Some songs require effort. Some just seem to arrive fully formed.
And as Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith explains, others may just come to you completely out of the blue, like surprise gifts. That was how he came to write a pair of instant classics from Maiden’s 1986 release, Somewhere in Time.: “Wasted Years” and “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
Up until then, Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson and bass guitarist Steve Harris were the group’s most main songwriters. But after their grueling 13-month World Slavery tour in support of 1984’s celebrated Powerslave, Dickson went “mentally AWOL” and bowed out of the writing process for Somewhere in Time.
Although Smith had co-writing credits on several earlier Maiden songs, including Powerslave‘s anthem “2 Minutes to Midnight” and “Die With Your Boots On,” from 1983’s Piece of Mind, this was the first time the responsibility of writing songs fell solely on his shoulders.
Fortunately, he had unexpected help from a couple of new gear items. As he tells MusicRadar, “The amps we used were transistor amps. Def Leppard used them a little bit as well, everyone got into them because it was an instant gratification sound. It was like, plug in and whoa! — chorus and distortion and all this stuff.”
Smith is almost certainly referring to the Scholz Rockman headphone amp, which came out in 1982 and was used by many guitarists, including Def Leppard’s Phil Collen and Steve Clark, who tracked nearly all their parts for 1987’s Hysteria through the units. Smith is known to have used a Rockman onstage during the World Slavery tour.
But it was a Roland guitar synthesizer that proved most beneficial to the writing of his iconic hit “Wasted Years.”
“I got this Roland guitar synth out of the box from Japan, and when I switched it on it started making this crazy noise,” Smith explains. “I just played along to it. It was like a rhythmic thing. So it gave me a song straight away.”
Smith worked with the results and built them into a song, but he wasn’t sure it was right for Maiden’s style of music.
“I had a little four-track demo of it, and it sounded a little bit like U2,” he adds. “You have ideas that you think maybe wouldn’t suit the band, so I wasn’t even going to play it to Steve. But he heard me playing it in a rehearsal and he said, ‘That’s good. We should do that.’
“Steve’s funny like that. You might think he wouldn’t go for it, but he was like, ‘Let’s try it!’ And because Bruce wasn’t around, I just dashed off the words as well. It was written really quickly. But if Steve hadn’t heard it by accident, I would never have played it to him.”
As for Smith’s other sole contribution, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the song should arguably have had his endodontist as a co-writer. He wrote it after being under heavy sedation.
“I had to go and have a root canal,” he recalls. “I was in the chair for hours. It was terrible.” All the time I was coming back to the hotel in a taxi, it was pissing with rain, and the riff just came into my head. I got back to the hotel and put it down.”
As Smith says: “Funny how these things turn out!”
Somewhere in Time peaked at number 11 on the U.S. Billboard charts, giving Iron Maiden their highest ranking there at the time.
