Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son- the Legendary Album

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is the seventh studio album by  Iron Maiden.

It was released on 11 April 1988 it is a concept album which  incorporates progressive rock elements , which are evidenced in the length and complex structure of the title track.  It was also the first Iron Maiden album to feature keyboards. In the UK ,the album debuted at number one.

According to Steve Harris the story goes, "It was our seventh studio album and I didn't have a title for it or any ideas at all. Then I read the story of the seventh son, this mystical figure that was supposed to have all these paranormal gifts, like second sight and what have you, and it was more, at first, that it was just a good title for the seventh album, you know? But then I rang Bruce and started talking about it and the idea just grew."

After his songwriting contributions were rejected from the band's previous album, 1986's  Dickinson felt that his role within the band had diminished, as he "just became the singer", but felt renewed enthusiasm when Harris explained the concept to him; "I thought, 'What a great idea! Brilliant!' And of course I was really chuffed, too, because he'd actually rung me to talk about it and ask me if I had any songs that might fit that sort of theme. I was like, 'Well, no, but give me a minute and I'll see what I can do.'" Speaking about the record in later years, however, Dickinson remarked that "we almost did [something great]", explaining that, "it was only half a concept album. There was no attempt to see it all the way through, like we really should have done. Seventh Son... has no story. It's about good and evil, heaven and hell, but isn't every Iron Maiden record?"

The brief to Derek Riggs  was, unlike with previous albums, to create "simply something surreal and bloody weird". Riggs confirms that,  "they said they wanted one of my surreal things. 'It's about prophecy and seeing into the future, and we want one of your surreal things.' That was the brief ... I had a limited time to do the picture, and I thought it was pretty weird their concept, so I just went with that."

According to Dickinson, his revitalised enthusiasm, brought about by Harris's idea to make a concept album, carried forward into the cover artwork, saying, "I was probably responsible in a large part for the cover, with Derek." Dickinson states that the idea to set the painting in a polar landscape may have originated from when he showed Riggs a Gustave Doré piece, depicting traitors frozen in a lake of ice in the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno

So why should you own this album ?  Well try the official video for Can I Play With Madness

In addition to Dickinson's return to writing, the album was also notable for its number of co-written pieces, in contrast to its predecessor, with five of the eight tracks being collaborative efforts. According to Harris, this was probably because they "spent more time checking up on each other to see what everybody else was up to, just to make sure the story fitted properly and went somewhere". To make sure each song fit with the record's concept, the band drew up a basic outline for the story, which Harris states "didn't make the actual writing any easier ... I probably took longer over the writing I've done on this album than any I've done before. But the stuff we all started coming up with, once we'd agreed that we were definitely going for a fully fledged 'concept' album, really startled me. It was so much better than anything we'd done in ages".

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