B-side "Keep Yourself Alive" Format Vinyl record (7") Length 1:43 | Released April 1975 Recorded 1974 Label EMI, Elektra | |
"Lily of the Valley" is a song by British rock band Queen. Lead singer Freddie Mercury plays the piano and provides all the vocals on the track. It was originally featured on Queen's third album, Sheer Heart Attack, released in 1974, and is one of the album's few ballads.
Contents
In 1975, "Lily of the Valley" was released as the B-side of different singles in the U.K. and the United States. The U.K. single was "Now I'm Here", and the U.S. single was a reissue of "Keep Yourself Alive".
The lyrics refer back to a song from a previous album, "Seven Seas of Rhye" from Queen II, with the line "messenger from Seven Seas has flown, to tell the King of Rhye he's lost his throne."
In a 1999 interview, Brian May told the British music magazine MOJO, "Freddie's stuff was so heavily cloaked, lyrically... But you could find out, just from little insights, that a lot of his private thoughts were in there, although a lot of the more meaningful stuff was not very accessible. Lily of the Valley [Sheer Heart Attack] was utterly heartfelt. It's about looking at his girlfriend and realising that his body needed to be somewhere else. It's a great piece of art, but it's the last song that would ever be a hit."
Covers
"Lily of the Valley" was covered by 1980s band Game Theory, whose frontman Scott Miller performed a version that appears as a bonus track on the 2015 Omnivore reissue of Game Theory's 1985 album Real Nighttime, produced by Mitch Easter.
The song was also covered, together with "Tenement Funster" and "Flick of the Wrist", by Dream Theater on the bonus disc of their album Black Clouds & Silver Linings.
Another cover version appears on Jim Stevens' Connective Energies album, released on January 27, 2017.