Father To Son Lyrics

"Father To Son" was written by Brian May and features heavy metal sections as well as a quiet piano part, which May played. Like the preceding number, "Father To Son" has parts with May on multi-tracked guitar, played through John Deacon's custom-made amplifier (the Deacy Amp). It is written in the father's perspective when talking or thinking about his son. Queen added "Father to Son" to their live setlists immediately and toured extensively, but the song was dropped from the setlists in 1975. Brian May, 1983, Guitar Greats, BBC Radio One: "(The Who and Led Zeppelin are) probably in there somewhere. They were our favourite groups among a few others. But what we were trying to do differently from either of those groups really was this sort of layered sound. See, The Who had a sort of 'clang' guitar sound – you know, the open chord guitar sound. There is a bit of that in 'Father To Son', but our sound is sort of more based around the overdriven guitar sound, which is what is used on the main bulk of the song. Also, what I wanted to do was this business of building up textures behind the main melody lines. So you have in the first entry of the vocal behind it there is a sort of orchestral thing, which is a nine-part guitar thing that was my expedition into sort of proper orchestrating of the guitar. So that was one thing. It's amazing how few people knew what we were doing. We wanted to make a kind of rock music that still had the power of, like, The Who or Led Zeppelin but which had more melody, more harmony, and more texture than had been done before. That was one of the first songs we did it on and there's lots of harmonies, lots of guitar harmonies and lots of bits of melody, you know."