"Love of My Life" is a song by the British rock bandQueen from their 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The sentimental ballad was written by Freddie Mercury. Mercury never publicly disclosed the song's muse, stating in an interview: "There isn’t really any connection between the music and my life. 'Love of My Life,' for instance, I simply made up. There’s nothing personal about it." John Reid said the song had been written about David Minns: "Freddie actually wrote 'Love of My Life,' for David Minns. Freddie told me that. 'Love of My Life,' was for Minns." After Queen performed the song in South America in 1981, the version from their live albumLive Killers reached number 1 in the singles chart in Argentina and Brazil, and stayed in the charts in Argentina for an entire year. Freddie Mercury wrote it on the piano and guitar first, and Brian May rearranged the song for acoustic12-string guitar for live performances, also lowering the key by a minor third. May contributed occasional guitar phrases to the original recording and played the swooping harp glissandos by pasting together multiple takes of single chords.
Live performances
Introduced during the News of the World Tour in 1977, "Love of My Life" was such a concert favourite that Mercury frequently stopped singing and allowed the audience to take over. It was especially well received during concerts in South America, and as a result, the band released the Live Killers version of the song as a single there. After Mercury's death, Brian May has frequently dedicated the song to him in his own live performances. A notable exception is the Sheffield show which yielded the Return of the Champions CD and DVD. At that show, May announced that Mercury's mother was at the show and he dedicated the song to her instead. In the Queen + Paul Rodgers Tour, May would sing a few lines of the song, then let the audience take over for every verse, as Mercury did. When played at the Glasgow SECC in the 2008 Cosmos Rocks tour, May dedicated the song to his own mother, who had recently died. During Rock in Rio 6 in 2015, Queen + Adam Lambert was one of the artists to celebrate the festival's 30th anniversary. "Love of My Life" had both May singing a few lines and archive footage of Mercury performing the song during the inaugural Wembley concert in 1986.
The acoustic version of the song featured on the band's 1979 album Live Killers was recorded at their concert at Festhalle Frankfurt on 2 February of that year. A shortened version was released as a single in the UK and other territories, which did not include the spoken intros and outros from the album. The liner notes for the DVD release "Greatest Video Hits 1" state that although the live audio is from Frankfurt, the accompanying music video that was edited to the track consisted of footage from a 1979 Tokyo concert. In fact, the footage was filmed before one of three Tokyo concerts the band played between 23–25 April. Some bits of footage from two concerts in Paris from earlier in the year are woven in. After performing the song in South America in 1981, it was this version that reached number 1 in the singles chart in Argentina and Brazil, and stayed in the charts in Argentina for an entire year.
