Brian May

Brian Harold May CBE (born 19 July 1947 in Hampton, London, England) became famous in the 1970s and 1980s as the virtuoso guitarist of the rock group Queen and composed many of their hits, including "We Will Rock You", "Hammer to Fall", "Tie Your Mother Down", "Who Wants to Live Forever", "I Want it All", and "The Show Must Go On".

Brian May's Input In Songs Credited To Queen

After the famous Live Aid concert in summer 1985, Mercury rang his band mates and proposed to write a song together between them. The result was One Vision, which was basically Brian on music (the Magic Years documentary shows how he came up with the opening section and the basic guitar riff) and Roger on lyrics, with Freddie being more a producer and arranger than a proper co-writer, and John Deacon mostly absent.

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For their 1989 release album, The Miracle, the band had decided that all of the tracks would be credited to all the band, no matter who had been the main writer. Still, interviews and musical analyses tend to identify the input of each member on each track.

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May composed I Want It All for that album (recent releases credit the song to just him), as well as Scandal (based on his personal problems with the British press). For the rest of the album he didn't contribute so much creatively, although he helped building the basis of Party and Was It All Worth It (both being mostly Freddie's pieces) and came up with the guitar riff of Chinese Torture, an unreleased track of those sessions.

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Queen's next album was Innuendo, on which May's contributions increased, although more in arrangements than actual writing in most cases; for the title track he did some of the arrangement for the heavy solo, then he added vocal harmonies to I'm Going Slightly Mad and composed the solo of These Are The Days Of Our Lives, a song for which the four of them decided the keyboard parts together. He changed the tempo and key of Freddie's metal song The Hitman and took it under his wing, even singing guide vocal in the demo. May also co-wrote some of the guitar lines in Bijou.

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Two songs that May had composed for his first solo album, Headlong and I Can't Live With You, eventually ended up in the Queen project. His other composition was The Show Must Go On, a group effort in which he was the coordinator and primary composer, but in which they all had input — Deacon and Taylor with the famous chord sequence, Mercury with the first verse.

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