Quote related to '’39' from 'A Night At The Opera'

Obviously, you have certain of your own babies, if you wrote the song, and you want them to be heard in a wide area. And if you miss that opportunity, it's kind of gone forever. In my case, there's things like Long Away, '39… which could've been a single, and part of me wishes they had been, because they would've been much more in the public consciousness. Songs become hooked into people's lives in a very wonderful way. You know, you hear a song, and it reminds you of a beach somewhere at a particular time with a particular person. Generally, if the song doesn't become a single, it doesn't have that opportunity to become part of life. I remember waking up with the idea, thinking a lot of people do folk songs with acoustic guitars about sailors that went off on a long trip and nobody ever did anything about a spaceship, spacemen who got off, and the whole story seemed to be very appealing to me, the guy going off to search for new lands in a spaceship, but because of the relativistic, general relativity time dilation effects, he goes to speeds near to light speed, so his perception of time is completely different from the people back home. He comes back after what he thinks is a year but to the people back on Earth it's been a hundred years.  The middle part is of course the journey and it goes through very strange chords. It's a tour de force for Roger who does this very high ethereal vocal. It's very much like science fiction movies when we were kids - that's kind of the effect I was looking for.

Brian May; The Making of A Night at the Opera, 2005