10 Best Hard Rock Songs Over 10 Minutes Long
5. Iron Maiden - Rime Of The Ancient Mariner - 13:45
Iron Maiden’s Powerslave is a fan favourite album featuring the likes of 2 Minutes to Midnight, Aces High and of course Powerslave itself which all regularly appear in the band’s live setlists even today. This all being said, an unsung hero of the album is the closing track Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Inspired by the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem of the same name (which by some coincidence happens to be Coleridge’s longest single poem of his career... spooky), Dickinson belts out the story of the mariner who returns to dry land and interrupts a group of wedding guests with his strange, winding tale of woe and high-sea curses. “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink” Bruce cries, and Dave Murray and Adrian Smith put in excellent performances adding twin guitar licks in all the right moments.
As things get more and more desperate for the mariner and his shipmates, the traditional Iron Maiden gallop shifts up a gear only breaking to make room for the sounds of the vulnerable, creaking ship and an unsettling narrated passage. Whilst many longer songs do indeed take us through stories, what makes Rime of the Ancient Mariner special is how it transitions from up-tempo heavy metal to something darker and more sinister and then back again.
Iron Maiden’s back catalogue is rife with story-telling but none quite as long, grand or perhaps more chilling as the 13:45 Ancient Mariner.