“A Winter’s Tale” is a song by British rock band Queen. It’s a single from the Made in Heaven, album, released in 1995 after Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991. It was written after the Innuendo sessions, inspired as Mercury was staring out the windows of his hospital, at Lake Geneva. The song has a psychedelic, dreamy feel, and describes what Mercury saw outside the windows.
Freddie wrote, composed, and did the vocals and keyboards for it. In the documentary “Queen – Champions of the World”, it was stated that this was, if not the first, then an extremely rare style of recording for Freddie, as it was all performed in one take live in the studio. It was stated in the film that Freddie had always insisted upon music being completed prior to the vocal arrangement beginning, but acknowledged that he had little time left and pressed on, as there was not enough time to work on it differently.
The music video, produced after his death, was an epitaph, as Mercury’s actual written song notes were displayed alongside imagery and clips of Mercury’s past performances.