Queen fans have something to celebrate today and look forward to as well. The band dropped the newly completed Freddie Mercury-sung outtake “Face It Alone” today and announced the November 18th release of a a massive five-disc box set of their critically acclaimed 1989 album, The Miracle.
The Miracle — Queen's 13th studio set — was released on May 22nd, 1989. The album, which stalled at Number 24 in America, topped the charts in the UK, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, and Germany.
The album's lead single, “I Want It All” hit Number Three on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart.
The upcoming Miracle box contains over an hour of unreleased studio recordings including six previously unpublished songs — “plus intimate fly-on-the-wall audio of the band at work (and play) in the studio.”
Brian May said of the recently unearthed track, “Face It Alone,” which features all of Queen — including bassist John Deacon: “I’m happy that our team were able to find this track. After all these years, it’s great to hear all four of us. . . yes, 'Deacy' is there too. . . working in the studio on a great song idea which never quite got completed. . . until now!”
The Miracle — which was the second to-last Queen album released in Freddie Mercury's lifetime, was the first to credit the entire band on all the songs. Brian May explained, “Splitting the credits was a very important decision for us. We left our egos outside the studio door. and worked together as a real band — something that wasn’t always the case. I wish we’d done it 15 years before.”
Shortly before his 1991 death, Freddie Mercury explained that the variety of having multiple songwriters in Queen curbed many of the band's impulses to work with other people: “I think this is one of the few groups that all four members write. In a funny way, when we do a Queen album, they're like four solo projects within themselves anyway; 'cause, I mean, I have my bunch of songs, Brian has his, Roger (Taylor), and John (Deacon). . . And so, it's like four little solo projects working side by side and them we put them all together. So, I think that is the reason that we didn't go and do solo projects earlier on. If we were writing all the same kind of songs, then we would've gotten fed up and said, 'Oh, I want to do my solo album first.' But we all are writing different songs, so it keeps us interested.”