Roger Taylor Talks What’s Next for Queen & the State of the World: ‘Without Being Too Rude, What Is Happening to America?’

All Queen‘s Roger Taylor is saying on his latest solo album is to give peace a chance — and maybe kindness, too.

Violence Insane In a Beautiful World, out on Friday (Sept. 18), is the multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter’s seventh album of his own; it comes five years after his last, Outsider, and 45 years since his first, Fun in Space. The 10-track set, recorded at Taylor’s home studio in the U.K. and co-produced with Joshua J. Macrae, takes its theme from the opening track, “A Beautiful World,” which extols the virtues of the planet while acknowledging the challenges of current times, ending with the warning “don’t f–k it up.”

“It’s about how this is a beautiful world that we live in, and with all this terrible violence and everything let’s not screw it up,” the 77-year-old Taylor tells Billboard via Zoom from his studio. “It’s a very simple point, really, but a fairly important one. We’re in a bad state in most of the world at the moment — more wars, more needless deaths and insane violence. There are times when I despair for what we’re leaving our children, our grandchildren, but I hope it gets better.”

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The song “Spit In His Eye,” meanwhile, posits an attitude of defiance — “You can never surrender,” Taylor notes — while “Chump” is a direct shot at a certain U.S. president with a surname that rhymes with the title.

“‘Chump’ is fairly self-evident, what it’s about,” Taylor acknowledges. “I mean, I hate to interfere with other countries’ politics, but…wow! Without being too rude, what is happening to America? It’s such a wonderful country, but it’s changing to the worse at the moment. [Trump] seems to be demolishing all the good things about it. The land of the free? Hmm, doesn’t seem like it from the outside. And it’s such a shame because we love America. It has so much to offer. Let’s hope it’s reversible.”

Adding weight to “A Beautiful World” and a reprise version (“A Great Big Beautiful World”) at the end of the album is the Ndlovu Youth Choir from Limpopo, South Africa. Taylor saw a video of the troupe’s Zulu arrangement of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and reached out to make it part of the two “Beautiful World” tracks as well as the dance club-flavored “Come on Summer (It’s Party Time).”

“I was very smitten with them,” he recalls, “with these amazing costumes and fantastic choral arrangements and they were very happy to join me. It was really a two-way process; I would tell the choirmaster what I wanted and he almost telepathically provided it. They were very easy to work with, which made my life a lot easier.”

The rest of Violence Insane — whose cover features a shot of the Earth and moon from the recent Artemis II space mission — cuts a wide swath of styles, from love songs such as “I See You Now” and a rendition of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” (which Taylor first performed on the BBC’s Later…with Jools Holland) to the vibey tone poem “Violence Insane” and the admittedly “silly” “Don’t Photographic Food.” “If I just did one style of music all the time I think I would be deathly bored,” explains Taylor, who played all of the instruments on the album. “I always believed in eclecticism; we grew up listening to those incredible Beatles (albums) and the Beach Boys, where you don’t know what’s coming next. For me that’s what keeps the interest alive.”

Taylor and his band, which includes several musicians from the Queen + Adam Lambert lineup, will support the album with a quick six-concert swing through the U.K., starting Sept. 21 in Newcastle.

“In Queen I never really wanted to be the frontman — obviously with Freddie [Mercury], I was never going to be better than him, right? I don’t really have a hankering to be out front at all,” Taylor says. “But I guess if you’re writing the songs and singing them and delivering them, you’re kind of the frontman, so there it is.”

Taylor isn’t sure yet about whether he’ll do more shows of his own — “I feel very content to keep it in the U.K. right now,” he says — while Queen + Adam Lambert has been quiet since its early 2024 dates in Japan. Although guitarist Brian May is “in pretty good shape” following some recent health scares, Taylor is “not sure he’d be up for doing the whole grueling tour. I’ve always loved touring. I think [May] loved it up to a point, and then not, up to a point.” Nevertheless the two, who reside nearby and “see quite a lot of one another,” are looking at other ways to present Queen in the future.

“We’ve been thinking about using some kind of technology to present some kind of show, fairly revolutionary,” Taylor says, citing the lauded ABBA Voyage virtual concert as well as Sphere in Las Vegas, which he and May have both visited “and were pretty blown away by that. It gave us a whole new outlook about what possibly could be achieved, not necessarily involving live playing. We’re just banging ideas around at the moment … We talk about it a lot, and we’re gonna get there, I hope.”

In the meantime, Queen will be releasing a new concert film, Queen Budapest, in theaters on Oct. 7, documenting the group’s landmark July 27, 1986 concert in Hungary — its final filmed performance with the late Mercury. DVD and Blu-ray formats, as well as a live album, are set to follow on Oct. 30.

“It was pretty crazy,” Taylor says of the stadium date, for which Queen worked up an acoustic version of the Hungarian folk song “Tavaszi Szel Vizet Araszt.” “There were about 80,000 inside and about 45,000 outside, listening. We didn’t know how much they knew … then we realized and they told us they had gotten our music on illegal cassettes and the black market, so they knew, and it was very memorable. They took our 35mm film to Peter Jackson’s people [Park Road Post Production in New Zealand] who made it look so fresh, bright and clear. I can’t wait to see it in IMAX.”

As for other future projects, Taylor says he’s “absolutely not” thinking about another solo album — yet. “I’m 77; maybe there won’t be a next one — but I hope there will be,” he says. “I just love to work. I think if you’re in a creative industry, work is precious, and I think it keeps you going. The idea of retiring and doing nothing is anathema to me. It’s nice to think you might be slightly relevant, in a tiny way.”

The tracklist for Violence Insane In a Beautiful World includes:

1. A Beautiful World – Feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir
2. Violence Insane
3. What Really Matters
4. Don’t Photograph Food
5. I See You Now
6. Chump
7. Spit In His Eye
8. Jealous Guy
9. Come On Summer (It’s Party Time) – Feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir
10. A Great Big Beautiful World (reprise) – Feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir

Roger Taylor’s U.K. tour dates:

Sept. 21—Newcastle, O2 City Hall
Sept. 22 – Edinburgh, Usher Hall
Sept. 24 – Birmingham, The Alexandra
Sept. 25 — Manchester Opera House
Sept. 28—London, Roundhouse
Sept. 29 — Swansea Building Society Arena