Queen: Of Biblical Proportions

Queen: All The Songs, The Story Behind Every Track – Benoit Clerc (Black Dog and Leventhal)

Full confession up front- as a recovering rock radio DJ, I fully admit to not being a fan of Queen’s music. Chalk it up to them not being my cup of tea and the fact that they were omnipresent on the airwaves and got played over and over.

I gained a new appreciation for the band with the release of the biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, which gave insight into not only their beginnings, but into the process of writing songs and recording.

So it is from that perspective, one of new found appreciation that that I approach Queen: All The Songs, The Story Behind Every Track by Benoit Clerc. For me, the book has a great similarity Mark Lewisohn’s timeless book The Beatles: The Recordings, which delves not the nitty gritty detail of the Fab Four’s studio sessions. Queen: All The Songs, dwarfs that book, not only shear volume, but in the depth of the very specific detail. It covers songwriting, the recording studio, the participants on the production side and the specifics on the session itself.

I am an old school album collector and as a music fan obsessed with the minutiae of liner notes. Clerc delivers liner notes on performance enhancing drugs. This is super-sized fan stuff.

Lavishly illustrated with archival photos and highlighted tons of fan friendly tidbits and trivia, this is one of those great books that fans will dip into on a regular basis. I can easily see pulling out a stack of Queen albums and gaining insights into what went into the making each of the songs. Great stuff all the way around.