“Tie Your Mother Down” by Queen

"Tie Your Mother Down" kicks off A Day at the Races, Queen's 1976 album, and Brian May wrote it as a straight shot of hard rock, no velvet and no operatics. On the album it creeps in behind a minute of May's eerie instrumental prelude, a Shepard tone melody that seems to climb forever, and the same figure returns at the tail of "Teo Torriatte" to close the loop on the record.

Then May's guitar crashes through the door. Freddie Mercury sings lead and joins May and Roger Taylor on the stacked backing vocals, John Deacon's bass locks in with Taylor's drums, and the band produced it themselves. Queen played it on every tour that followed, and it kept going: May and Taylor have torn through it with the Foo Fighters, including at Queen's 2001 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.