Queen is back with the latest installment in their weekly YouTube series Queen The Greatest Live, and this week they're delving into what goes into creating a great set list for a show.
“Set lists are a very interesting case. You have all these songs and everything and what is the optimum way to put them across?” guitarist Brian May shares. “Do you just go in there and randomly work your way through where you can and that's how everybody starts. But wouldn't it be nice if you can take the audience on a journey and optimize the mood that happens?”
May adds that for Queen, their philosophy has always been to “come on big, give them what they've been waiting for."
“They’re full of adrenaline. They want to rock hard, hard, hard,” he says. “So the first two or three songs hit them hard in different ways, different tempos, different kind of atmospheres, but all hard rock.”
After going hard out of the gate, Roger Taylor says it gives them the freedom to “meander all over the place with different styles of stuff,” including their infamous acoustic sets on a B-stage, before coming back and building up to a huge end with songs like “The Show Must Go On,” “Radio Gaga,” “We Will Rock You,” and “We Are the Champions.“
Notes Taylor, “I think we like to send our audiences home feeling they’ve had a real experience.”
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