something more expansive.
May also reflected on how challenging the song’s guitar part is. He admitted that what seems effortless on the record is anything but when playing live. That riff, probably one of Queen’s most recognizable, remains “the most unnatural riff to play you could possibly imagine.” He said that while he practices it, when the adrenaline and crowd heat up during a live show, it still demands focus.
Even decades in, the song continues to humble him. May remarked that when Bohemian Rhapsody was released, the band wasn’t trying to make history—it just happened that history liked them.
