“Face It Alone” arrives digitally
Having generated a media firestorm back in the summer when band members Brian May and Roger Taylor first leaked news of a rediscovered Queen song featuring Freddie Mercury being considered for possible release, the highly anticipated “lost” track, “Face It Alone,” drops as a simultaneous worldwide single release today (Thurs, Oct 13th).
The track’s existence was first revealed by May and Taylor in a BBC radio interview at their appearance at this year’s Royal Jubilee concert at which they performed the opening with their regular singer Adam Lambert, with Roger Taylor describing it as “a little gem from Freddie that we’d kind of forgotten about,” with Brian May saying “it’s beautiful, it’s touching.”
“I’m happy that our team were able to find this track. After all these years, it’s great to hear all four of us … yes, Deacy is there too … working in the studio on a great song idea which never quite got completed … until now!” May says.
The track’s arrival as a single leads in a November 18th release of a new revisiting of the band’s 13th album, The Miracle, the band’s penultimate to be released in Freddie Mercury’s lifetime, which now becomes available in a lavish eight disc Queen The Miracle Collector’s Edition box set format featuring an LP and CD of the original album, four CDs of bonus material and a Blu-ray and DVD of album videos and interviews. A 2 CD version will also be offered.
Among its contents, the expanded set includes The Miracle Sessions, an hour-plus disc of further previously unreleased recordings, including six unpublished songs. Just as tantalizing for fans, the audio includes the band’s candid spoken exchanges on the studio floor in London and Montreux, giving the most revealing window yet into the four members’ creative process and the joy, in-jokes and banter on their return to working together.
“Face It Alone” was originally recorded during the band’s historic 1988 sessions for that album, a prolific period which saw the band lay down around 30 tracks, many of which were never released, but remained among those that didn’t make the final album cut. It was rediscovered when the band’s production and archive team returned to those sessions to work on The Miracle box set reissue.
“We’d kind of forgotten about this track,” admits Roger Taylor, “but there it was, this little gem. It’s wonderful, a real discovery. It’s a very passionate piece”.
The single will be the first new song featuring Freddie Mercury released in over eight years. On 2014’s Queen Forever album the band included three previously unheard tracks with Mercury, including “Let Me in Your Heart Again,” “Love Kills” and “There Must Be More to Life Than This.”
Widely recognized as Queen’s strongest album of the 80’s and one of their most inspired, the 1989 released The Miracle was a global success reaching No. 1 in the UK and several major European markets, even re-establishing the band in the US where it delivered a gold album. Brian May has often cited the title track as his favorite Queen song of all time.
Heard for the first time in Queen history, the spoken outtakes from The Miracle Sessions invite fans onto the studio floor to experience the band’s unvarnished dynamic, more natural and revealing than any “official” press interview. These unguarded exchanges – by turns mischievous, encouraging, witty, even affectionately waspish – capture the band as they truly were during The Miracle’s late bloom, buzzing with renewed enthusiasm at their return to the studio, and driven by a rare chemistry that still threw up sparks.
Another first for the box set is the reinstatement of “Too Much Love Will Kill You.” The Miracle was originally planned to be an 11-track album, but “Too Much Love” was removed at the last minute due to unresolved publishing issues. Later, Queen’s original version was to emerge on Made in Heaven in 1995, featuring Mercury’s lead vocal. While the CD version of the album remains faithful to the familiar ten-song running order, the vinyl record in the Collector’s Edition marks the first time that “Too Much Love Will Kill You” has been presented as part of the album, in the exact position on side one it was allocated in 1989.
Elsewhere, The Miracle Collector’s Edition brims with rarities, outtakes, instrumentals, interviews and videos, including the last interview Deacon gave, from the set of the video for the hard-driving single “Breakthru.” The richly packed box set also includes a lavish 76-page hardback book featuring previously unseen photographs, original handwritten fan-club letters from the band, press reviews from the time and extensive liner notes, with recollections from Freddie, John, Roger and Brian on both the making of the album and some of their most iconic videos.
