The Game

About

Released in 1980, <i>The Game</i> finds Queen loosening up a little a bit. The group’s previous album, the playful <i>Jazz</i>, was fun—but given the option of either dashing something off, or agonizing over it to the point of paralysi, the members of Queen always chose the latter. So when they managed to record “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” in four hours—an unprecedentedly short amount of time in Queenworld—and the song ended up becoming the group’s biggest American single to date, the bandmates had an epiphany: They could be quick and easy in the studio, and <i>still</i> be Queen. In a continuing effort to record internationally—a pursuit undertaken to avoid English tax collectors—Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon headed to Munich, where they hung out after recording sessions at a club called the Sugar Shack, often auditioning new tracks on the club sound system after hour. Generally, the more space a track had, the better it sounded, whether it was the weird, funky hard rock of Brian May’s “Dragon Attack” or the disco of John Deacon’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” which the band put out as a single in part because Michael Jackson suggested it (and if there’s one person you were going to listen to about pop music in 1980, it was Michael Jackson). .

via Apple Music

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