7 Times A Song’s Album Version Wasn’t The Best One

Superior Version: Rare US radio version.

I love me some Iron Maiden, and with The Wicker Man being the first song of theirs to which I was exposed, it will always hold a place in my heart.

The two UK CD singles released for The Wicker Man feature the track in its entirety, while standard radio edits existing elsewhere change the length of the song, cutting out maybe twenty seconds of the admittedly repetitive “whoa” sequence at the end.

However, a radio edit of this song was distributed to US radio stations where almost everything is exactly the same as the album version, including the original track length. However, this version turns the choruses into a call-and-response affair, matching every other “your time will come” with an equally sweeping “thy will be done” (though the latter lyric changes sporadically as the track progresses).

The inclusion of these additional lines fill an emptiness in the track you didn’t even notice until this point. In fact, upon hearing this for the first time, I was legitimately angry that this was not the album version. The changes are minute, but make the song flow better and would have allowed for better crowd interaction in a live setting.