Sweet! I'm glad you liked the song. "Spread Your Wings" is one of my favorite songs of theirs. The accompanying visuals -- the giant robot holding the bodies of the band members in its hands against a green backdrop -- are taken from the cover of the album with this song on it, News of the World. It features "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" and I was an older kid when it was new and we couldn't get enough of it for a few years. "Spread Your Wings" was on the same side of the record as those two songs, so I would let it play through to the end because all the songs on that side were good. Their bass player wrote the song but their singer lived its story and it shows in how much extra he puts into singing the song.
Just to share why this song is important to me. As a teenager, my co-best friend Patrick introduced me to a tape of a live concert by Queen. And when they played this song, he gushed over it. Even as a youngster, Pat had big dreams. You know, the timing of it is off and Queen must have been playing this, years before they put it on an album. I don't know, maybe my memory of when this album came out is faulty. As things go, Pat and I followed different paths. I hadn't seen him a long time, when I heard that he had become a Major in the Army. He was serving in Germany, had a wife and two kids, and the day I learned these things was also the day I learned he had been hit by a train while out jogging, and was dead. Not yet thirty. I thought of him listening to this song. As crazy and wild as I was as a kid, Pat always told me that he was glad we were friends as I kept him grounded from the nuttiest notions in his head. One example. One night for no reason we "attacked" a reproduction full set of armor at a Mexican restaurant. Screaming, "Freedom!", long before the movie Braveheart was ever made, we beat the living hell out of that statue. I had to drag him out before the cops showed up. He was really into our craziness. And I can tell you why that high-speed train hit him. Didn't even need to be there to know. He dared himself to beat it. Or, and I hope, my other co-best friend who was rather a successful artist and prone to fantastical imaginary tales, and was the one who told me about Pat, made the whole thing up. Pat, whether here somewhere on earth, or not, this song goes out to you.
