Roger Taylor’s new solo album is both a warning and an expression of wonder. Violence Insane In a Beautiful World is deeply troubled by the destruction humans inflict on the planet, while remaining awed by the profound beauty of life on Earth.
“It came with age,” Taylor says of these concerns, “and the realization about how we do tend to screw it up, really. And I think from space, we would tend to be looked on as an infection in the world.”
The longtime drummer, singer, and songwriter from Queen recorded the new album in his home studio in Surrey, England, and it represents a year of work as waves of inspiration came to him. He begins the album with the song “A Beautiful World,” rising from a steady drumbeat and the gentle sounds of wildlife, as he sings, “Amazing, this blue and this green sphere … It seems there are signs of infection / Too much misdirection, destruction, confection.”
“It’s a beautiful world but there’s all these wars, all the death, and the differences—be they political or religious or whatever,” Taylor says of the album’s overall theme. “We’re in a bad place at the moment and we live in a beautiful place. Let’s not fuck it up.”
The first song opens up further with the warm, soaring sound of the Ndlovu Youth Choir from rural Limpopo, South Africa, vocalizing around him. Their vocals appear at both ends of Violence Insane In a Beautiful World.
“It was such a joy working with them,” says Taylor, who discovered the choir after they’d grappled with Queen’s most famous song. “Somebody showed me the video they made of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with all these incredible costumes and wonderful chord arrangements. It’s not easy to do that song in Zulu, and they did it, with no electric guitars or anything. Just fantastic.”
The opening song’s uplifting message is in contrast to “Violence Insane,” with Taylor personally slashing a heavy guitar riff as he sings of “Blood everywhere / A difficult, difficult day.” He calls the vocal “my Vincent Price moment.” The grim tune, he says, “Is sort of a Hammer horror track, but really, it’s all about the violence in your head.”
Sporting a white beard and striped shirt, Taylor is speaking in a video call from his 50-meter luxury sailboat, Rock and Roll, anchored in the port of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on the French Riviera. It’s his last full day at sea, before heading back to London and rehearsals for a U.K. tour.
For his planned six shows, he is spending two or three songs behind the drum kit, but otherwise sings up front at center stage. “It’s a toe in the water, and I’m just going to see how it goes down,” he says of performing. “I really enjoyed the last tour I did, which was five years ago. I’m looking forward to it with a certain amount of trepidation.”
Songs from the new album often take a romantic turn, including “I See You Now” and his emotional reading of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.” Taylor first performed “Jealous Guy” on the BBC’s “Later…with Jools Holland” in 2024, and on the new album he sings it to a melancholic piano melody played by London keyboardist Tina Hizon.
The song is originally from Lennon’s Imagine, a longtime favorite of Taylor’s. “I loved that album,” he says, then adds of the title song, “‘Imagine’ had great lyrics, but ‘Jealous Guy’ was such an affecting raw, apparently simple track, and it was so direct.” His new version is “just piano and me and a little cello thing in the middle, but that’s it. I think it should be simple.”
On the sillier “Don’t Photograph Food,” he adopts a Bowie-esque vocal, half-purr, half-snarl, singing of “Simpsons” clouds and playfully admonishing, “I like food … Don’t take pictures of food / I know what it looks like.” There is also a callback to one of Taylor’s most famous Queen lead vocals, “I’m In Love With My Car,” as he growls, “I like fast cars, I like real fast cars,” followed immediately by a crash.
“Chump” is his indictment of the current U.S. president, and it begins with a weary sigh. Taylor then recites a bleak character study while accompanied by some fittingly mournful piano: “A man of no morality, of no real quality, a shallow man … We’re drowning in your self-regard, we’re drowning in your lies.”
Writing the caustic lyrics was an enjoyable exercise, he admits, and was fueled by “a little vitriol, a little anger.” The song is also an example of what Taylor never could have done within Queen, whose songs were generally apolitical, with very few exceptions—such as 1984’s “Hammer to Fall,” which lamented the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
“In Queen, we used to argue, shout, and reason with one another,” Taylor says. “In the end, it was a good chemistry. As a solo artist, you have much more freedom. It’s what you want to do, and it’s what you want to say. So I can be a little political, which I’ve always liked to be, but you cannot be political in a band unless you all have exactly the same views. And of course, that’s not going to happen.”
At 77, Taylor has witnessed a lot of world calamity, environmental decay, and various societal ups and downs through the decades, including as a part-time resident of many years in Los Angeles, but he still expresses alarm at the current state of things.
“It’s particularly bad right now,” he says. “I’m quite old now. And I have to say, your own wonderful country is having a bad time at the moment. From far off, it looks like you have a maniac in charge. It’s horrible to comment on other countries’ leaders, but in this case I just couldn’t help it. That little song wrote itself. I mean, what happened? ‘The land of the free,’ America—what a wonderful country, and he’s eroding it.”
After all that, Violence Insane In a Beautiful World closes with two songs that express a more hopeful feeling: “Come On Summer (It’s Party Time),” a bright, bouncy club song inspired by his visits to Ibiza; and the lush “A Great Big Beautiful World.” On both he’s joined again by the Ndlovu Youth Choir, delivering a sense of uplift that Taylor says is where he generally lands in his own life: “I think it’s the way it should be. It would be a miserable experience if it was all just down, doom, and everything.”
His other gig as founding member of Queen remains an ongoing concern, though there are no plans for touring or recording anytime soon. After forming in 1970, Queen eventually became one of rock’s most successful acts, with sales of more than 250 million records worldwide. The 2018 biographical movie Bohemian Rhapsody was a major hit, though Taylor says with a laugh that the early days of Queen only look easy in retrospect.
“It took Queen three years to really get going,” Taylor recalls. “You couldn’t get a recording contract unless you were doing gigs, and you couldn’t get gigs unless you had a recording contract. It was catch-22, very hard. You have to have an enormous amount of faith in the band and in what you’re doing—almost a naivety in the amount of faith.”
“What does surprise me is the fact that we have a kind of longevity, which has been flattering—to know that we’re not forgotten,” Taylor adds of the band, whose four original members all wrote Queen hits. “I’m very proud of Queen and what we did. We were a good band and we were very eclectic. We never stuck in one groove, rather like the Beatles. I mean, look at the Beatles—the last four or five albums you never knew what the next track was going to be like, what style it was in, but they were all good.”
He also credits the Beatles for showing a whole generation of rockers the importance of writing material true to themselves: “The Beatles take so much credit, as they should, for instilling in up and coming bands, ‘Oh, you don’t need Tim Pan Alley, you can write this stuff yourself,’ and then it might fit your own personalities. What a lesson they gave to us all—to the world of young musicians.”
Earlier this year, Queen released an official brand of wine: Queen Côtes de Provence Rosé—or Cuvée Rock n’ Roll—a vintage spearheaded by Taylor. He and guitarist Brian May talk frequently about possible projects with the band’s music.
“I actually love playing live. Brian loves playing live, but I don’t think he wants to do any long touring things. So we’d like to put together some special thing,” says Taylor. Anything new from Queen will likely come in a different form from what fans have seen in the past.
“Technology’s come such a long way, and we’re trying to dream up something that’s really quite extraordinary and special—without actually probably being there.”