Released in 1975, Queen’s A Night at the Opera is the band’s top-selling album. It features massive hits, including “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “You’re My Best Friend,” and “Love of My Life.” The fifth song on the album, “’39,” written and sung by Brian May, has been called the band’s “most underrated,” by some because of its deceptively simple sci-fi folk premise.

The song is about a team of astronauts who go into space to find a new world and, after being gone for a year, return to Earth. Only, their year in space was 100 years on Earth. The main character in the song learns that his wife has passed away and is met by his daughter, who looks a lot like her. May cleverly cloaks the time change by mentioning that the astronauts left in ‘39 and returned in ‘39. So, they could have left in 2039 and returned in 2139.

The song’s big reveal comes at the end:

In the year of ’39 came a ship in from the blueThe Volunteers came home that dayAnd they bring good news of a world so newly bornThough their hearts so heavily weightFor the Earth is old and greyLittle darling, we’ll away........

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