Though he's currently in the midst of revisiting his 1992 solo debut album, Back to the Light – in some very creative ways, mind you – Queen electric guitar hero Brian May's still keeping an eye on a potential future solo album.
Speaking to Goldmine (as transcribed by NME) the Red Special-toting icon said he might return to the studio upon completion of Queen + Adam Lambert's pre-COVID touring commitments.
“I do think about it,” May said of the possibility of making a new album. “And strangely enough, I think it probably would be instrumental this time. Because I have enough ideas. And I have lots of unfinished business.”
“We have a big world of touring to do. And we’ve been postponing and postponing the Queen tour, which we started just before COVID happened.
“Next May we will be doing a bunch of touring," he continued. "Once that’s done, I think I will have the opportunity to sit down, and if I’m spared – as my mum used to say – and still functional, I think I might make the album.”
May has two proper solo albums to his name: Back to the Light and 1998's Another World. He did, however, release a standalone single, the cosmically-themed "New Horizons," in early 2019.
“I don’t have the dazzling technical expertise of a Joe Satriani or a Steve Vai or Al Di Meola or Eddie Van Halen. But I just might,” he said of doing an instrumental LP. “My guitar is very much my voice. I can’t play faster than I think.
“I’ve always been obsessed with songs and songs to me are about singers, and about the vocals.”
While we're on the subject of new material from May, the Queen legend also mentioned to Guitar Player earlier this summer that he, Roger Taylor, and Adam Lambert had "been in the studio trying things out, just because things came up."
But, he added, "up to this point we haven’t felt that anything we’ve done has hit the button in the right way."
"It’s not like we’re closed to the idea," May said of the band's attitude toward a new studio album, "it’s just that it hasn’t happened yet. And to be honest, life has now taken a turn in which it’s very difficult to explore an avenue like that. Things may change, but I don’t think they’re going to change very fast."
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