For My Sunday Song #224, we are going to discuss one of Queen’s fun songs, “I’m in Love With My Car”. The song is off the album, “A Night at the Opera” which was released in 1975. The song was written by Roger Taylor and is one of his more famous songs mainly because it was the B-Side to a little known Queen hit “Bohemian Rhapsody”, you may have heard of that one. There is a whole story to that which we will get to shortly.
The song was actually inspired by one of the band’s roadies, Johnathan Harris. Johnathan loved his car to death which was a Triumph TR4. Roger wrote it and played all the instruments for the demo and the band kind of thought of it as a joke, but Roger wasn’t joking. They recorded the song and Roger pitched a royal tantrum to get on the B-Side of “Bohemian Rhapsody” which the band finally caved after Roger had locked himself in a closet (or cupboard) until Freddie finally agreed. This ended up causing a lot of tension between him and Freddie because Freddie was pissed he got as much in royalties for that “Bohemian Rhapsody” single he didn’t write-it. But because his song was on the B-Side he got a big piece of the pie as well. Turned out that whole tantrum trick worked out quite nicely in Roger’s favor.
The song is actually pretty great. What guy hasn’t fallen in love with his car. I had a friend that spent so many long hours fixing up their 69 Firebird and they loved their car so much. It was also fun to do burnouts with. And I love my car now as it is fun to drive and just hugs the road. So I get it. Musically, Brain May’s guitar work is great as he recorded it with his own Red Special guitar. Freddy is on the piano playing away and Roger’s vocals sound great. The song ends with a motor revving and that was Roger’s own car which was an Alfa Romeo.
2 Loud 2 Old Music 