“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Iron Maiden

"Stranger in a Strange Land" was the second single from Somewhere in Time, Iron Maiden's sixth studio album, released in 1986, and it's Adrian Smith's song from top to bottom: he wrote the music and the words and plays the guitar solo. The title has nothing to do with Robert A. Heinlein's novel. It's the tale of an Arctic explorer who dies and freezes into the ice, only to be found, preserved, by another party a century later; Smith got the idea talking with an explorer who had come upon the frozen body of John Torrington from the Franklin Expedition.

It moves at a mid-paced gait, and Smith said in 2020 that after so much fast, aggressive Maiden material, that tempo finally gave him room to stretch out. Bruce Dickinson sings, Steve Harris adds bass synthesizer to his bass, and Martin Birch produced and mixed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.