"Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" is the opening track on the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John. The first part, "Funeral for a Friend", is an instrumental created by John while thinking of what kind of music he would like at his funeral. This first half segues into "Love Lies Bleeding." In the Eagle Vision documentary, "Classic Albums: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", John said the two songs weren't written as one piece, but fit together since "Funeral For A Friend" ends in the key of A, and "Love Lies Bleeding" opens in A, and the two were played as one elongated piece when recorded.
The grandiose introduction to "Funeral For A Friend" was performed on A.R.P. synthesizer by the album's engineer, David Hentschel, who Elton recalled overdubbed track after track of music and synthetic atmospheric effects until the mini-opus was complete.
"Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" was too long for a single release, but got plenty of airplay on FM stations that were predisposed toward rock epics. The whole piece together is just over 11 minutes long. A fan favourite, it became a staple part of many an Elton John tour set list.
The atmospheric opening to the track was used in the final scene of Blackadder II as the camera pans across the dead bodies of the main cast.
Read more about Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding: Covers
Famous quotes containing the words funeral, friend, love, lies and/or bleeding:
“Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I would hope that parents and grown children could be friends. When a friend confides in you that she’s going to do something that you think is most inappropriate, foolhardy or even dangerous, wouldn’t you as a friend say so—in a calm, supportive way? Yet I have to be so careful what I say to my children. I have to walk on eggs to be sure I’m not hurting their feelings or interfering with their lives.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Behind one high mountain lies yet a higher one.”
—Chinese proverb.
“I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .
The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.
The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)