Queen – Face It Alone

Back in October of last year, the band Queen released a song that they had worked on for their album The Miracle but which didn’t make the album. Here is that song:

It’s interesting, because in the Beatles’ later works, it seems like there is an overarching theme of wanting to go home, to find the place where one belongs, or at least “once belonged”. I’m not a Queen expert, by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems that the theme that developed later in their music was more one of facing mortality. Songs like “Who Wants to Live Forever“, “These are the Days of Our Lives“, and even “The Show Must Go On” demonstrate this. Of course, what the band knew was that Freddie Mercury was dying of AIDS. So it is no wonder that even without making this public until the very end, pieces of this ended up showing up in their music.

“Face it Alone” is another song that fits this category. The song has been finished, insofar as it’s been put together and polished up and the like, but I don’t think it actually was done – had this gone on an album, I think that there would be another verse where Mercury just repeats “When the moon has lost its glow…” However, by leaving it that way, it adds to the spookiness of the track.

The short and long of the sentiment of this haunting song is that no matter what one has done with his or her life, there’s some point where we stand and face the hard things by ourselves; even money, fame, or hard work can save us from these times. It’s an excruciatingly lonely place, and in many situations, there’s no coming back from it. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard another song that really captures something of that.

I found out about this song through the Babylon Bee‘s sister site, Not the Bee. (Listen: Queen drops long-lost song featuring Freddie Mercury, and it’s so sad). The main comment from them is as follows:

It’s a beautiful song, but the message is so hard to hear when you consider how Freddy Mercury left this world via complications with AIDS.

And that’s the rub isn’t it? If you count your life as your own, then there’s not much hope.

Of course the good news is that if you believe in Christ, you don’t have to face anything all alone, not even death.

There certainly is a very good and very valid point here, that with God with us, we aren’t truly alone, and our hope in Him will not disappoint.

However, I can’t help but think that even among the saints there isn’t some amount of realization that sometimes we stand and we go forward alone. Maybe because we’re coming up to the anniversary of St. Alexander of Munich’s feast day, that is, the day he was executed, that even if he had been given a glimpse of heaven, and even if he was aware of the angels all around him, he was human, after all, and as he was being prepared to have the guillotine separate his head from his body, there was some feeling of being uniquely alone there as well.

When Jesus went out into the wilderness and he was tempted by Satan, certainly that feeling of being alone also played a part of it. Afterwards, Jesus needed to be attended to by angels afterwards. I believe that each one of us has these times in their lives, and we endure or we let it destroy us. Going back to the Beatles, I’ve had the song “Let It Be” turn up on the radio at providential times over the last few months. A week and a half ago, as I was driving, I started crying at the line “And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on me / shine until tomorrow, let it be.” In some sense here, I think it’s talking about the same type of situation that we find ourselves in, but it also points out to the fact that there’s hope to hold on to, even just getting us to tomorrow.

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