Queen share unreleased Freddie Mercury track ‘Face It Alone’
The new track arrives on the upcoming reissue of Queen's 13th album 'The Miracle'
By Nick Reilly
Queen have shared Face It Alone’, an anticipated ‘lost’ track featuring the vocals of the late, great Freddie Mercury.
It comes after guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor revealed its existence during a BBC interview at the Platinum Jubilee concert, with Taylor hailing it as “a little gem from Freddie that we’d kind of forgotten about’.
The new release slots effortlessly into Queen’s storied back catalogue, with slow-burning instrumentation and Freddie Mercury’s distinctive vocals eventually making way for an explosive chorus.
“When something here so near, and dear to life, explodes inside, you feel your soul is set on fire,” comes Mercury’s opening vocals.
The track’s arrival comes ahead of next month’s reissue of the band’s 13th album, The Miracle, the penultimate to be released in Freddie Mercury’s lifetime. It is now available in a lavish 8-disc Queen The Miracle Collector’s Edition box set format.
Among its contents, the expanded set includes The Miracle Sessions: an hour-plus disc of further previously unreleased recordings, including six unpublished songs. Offering an insight into the recording process, the audio includes the band’s candid spoken exchanges on the studio floor in London and Montreux, displaying their in-jokes and banter during the sessions.
‘Face It Alone’ was originally recorded during the band’s historic 1988 sessions for that album,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,” said 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 8 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.’