“In a way it’s the most important song I ever wrote, because it does sum up life’s journey for me” – Relive Brian May talking through ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ from his forthcoming Album:
Storytelling with Brian May: “Too Much Love Will Kill You”
– https://youtu.be/v7nlN7wHEE8
Brian May “‘Back to the Light” Remastered Reissue Coming August 6, 2021
Available to Pre-order Now: https://BrianMay.lnk.to/BackToTheLight
Transcript J Tunney
E&OE
‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ is a big long story and the version that you hear on this album is the original. It has the original. It has the original keyboard that I played when we were writing this. Me and Frank Musker and his lady friend at the time, were in a room and it was like a therapy session for me. I was just pouring out all these words, because I felt like I was trapped, I was in a place that I could never ever get out of it. All I could do was write about it. This is the only song I wrote in that probably nine months or a year period.
Every word on it as I listen to it, now, every word counts for me. Every word I would still stand by. It’s exactly how I am inside. I say “am” in the present tense because really, I’ve come to the realisation that I haven’t changed that much. You know, those flaws in my psyche are still there, the things that I struggle with are still there. So – ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ is a chronicle of what’s actually buried deepest inside me. And as I say, every word means something at that time and still now. It’s about relationships, of course.
It’s about my relationships … painful for me and for also the people around me that I would reveal it in this way. And it did do some damage. It was hard to deal with, but I had to sort of open up and be as honest as that for the songs – the one opportunity I have in my life to tell it as I saw it. And in a way it’s the most important song I ever wrote because it does sum up life’s journey for me. It got a lot of prominence because it became Queen song, and people did assume that it was about Freddie, which is not the case. But the funny thing is about songs, they can mean so many things and I don’t know if that was inside me as well when I wrote it – it’s possible that it is – so I’m not going to say what it’s about definitively. It became about a number of different things and I did perform it at the Freddie Tribute with him in mind obviously. So the song transformed in a way at that moment. And it was recognised as the – yeah – it got the prize from the Ivor Novello people as the best song lyrically and musically of that time, which is great. Means a lot to me.”
Brian May