"'39"

"'39" by Queen

though I have listen to Queen for many years I did not came across this song for about a half year ago and it strikes me now how good this song really is.

"'39" is the 39th song in the Queen studio album chronology.

The song's lyrics are a science fiction short story which concerns twenty volunteers who leave a dying Earth on a spaceship in search of new worlds to settle. They return to report success, 100 calendar years later, with only a single year passing from the volunteers' perspective (due to time dilation). The lyrics imply that the song's protagonist faces his child upon return to Earth:

"Oh so many years have gone though I'm older but a year
Your mother's eyes from your eyes cry to me"

This, and the fact that all his peers and friends have died, are a terrible grief to the protagonist, as the final words insist:

"For my life
Still ahead
Pity me"

Brian May described the song as follows:

"It's a science fiction story. It's the story about someone who goes away and leaves his family and... because of the time dilation effect, when you go away, the people on Earth have aged a lot more than he has when he comes home. He's aged a year and they've aged 100 years. So, instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter and he can see his wife in his daughter... a strange story. I think, also, I had in mind a story of Herman Hesse, which I think is called "The River". A man leaves his hometown and has lots of travels and then comes back and observes his hometown from the other side of the river. He sees it in a different light, having been away and experienced all those different things. He sees it in a very illuminating way, 'cause I felt a little bit like that about my home at the time as well, having been away and seen this vastly different world of rock music... totally different from the way I was brought up, and I had those feelings about home."

It's one of those song that can have a deeper meaning thou the songwriter didn't mean for it.

I think it can be interpreted in a way that when you go out on a big journey to a new world or place you get much experience and knowledge that you take in and can use in the future. And when you come home you share your experience with the people and notice that they are still the same people or have maybe changed in some way but you feel like a different person in one way or another or maybe more then one.