One of Iron Maiden‘s most popular hit songs is one that Adrian Smith originally didn’t even want to introduce to Steve Harris, assuming the bassist and founder wouldn’t like it.
That song is “Wasted Years” off 1986’s Somewhere in Time, which Maiden just finished celebrating on The Future Past Tour and its split focus on that record and the band’s latest, Senjutsu. It also wound up being the last song Nicko McBrain played with Iron Maiden, as the 72-year-old drummer officially retired on Saturday (Dec. 7) in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
In a new interview with MusicRadar, Smith recalls the unique circumstances that led to the guitarist solely authoring three of the album’s eight songs.
The Writing Process for Somewhere in Time
Singer Bruce Dickinson was famously absent from the songwriting process, burnt out from the 13-month gauntlet of a world tour supporting 1984’s Powerslave. His idea, at the time, was for Maiden to head in a different musical direction and had introduced acoustic songs he had written for the Powerslave successor.
“That tour took a lot out of Bruce. It took a lot out of everybody. Bruce had gotten really into fencing. He used to go off and do these tournaments. And when he brought in these songs he’d written, it was all acoustic stuff. Some of it was good, but I guess it wasn’t what everyone else wanted to do,” Smith notes.
The guitarist recalls the band residing in New Jersey during the winter, idling in a hotel and spending the days “just drinking.”
Smith underwent a root canal procedure during this time and, during a taxi ride back to the hotel while it was raining, “the riff for ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ just came into my head.” He quickly got to work once he returned to the hotel.
“We were also trying new ideas with that album,” he explains, “I always wanted to make an album that sounded really produced – as opposed to kind of live with a little bit of little bit of fairy dust on it.”
Somewhere in Time famously found Iron Maiden experimenting with guitar synthesizers, which also served as the catalyst for another one of Smith’s standouts on the record — “Wasted Years.”
The song, which was released as the album’s lead single, has been performed live over 700 times and, according to setlist.fm, is Iron Maiden’s 14th most-played song live.
“I got this Roland guitar synth out of the box from Japan,” Smith recalls, “and when I switched it on it started making this crazy noise and I just played along to it. It was like a rhythmic thing. So it gave me a song straight away.”
Spencer Kaufman, Loudwire
The guitarist says that his four-track demo of the song “sounded a little bit like U2” and, for that reason, he didn’t even plan on showing it to Harris for consideration on the album.
“But he heard me playing it in a rehearsal, and he said, ‘That’s good. We should do that,'” Smith explains. “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.”
He reasserts, “But if Steve hadn’t heard it by accident, I would never have played it to him.”
Watch Iron Maiden Perform ‘Wasted Years’
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Gallery Credit: Loudwire Staff